Choosing Real Estate Markets In 2024
In this episode, Steven Jack Butala and Jill K. DeWit discuss the importance of choosing the right real estate markets for investment in 2024. They break down the steps they take when choosing where to buy, highlighting data-driven approaches to ensure profitable results. Whether you’re considering land, homes, or commercial properties, understanding the dynamics of real estate markets is key to success. Tune in to learn how they evaluate different areas and what factors matter most when making investment decisions. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to navigate the real estate landscape confidently.
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Choosing Real Estate Markets In 2024
Introduction And Topic Of The Episode
This is episode number 2,023. Let’s walk through how we choose where we buy real estate this year in 2024. One of the top five questions we get. How do I know where to buy property? What’s the difference between Central Michigan, Central Wisconsin, Maine and Florida? What do I do? Where do I look?
We’re going to break that down and deconstruct it. Hopefully, have a little bit of fun with it. We’ll see what color Jill’s nails end up in by the end of this episode. In all reality, all kidding aside, where you choose to send mail in buy and sell property matters. You do not want to do it in a place where there’s just nothing going on.
Sometimes, it’s about too hot. I’m just going to say too, that’s my thoughts on it. There are places where you don’t want to buy any property. It doesn’t matter if it’s land, houses or commercial property. We do it all when it’s not moving. Then, the other side of it is, what if it’s hot? I’m going to pick that. It was Austin a while back. They’re on fire. I’m going to do that.
I don’t want to swim in that pool too. I’m not going to get into a bidding war when I’m buying property. That’s the last thing I’m going to do and I always say that too when I make those calls and I get people and they say, “You’re one of three offers.” I’ll say, “Now I’m 1 of 2. Call me if nobody pans out.” Sometimes it happens. When that happens, I’d say, “No. I’m not interested. Have a good day. You guys can all argue about it yourselves.” I’m not going to reset the market and whatever it is.
We’ve been doing this for 30 years, Jill and I have been doing it together for fifteen years, I guess and we’ve been teaching for almost ten. You hear me say all the time. You hear Jill say, “Just make my phone ring and I’ll put some stuff together.” I’ll tell you what. This episode is about the stuff that I do long before that seller picks up the phone to call Jill to see if she can put a deal together. There are a lot of things that happen in my dark, cold office before Jill’s magic happens. We talk a lot about Jill lately and how she creates these real estate deals, but this is a prelude so to speak, to what goes on.
It’s Oz. This is what goes on. This is Oz behind the curtain.
It’s a prequel. With movies recently, everything’s done in threes. They make three movies and one of them is a prequel and it’s a stuff that happened, a side story. That’s what this is.
Hopefully, they take off and do well. Kevin Costner is not doing so well. Just kidding.
Each week on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy Discord forum and we take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request from our Land Academy community. That’s you. Let’s take a question, Jill.
Zane and Tara wrote, “We are under contract for a lived-in, but not great shape old mobile home on a half-acre lot that also has a shop on it. The lots are being sold together but have two APNs and the total acreage is half an acre. It’s in town and has all the utilities hooked up. The owner is moving out this weekend and will not be returning. We have only bought raw rural vacant land. This is out of our wheelhouse. Can anyone advise me on the pitfalls, issues to be aware of, et cetera? I’m treating this as a land deal, but I feel I need to do more or different due diligence. Thanks for all the advice.” This is great.
Expanding Into Mobile Home Deals
This is fantastic, before before Jill answers the question, because we’ve done a ton of mobile home deals and we are always in some process of doing a mobile home deal. We love mobile home deals. I have to say congratulations. I know for a fact that as we move forward as real estate investors, all of us need to diversify in product type. Once you have the stuff down, which these two seem to have down, the mechanics of sending a mailer out, how to choose a place, how to send the mail and how to answer the phone and create your real estate deal.
Diversify your real estate investments for long-term success. Share on XThat’s the time to take a look at your landline of business and create maybe a mobile home line of business and then create single-family residences, condos and all of that stuff. This we what Jill and I have spent a tremendous amount of time talking about. Where’s Land Academy going to go? You’re doing it. You’re taking the skills you’ve learned at practice in rural vacant land and now expanding.
Correct. What do we do differently? One of the good things I picked up on is we have utilities and the people living there. We know that it’s tenable. This is all great information. I’m wondering if you have pictures. The first thing I would do, too, right now, while I’m in escrow, which they are under contract, I would have eyes on it. I would have a local realtor going out there, taking a look at it, telling me what they think I can not tell them.
What they think they can sell it for. Let’s say a reasonable, 60 or 90-day period and the condition of it. Have them get some pictures. If I don’t like the pictures or they’re not that great, then I’ll send somebody else. I’ll send my photographer out just to get eyes on it. They do all this while it’s in escrow because I can change my mind. I don’t have it yet, but I want it locked in because it’s a good enough deal.
It’s going to take a couple of weeks and you could get all this done in one week and then decide if you want to move forward or not. You’re going to have a really good feeling for the pricing. By the time that’s done, you’ve got pictures of it, what the conditions are, you’ve seen it with the pictures and the video, the drone video and inside video, whatever you can get done and you have a good estimate, a broker’s opinion basically from an agent.
Did you talk about the inspection?
I didn’t get to that yet. That comes next. Once I even have that, I like to do this first before I even order an inspection because now I’m outlying even more money. Now I’m going to go and get an official inspection and the right agent will point you in the right direction of, “Yes, this is the guy to call we use him in town. It costs $275. He can get it done tomorrow afternoon. That’s what you’re going to do. You have all your answers. What do you want to add?
No. That’s all correct. There’s a separate checklist for purchasing mobile homes and one for houses that we talk about in Career Path. Jill and I teach an advanced class called Career Path. I think it’s coming up this October 2024. Go to LandAcademy.com for the details and we talk in very much detail about the order of things.
The order of due diligence is a little bit different than land but I’ll tell you, if you do everything correctly, it will sell very quickly. What you’re doing here for everybody, you and everybody is giving yourself a lot of options on the sell side. You’re going to find out as much as you can about this property without going to see it. It might be way worse than you think. You’re going to get pictures and all the stuff and an inspection Jill said.
You’re going to find out a bunch of stuff and possibly, you’re going to miss some things. That’s just how that’s how real estate is if you don’t go see it. You want to make sure that property is priced. You have lots of options and the best case scenario is that you just resell it as a piece of vacant land and still make money because it’s priced very well and the bonus is it’s got a used mobile home on it.
As well as a shop. What do you mean by shop? Is it a workshop or was he selling jewelry out of it?
It’s not a dress shop.
Now I feel a little bit better because it was in town. I was wondering, “Was the guy a potter, too? Was it a blacksmith shop in the front and he lived in the back? I don’t know.
Do you know what? It’s in town. I could be wrong.
That’s what I was assuming.
A mobile home and a dress shop.
There you go. It could be a barbershop. We’re going to say, barbershop. How great is this? I like what you said. Make sure the math works so well that you have a lot of options, it is a quarter and a third still to what it’s worth as a mobile home.
Make your real estate deals work for you. Price them so you have multiple exit options. Share on XOptions For The Mobile Home Deal
We talked about your options like this in your career path. You can buy it and rent it. Somebody’s living in it right now. It can’t be that bad. It could and you’ll find out with pictures and things like that, but I doubt it, especially if there’s a dress shop attached. You can rent it out. You could buy it from somebody who rents it and then sell it to somebody who does rent property out like that. If this is not a vacant piece of land, buying it and reselling it with land is one access strategy, one option.
This has multiple options. You’re setting yourself up to seriously succeed here. Plus, it’s got an extra APN. Hopefully, it’s been unused so that the property might be built on the center of the two APNs or hopefully, it’s just built on one and you can resell the APNs separately. Great work, guys. I chose this question on purpose because you should celebrate. Please do a 100 of these. As many as you can. I remember the first mobile home deal you and I did and I remember us looking at each other and saying, “We got to do 500 of these a year.”
Which one was it?
It was the one in Northern Arizona that we use as an example in the buy for $5,000, sell for $35,000. The tenant was a bull guy. There was a gun case in it.
Is that the one that we looked at that you could see from the freeway kind of thing? Not that one?
No. It was in Mohave County. Today’s topic let’s walk through how we choose where we buy real estate this year in 2024. I want you to clear your mind and I want you to think about how you have used Zillow or Realtor.com or Redfin.com in the past and maybe you haven’t. I’m going to start fresh. You’ve never used it.
Go to Zillow.com, login and type in a destination. It doesn’t matter. I always use Los Angeles as the starting place to look to review the entire country for acquisition possibilities because it might be the worst place to buy property in the city of Los Angeles. We start with the worst and it only gets better. I want you to start changing your parameters.
Good concept.
Don’t do this in marriage. Start with the best and just keep it that way. Now, you’re looking on Zillow for every single piece of property in Los Angeles that is for sale, thousands and thousands of properties.
There could be office buildings in there, there could be rural land in there or vacant land, houses, condos, all of it. We don’t want all that stuff. We only want to look at places where we can target property that we want to buy and resell.
What we’re looking for is places where property sells quickly in certain specific criteria. I want you to choose houses only, I want you to choose 3 bedrooms or more, 2 bedrooms or more and I would you, just for fun, to type in between $100,000 price and $600,000 price. The low end is $100,000, the top end is $600,000 and then the other parameters that I said.
Using Zillow To Find Potential Markets
What you’ll see is now you’ve gone from thousands and thousands of properties that are for sale to maybe 100 probably less than a thousand in the entire Los Angeles area. Make sure that you have removed any type of geography criteria. Now, it’ll say, Remove Boundary Lines. You’re looking at the whole part of Southern California and you’re going to start to move around.
Move your mouse around all over the country, start on the western part of the coast, go up and down maybe through Oregon, through Washington and you’re going to see clusters of property where there’s a lot. The beauty is that there are way more properties, let’s say, in Portland, Oregon, than there are maybe 4 or 5 inches to the right or the East.
You will see little clusters and you’ll start to see places where there are available properties. There are a lot of properties in some areas that fit your criteria and there are no properties in some areas that fit your criteria at all. Now, click Sold Properties. The for-sale properties are red, the sold properties are yellow.
In an ideal world, you want to see property about one to two times the number of properties that are yellow or sold properties versus red. You want to see more sold properties than active properties. Why? It is because that indicates an active market. One property goes up for sale and it gets sold. Two properties get sold for every one property that gets listed. That’s the market you want to be in. Does that make sense?
Yes, two to one. You want to say two to one double sold and there are active right now. Did you say sold in what time frame?
No. I didn’t and thank you for reminding me. I usually default, the time on Zillow to twelve months. Jill gets a little more aggressive as she should and she would like to see it maybe in 30 to 60 to 90 days.
I’ll play with all of them. I’ll toggle back and forth just to see.
At some point, you’re going to come to a place where you have a light bulb go off over your head and you find a market that’s 900 properties have been sold or 90 properties have been sold and 30 are active and they’re right within that acquisition criteria. For you, you might not want $600,000 topside. You might want only $300,000. If you like rural markets like we do and not super urban markets, then maybe it’s $100,000 to $300,000.
It’s fun, by the way, in a very small amount of time is that if you buy a property for $100,000 less than what you’re searching for in this exercise and it’s in okay shape, you’re going to sell it fast. We’re starting with our exit. I want to know if I’m going to go through all the trouble of creating a mailer, making Jill’s phone ring, and she will talk and create these real estate deals. That I can sell that freaking piece of property quickly.
Is it worth it?
I can predict, not even predict, but have an almost crystal ball intelligence on what the outcome’s going to be. That is how we pick markets.
It’s fun when you dig in and you look at them. You settle on an area and you spend a little time there. You’ll say, “This is a little bubble.” Now, I’m going to dig in. Now, I’m going to look at some of these listings. Let’s see what’s active. Let’s see how many days have been active. Have they done any price reductions? What’s going on? Toggle to the Sold.
Look at all these sold comps. Sort them maybe by the price. You sort by lowest to highest often. Sometimes I play with it and sort by the most recent. What just recently sold and start to look at those and think, look at all these. Everything is five to ten acres, listed in the last, six months sold within two months as long as they were this size and this price range.
What Jill’s saying is she’s adjusting her acquisition criteria to the reality of these markets.
What do the people want?
In Eastern Oregon, let’s say, there will be some sweet spot for what sells quickly and there will be some of a spot where what we’re trying to do is a round peg, square hole. I’m trying to fit my acquisition criteria into Eastern Oregon. It doesn’t fit, but there is a type of property to buy in Eastern Oregon in XYZ ZIP code that works.
Then, you’re now saying, I love this area, but this something’s not working, so you start playing with it. Maybe it’s got to be the price. Maybe it’s the size, maybe it’s the price, something that. It might change the outcome.
Maybe in these ZIP codes that you’re trying to make work, there’s just no activity. For whatever reason, there’s just no demand. Nobody wants to live there or for whatever reason.
You move on the page.
Assessing these markets is free. If you’re a Land Academy member or not, please go out and do this exercise.
We call this trolling. Can I say this?
This is what we call trolling.
This is Jack has called us trolling. Just sitting and looking and trying to figure out what might be a good area.
Yes. From there, we have an idea of a market that might work. Now, what we do is we take the data, we identify the market as, let’s say, 4, 5 or 8 usually contiguous ZIP codes and we take the data that’s available to confirm or deny our suspicion. We suspect that this market works for the criteria that we’ve chosen. Great. We dig up the data and look at each one of the ZIP codes. You can see that the days on the market for this ZIP code are 90. That’s not that exciting.
The days on the market for the other two ZIP codes that are adjacent surrounding it are 30. I like 30 better than the market. I want to sell it faster, not slower. Also, something’s wrong with one of these ZIP codes because not only are the days on the market very long, but there are too many properties for sale.
We go from the trolling to confirming with the red, green and yellow test whether or not these ZIP codes if we do mail it and get property for the prices that we’re pricing it, then, it’s a data confirmation of a suspicion or a theory. From there, we build mailers. We send out the mail and price it correctly. That’s how we find markets, where we know we’re very serious educated guess about what the outcome’s going to be and what the exit is.
That’s the best part of this. When I talk to people, they’re thinking about joining Land Academy. They’re asking questions and when they learn the data behind every single decision we make and how smart this group is under your direction, it starts with you, they’ll say, “This is a no-brainer.” I say, “Yes, that’s right.”
If it doesn’t pass all these tests, everything that he’s talking about, the trolling and he takes it to all these other levels to make sure we’re making some good decisions before we even just send out the mail. That’s huge. We’re not going to waste our money. Not going to waste our time. We’re going to make sure that it’s great and if it’s not, we pick another good area. They’re always changing. That’s the thing, too. You think, “I’m going to spend ten years doing Nashville.” Do you know what? It might cool down. I think it has cooled down.
It’s possible.
You have to be watching around and doing this all the time for new things that are going to pop up. It’s great.
The Red, Green, Yellow Test
We take a hardcore data-scientific approach to buying and selling real estate. This works with land. It works with houses. It works with condominiums, more urban markets and townhouses, certainly works for mobile homes in all markets, and works to some degree with commercial real estate.
This is great. What we don’t do is trust word-of-mouth, brother-in-law or psychic beings. We don’t drive for dollars. This is good. We don’t throw a dart. This is awesome. Let’s see all the ways that we don’t look for places to mail. I just gave five. Trust family members, reading the paper or the news. The news might say, “This is a new up-and-coming area, that’s where I’m going to send my mail.” No. You need to make these good, strategic, data-driven and check your stuff decisions.
There used to be all these crazy concepts out there when I started, like the, Buying The Path Of Growth. That was one of my favorites. Imagine the railroad. A handful of people in the country know where the railroad’s going to be developed because it’s 1882 and they start buying up all the land because they know the railroad’s going to be there. They have inside information and they’re buying in the path of growth. When I started this in the ‘80s and ‘90s, old-timers were Path of Growth, you know. I think their grandparents told them.
I’ve bought the property from people who bought it in the ‘60s who thought that it was coming to the path of growth and it wasn’t. They’re selling me their property 40 years later for real and more saying, “I guess it’s time to unload this. It’s not happening.” No. It’s not going to happen.
We don’t guess here. We don’t guess. We don’t estimate. We look at the data and make decisions. That’s Jill and I have been doing this for years. It’s no secret that if you go out on the Internet, all kinds of people claim that they can instruct you on how to do this and they won’t be around for long. I say this. Just please choose carefully about where you learn how to do this because these groups are largely regurgitating what we say mostly incorrectly and I don’t want you to learn the wrong way.
Choose your real estate mentors wisely. Not all advice is created equal. Share on XYou and I have been doing this together full-time for fifteen years. Land Academy is going on ten years now and you were doing it for ten or fifteen years before me. We can truly say that with just you, three decades of a full-time investor. If we can make it for three decades, I think we can properly help you and show you how to do it, too.
We don’t have the cutest software. I’ll tell you that. We don’t and never will. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here to create business partners for ourselves and we’re here to teach and instruct the basic foundations of how to find undervalued real estate. Create a real estate deal for yourself and, in turn, create equity. We’ll get to the deal with you in certain cases or somebody else in Land Academy will. Please choose carefully.
Can I ask you this question? I’m going to ask you some questions. What if I’m not just doing land, I’m doing houses or apartments or something? Would I do the same thing?
The answer is, basically, yes. There are a lot of caveats in the question earlier about, “Great, I bought and sold land this way and thanks, it works, but I’m buying a mobile home now. What are what’s different about it?” The answer is there are due diligence steps that are different. The asset itself, when you think about buying and selling a piece of land, there’s not that much you have to look at. Isn’t it a good location? Is it priced?
Access.
Is it buildable? In some cases, not all. You don’t necessarily need to see it, which has been triggered largely because of almost all because of Jill and I and Land Academy. That’s what’s triggered such a universal interest in this from people who want to get into real estate but have never done this for beginners.
It is because they have the perception that it’s easy and you can sit at your desk and do it. For the most part, if you know what you’re doing and you learn correctly, that’s true. You can. With mobile homes, houses, condos and townhouses, there are a lot of other things that are involved and while they’re much easier to sell, you do not want to buy them incorrectly. You want to know exactly what you’re buying, was that asset has any flaws or anything else.
We’ll help you with all that.
That’s what Career Path teaches.
Our other programs, too.
Jill’s Pride In Her Coaching Clients
Land Academy is evolving into a full, well-rounded real estate investor. I love that because that’s what Jill and I have always been. We’ve been buying and selling houses, mobile homes and all this stuff together for a lot of years. We’ve just been talking about land, but we’ve decided that we’re getting older. It’s time to share it all. Jill, do you have something inspirational to share?
I was going to just take a moment and talk about how proud I am of the individuals that we have. We just launched. This will be posted in September 2024. It launched in August 2024. First time we’ve ever had a fully official, one-on-one personal coaching program. I have a handful of people. We’re just slowly getting it up and rolling and I’m personally handling the coaching right now while I can because I want to make sure everybody gets what they need going forward.
I want to just compliment and I want to just share with everyone that I have all different extremes. I have people who have done career paths, but they still need some things to get them going. I have right in the middle. They’ve done 40 and 50 deals. They’re working on taking it to the next level, and I have brand new right out of the gate. I’m proud of all of them because the main thing is they know who they are. They all voluntarily said I know I need help. I’m just that kind of a person.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing all these deals, you’re in the middle or you’re just brand new. They were smart enough to know who they were, know their weaknesses and know that I wanted to do this right. I know that if I don’t have the attention that I need to get through these little hurdles, maybe it’s even motivational. Some of the stuff we talk about is motivational, like, “You have to do this. I’m going to help you make a calendar.” We did that.
That’s a good job.
Two, how to organize your time thing. “I need help setting up some of the technical things.” “What do you think about this?” Then, real high level like, I have a team. I’ve got a person who has a team of four people and making sure that the four people are doing what they should be working on and it’s the most efficient and then she’s doing what she should be working on, making it most efficient. My point is I’m very proud of them because they all took a step back to think about who they are and admitted to themselves, “I’m going to need coaching.”
“I’m going to need some hand-holding if I’m going to get this to the level where I want it to go.” I think it’s the greatest thing. Whatever you’re going to do, whatever you’re going to start, I hope that you take a moment to know who you are. I’m personally not that kind of a person. I love being on the other end of it, but for me, I’m like, “Out of my way.” I’m going to run through everything and figure it out. That’s just how I am and then maybe later I’ll ask, “How did I do?” but I don’t need to because I figured it out whatever it was.
Know who you are and if you’re the kind of person who wants help or needs help, it’s there. If you’re not, just put your head down and go. Nobody’s wrong. We all want you to get where you want to be. There are a lot of opportunities out there right now. There is. I love all that stuff. Interestingly, everything’s pivoted to online. What was that funny sticker you saw the other day?
Know your strengths and weaknesses. Seek help when you need it. Share on XIt was a YouTube-certified mechanic.
Yes. I love that. It’s funny, but it’s true. There are silly things that I might be looking up. We have an issue with the blinds in our rig. I’m five minutes away now. We already did it, watching a video. How do we hang these things back up here with this little piece? It’s funny.
You could be a YouTube-certified land investor.
You could.
Steven’s Advice To The Audience
It’s going to take you about four and a half years.
That would be a long way. That’s true. It’s better than the ten years it used to take everybody just not knowing anything and not having YouTube, it’s better. It used to be ten years, now it’s YouTube for four years or Land Academy for six months to a year, how’s that to get you going? Thank you. What about you? What do you want to share?
I would love for our readers to take away this. Please seriously consider buying and selling lots of different types of real estate. The mechanics are the same. If you understand the mail and follow-up with texting and email and all the stuff that we teach, then you will have a serious amount of success or triple the amount of success if you’re just using one real estate type. Please consider buying all those things and get educated on the small caveats and differences.
Now, for the 3 of you who have been with us for the whole 9 years, you’re going to say, “Jack and Jill, did you not tell me to pick an acquisition criteria and stay with it? It sounds like you’re telling me the opposite right now.” To which you say.
No. I’d stick with your acquisition criteria for land, stick with it for houses, create it and stick with it for mobile homes. No. Add a product line. I’m not saying if you want to go buy marinas or golf courses that’s great.
I’ve got some for you.
I don’t want you to be a scatterbrain and say, “I’ll buy it all.” “Whatever comes my way, I’ll look at it.” That’s a waste of time. Go through the motions, the Land Academy way of establishing acquisition criteria, sending the mail out, receiving the calls, choosing the ones you want and buying them. You have an acquisition criteria, then add another acquisition criteria and stick to it. I hope that’s clear.
Thank you.
Join us next time for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
