Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit discuss the right way to capitalize on the ever-present real estate industry and its cultural changes. Tune in as they emphasize the strategic way to change with the times and the power of flexibility to ensure the longevity of your business.

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Capitalizing On The Cultural Changes Of Real Estate

This is episode number 2053, and we’re talking about capitalizing on this ever-present industry and cultural change that goes on in real estate, which I’ve noticed over the last 30 years and probably since the beginning of time.

Can I please have that in English?

Stuff changes, and you have to roll with it. If you get too comfortable as we talked about before, you have everything all set up, you have your employees where you want, and you’re chugging along, thinking about buying a bigger house and two more cars and having another baby, please be careful. That’s when we get stung.

Dan.

Poor Dan.

I know.

We have a guy in our group who has two kids in college and two kids in diapers.

The second one hasn’t arrived yet. The second one is coming.

Discord Questions

Each week on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord forum, and we take a deep dive into a land-related topic by popular request.

Nate wrote, “Hello all. Should we adjust our mailing schedule to reflect the changing seasons? The property seems to come to a standstill where I am. Thanks in advance.”

This is a great question for this topic. You should be constantly changing and adjusting to your environment. We call it seasonality when your market or markets are subject to slowdowns in the winter, and then it increases in the summer. If you look back into our content, there’s all kinds of seasonality that we discuss, and it’s documented. It’s so well documented on a zip code by zip code basis.

Nate, let me paint this picture for you too. “Nothing is for sale right now. No one is interested in it. Nothing is happening,” and then 10,000 people get your letter. Now there’s an interested buyer. Think about this. I’m going to argue that when things are not hot, not happening, not moving, and not selling, those people who need the dough right now, need your letter in their hands.

Without exception, we buy real estate from people who are experiencing some type of life event. People experience life events in February as well as July. They need it, but they’re not getting a lot of letters in February.

Maybe not.

Buying property in a down marketing season and selling it in an upmarket season is a good idea.

Buying property in a down marketing season and selling it in an upmarket season is a good idea. Share on X

The prices will change quite a bit sometimes. You know what you would have bought it for in the middle of summer in the height of it all, versus now they’re like “I need to get rid of this” kind of thing, and then here you come like, “Oh.”

What’s exciting about this question is the data that is readily available to support exactly what you’re talking about. June, July, and August are amazing real estate sales months. It goes way down in the summer and the winter months. You can make that work for you if you’re willing to hold on to the property for 4 to 6 months. You have to buy it. You have to buy it crazy cheap.

It makes sense.

I shouldn’t even have to say that anymore here at Land Academy. That’s what we do.

That’s good.

Capitalizing On The Ever-Present Industry

Our topic is capitalizing on the ever-present industry and cultural changes industry-wide in real estate.

I did not write this topic.

Why is that?

Because I didn’t use those big words.

Like capitalizing? What big word is in there?

You wrote this.

Ever-present? Cultural changes?

This is big and fancy. You better be on the lookout for things that are changing and roll with it. That’s what I would have written.

Capitalizing, you take advantage of. Being ever-present means it’s around a lot.

Thank you for defining it all.

What was your title? Please go ahead. What is it? What’s the episode called?

Be aware of what’s coming at you and roll with it. Watch the markets.

I broke our real estate career, and yours too, into five stages. One for each day of the month. This is Friday. Thank God, apparently, for Jill. Monday in the real estate career started with nailing down the basics, learning stuff, sending a mailer out, and finding out if you like it or not. Tuesday, we put your land business on autopilot. You got some stuff rolling, you got a little bit of a schedule, and you realize you do like it and you want it to be your career.

Wednesday, you expanded on that. You took all that mailer knowledge and education that you had, and you expanded into other real estate types. Maybe houses, maybe mobile homes, maybe skyscrapers, maybe timeshares, if you like timeshares like Jill. On Thursday, we institutionalized that, and we got ourselves out of the operation portion of our business as much as possible because you do not want to be sitting around running payroll when you could be doing the special thing that sparked this whole business anyway, the thing that’s about you.

You’re taking hours away from working on that. For Jill, it’s creating a real estate deal out of nothing. For me, it’s utilizing data to feed the deals to Jill so she can do that. That’s what she and I work on anymore at all. We’re talking about grasping change. This has been very hard for me to do for many years, for decades. You’ve heard this cliche. I’m going to say it. I don’t like it, but I’m going to say it because it’s true, “Nothing is certain except change.”

My real estate business and businesses, you would not recognize what my real estate company looked like even five years ago when she and I were together. Thirty years ago, it was nothing like this. We didn’t have data. We didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have Google Earth and all the tools we have now. What tools are we going to have ten years from now that we don’t even know about? We haven’t dreamt them up yet.

You need to stay ahead of all the changes as much as you can. Read industry news and listen to podcasts like this or our podcasts of course. When interest rates change or it’s an election year or a hurricane happens or all kinds of things happen that potentially can affect your business, you need to roll with them. Instead of being angry about them, like I used to be, you need to embrace them and capitalize on them. That’s why I use the word capitalize. It’s instead of looking at something.

Like the sky is falling.

Instead of looking at something, we’ve had a couple of people. I told this story in a recent live talk that Jill and I did. We’ve had a couple of people who came to us, joined CareerPath, and very angrily said, “I’ve been buying and selling infill lots in city X for three years. I would send out 5,000 units, buy three properties, make $100,000, and do it over again. I can’t do that anymore. This doesn’t work any longer. I’m leaving.” That’s silly. It ran its course.

That entire time, while he was having that success, what he should have been doing was looking for the next thing because you can’t rely on a single scenario and then be upset when it happens. Not in the real estate industry anyway. In any business, things have to change for the better. As I’ve said on the air before, I’m going to quote my high school football coach. He said, “Tomorrow, you are either going to be better at football or worse. You will not be the same. You have to grow or you’re going to die.” That’s like four cliches in one sentence.

I was just going to say, “I waiting for Yogi Berra to come in there, and Boo Boo. What else is going to come out? I don’t know.”

This is what I think is the final stage.

I wish I had a good one right now to drop on you.

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. That’s my favorite Yogi Berra quote. This is the final stage of what you have to look forward to in a real estate career. I think any career is capitalizing on change. You have all the people in place and all the systems in place, and you have money working for you, and you understand the concepts and all this experience and confidence, then you should be steering the company and all the people in it where you believe it should go, and providing the tools that they need to succeed and support. It’s a lot like parenting.

I’m not done. Don’t close it out.

Do you want to talk?

Yeah. Thank you. I want to get something in here too. It’s looking for opportunities. That’s how I see capitalizing on your industry changes and all that. It’s going to change. You need to be watching it and be ready for it. Have a good team around you. Be not so rigid that you can’t adapt. Even as simple as some of the tools that you’re using in your day-to-day operation, they will change, and you have to roll with them.

That’s one of the things that you and I talk about. It’s so funny that at our age, I have a lot of friends that are my age who can’t do half or a quarter even of what we do for whatever reason. We do talk about this ourselves behind closed doors. How do we make the cut? How are you and I so good at this? How did you figure out this whole podcast?

If you could see this equipment in front of me, it would be comical. I don’t know any other person your age or that starts at the same beginning number as your age that can do this. Not one. We’ve sure helped people, and a lot younger people than us, not just Land Academy. I’m talking just technical and computer skills and all kinds of things. It’s amazing.

A lot younger.

It starts with you, first of all, and then it spills into everything in your life. It is like parenting. Things change. How we do things changes. Technology changes. Tools change. If you think, “The way I buy and sell land is going to be the same way forever,” heck no. It’s not going to be. How do you know this guy right here next to me has been doing it for 30 years? If anybody knows, he knows. Come on. He started with faxes and even before that, the Morse code. I’m joking.

That’s hilarious. During the Civil War, that’s what we used. Geez, Jill.

I’m joking. Seriously though, it’s funny to say we went from fax to this to this. Who knows? Maybe we will be doing it some other way ten years from now.

I put cultural changes in the title of this episode for a reason. This is what I learned this year in the last six months driving around in an RV. Some places allow you and encourage you to develop let’s say mobile homes. They want you to do that. That’s a cultural situation. If you go into urban Chicago or New York and say that you would like to put in mobile homes, they would laugh you out of the county building. What’s not acceptable culturally in those types of places, in rural areas, they encourage you to do it. They issue permits to do that quickly and efficiently.

In some cases, like in Arizona, they have a fast-track system and allocated areas in the county where they want the mobile home development because it’s cheap and affordable, and it’s the culture. That’s their culture. There are places like Arkansas that don’t have a planning and zoning department. They encourage you to do what you’d like to do with the land and trust that you’re because that’s their culture.

Everybody trusts each other. Embrace those. If you try to install a mobile home in New Jersey and get laughed out of there, don’t give up. Go to Florida and do it. Go to a place culturally that accepts that.

That was perfect. Thank you.

Episode Wrap-up

Join us next week for five more interesting episodes. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.