This episode explores leveraging home ownership data for successful real estate investing. Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit discuss step two of their five-step process for flipping houses without renovation in 2025. They delve into the importance of utilizing home ownership data to identify motivated sellers, particularly those facing rising mortgage rates. Jack and Jill share insider tips on direct seller communication, providing invaluable insights into market trends and buyer psychology. Tune in now and learn how to capitalize on this shifting market to achieve real estate success!

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House Flipping Without Renovation In 2025: Step 2 – Leverage Homeownership Data To Reach Potential Home Sellers

We’re talking about how to flip a house without renovation in 2025, step 2 of 5. We’re talking about utilizing home ownership data to contact sellers who are going to sell their house to you. How do you know that, Jack? That sounds very optimistic on your part. If you detect any optimism in me or my personality, it’s only because I’ve been doing something for so long that I’ve found out how it cannot work so many times it works.

I thought it was because you’re sitting next to me.

Yes.

There we go.

You are the wind between my wings. How does it go?

Is that right? I thought it was the wind underneath. Maybe it was wind beneath.

I wake up in the morning trying to please you.

Between your wings as your back.

Beneath.

I need a new relationship status, seeking outside counsel. I don’t know.

What could another status be like, self-reflecting.

Taking a break. That’s mind. I want that. I can be taking a break or on a break as you’re a relationship status. Here we go. We’ll continue this all week. We’ll come up with more.

Seller Motivations: How To Find The Best Deals

All week, we’re talking about the five steps to flip a house without renovation in 2025. Each day on this show, we answer a question from a Land Academy Member Discord forum and take a deep dive in a land-related topics by your request.

Aaron wrote, “My take on what people sell their real estate for is that there are sellers with different motivations. There are some that will sell at very low prices and make the law of quarters concept work.”

This is a big topic in Discord.

I see how this is going to be. For whatever reason, they need to sell it now or just don’t care. You caught them at the right time. There are many more that will sell at a price where you can make a profit, but they aren’t as motivated. I’m not sure what the ratio is but my sense, it’s like it’s 1 or 2 out of 10 that are not priced sensitive at all.

My experience is that most are the least somewhat price sensitive and more heavily male areas tend to have higher expectations. Not always, though. Sometimes you get them at the right time and they’ll sell cheap even after being bombed with male for years. You can hold out for really low, 25% buys, but it’ll require more male. You have to be selective in the deals that you do.

That’s where Jill and I are. We hold out for great deals, send a ton of mail and do the best ones.

You’ll be turning a lot of sellers down. You can send them to me. I might be on the assignment if I can make a work. This is perfect and exactly right. If you’re hitting Nashville, I wish I wouldn’t, but I’m run the numbers, whether you run Jack’s numbers. It may or may not be a good time, but you still might get somebody that says, “The last three years, I’ve shredded every letter and now I need the dough.”

Let’s talk about human nature for a second. This is a compliment to you and it’s not like a silly compliment on the show. Since the day I met Jill, she has not planned. She wakes up in the morning, the day is not planned. She starts to have feelings in the morning and she is unafraid of whatever happens that day. She could be filing or going to bankruptcy court that day. I’m just making something up here, and probably see something positive in it and have a good experience. When she gets there, everybody’s going to laugh and they’re going to talk to her.

I on the other hand, and this is where this human nature comes. I think most humans on this planet, don’t have that in adventurous type of spirit. What I want to know is that’s going to happen that I want to see the end before it happens and make sure I get to the end. I want to know statistically when I put a mailer together, how many people are going to respond, how much money I’m going to make, and what I need to do to make changes to be more successful.

I want to plan it all out, looking to the crystal ball and have it manifest. Aaron, this is what you’re saying. You and everybody on Discord about this topic of pricing and sellers and all that. Here’s what happens in our business. I do this stuff within reason. I don’t go nuts anymore. I used to. I get this mail out on time and I pick areas. I do this stuff. I do what I do. Jill doesn’t care. That’s the point to all this. She doesn’t care. All she wants is a seller who wants some real estate to call her and tell their story.

I want the phone to ring. I’ll see if there’s a deal there or not.

She doesn’t care. Sure, she said on the show 60 times, “It’s a lot easier when its price way undervalue. I can work with that.” She said it. This is her words, “I can’t work with a grossly overpriced mailer because then now they have all these expectations. I can still do it. I can find deals in there but it’s harder.”

It’s a lot easier to add money than it is to take it away.

Stop spending all this time on pricing. Stem people. I’m a stem person. I’m talking to myself and not you, but you might get something out of what I’m about to say while I talk to myself.

I’m going to give us speech in our weekly member call. My speech is going to be this, step away from the computer and hit the send button on your mail. Stop it. You can overanalyze this to death and then next thing you know, three weeks went by and you didn’t send out a letter and then your phone’s not ringing.

Become an amazing personality on the telephone. If you can’t or don’t want to, that’s me. Find somebody who will. It might be your child or your brother-in-law or a business partner that you find on the internet or in Land Academy but that’s how these deals get done. You’re not going to price your way into a perfect mailer and be successful.

You're not going to price your way into a perfect mailer and be successful. Share on X

The Land Academy Pivot: Shifting Focus To Houses In 2025

As we lean into our topic, eventually, I want to point out something. For those of you are saying, “Isn’t this the Land Academy Show? Why are we talk about houses?” You are correct. We also have House Academy and I want to make sure too you understand the big picture what we’re talking about. One of the things that we’ve been doing to pivot in 2024, as I wrap it up in 2025 and all of our experience driving all over the country. We’re never going to run out of properties.

One of the things that we’ve been personally doing is bringing back some of the things. We always have land going in the background. We’ve had that for decades. It always has put food on our table. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we have Land Academy, but over the years other companies and other things have ebbed and flowed and we’ve stepped into other things. Some real estate related and some not. Land Academy afford us to do that, but more now than ever.

As we’re seeing these price corrections happening, we’re leaning back into houses and into other things because it’s not such a buying frenzy. It’s making sense. That’s where this is coming from, number one. Number two, I want you to know that the way we buy and sell land by doing nothing. I don’t buy it. I don’t prove it. I don’t put in a driveway. I don’t put in a well or anything like that. We sell it in its current condition and it’s the same thing with houses and it works.

You can buy an undervalued house and sell it again as an undervalued house but for more money because you want to direct to the seller. There’s no middle man in there. It’s not on the MLS. It’s not putting money in to remodel the kitchen. Let somebody else do it. I just wanted to let you know this is the big picture of what we’re talking about and we’ll explain more as we go on this week.

Let me translate because I speak Jill. The land that we have purchased is taking longer to sell it. That’s just a fact. This is an amazing business buying and selling land and we’ll never stop doing it ever. Sales are slow and there’s a lot more people sending mail. A lot more people from other groups because there are a lot of people. Several people have taken the Land Academy experience and put their name on it. They’re teaching other people mostly incorrectly to send out mail.

That’s happening. It will be tempering but that’s happening. There’s more mail out there. It’s not hard to buy a hot property for us at all. It’s a little bit harder to sell it and this isn’t the first time we’ve been through anything like this. In fact, our business model looks completely different than it did years ago. What is our response now and has been? Make some changes. Roll with the market. The markets telling you that it’s slower sales out there and it will be.

Sales are slow, but that’s okay. Roll with the market. Share on X

This is our third time going through this. It will take 2 or 3 years to come back to where everybody wants to buy and sell property. That’s not the case now when that happens and we’ve done this two times before. We’re about to do it again as we shift our focus. We don’t replace it. We shift our focus on buying and selling SFRs, single-family residences with success. A few years ago, interest rates for 3%. It wasn’t an election year. Everybody got to work from home because of COVID. That’s telling us it’s still happening.

How The Changing Mortgage Market Affects Home Sellers

You could you could not buy and resell a house to save your life but you can now, so we’re shifting to the toward that market and we’re sharing it with everyone. Our topic is utilizing a home ownership data, assessor data to contact sellers. What I mean by this title is separating regular house owners from the ones who want to sell. Here’s the deal, we’re in a market where these short-term variable rate mortgages are coming to fruition.

They’re called three and ones and five and ones. It means it’s a fixed rate mortgage for three years or a fixed rate mortgage for five years and then it adjusts to market rates. All that started to happen around between 2020 and 2022 and here we are with the three and ones coming to fruition. A 3% mortgage will now be, depending on the terms of the agreement, the mortgage of 6% or worse. That means a $2,000 mortgage will be $4,000 overnight.

That’s going to create and hasn’t kicked in yet, for real. Those people an extreme high percentage of people who are going to experience, their reactions is going to be, “I need to sell my house. I can’t afford it.” They need to hear from you before that kicks in by you sending them a letter or calling or having a service or you yourself call them and say this is going to happen. You can get mortgage data anywhere. Now you’re separating the people are going to sell our house with the people that were not. It’s a much easier conversation and a much easier data set to manipulate.

I’m going to throw in there too a large percentage. You know the numbers better than I do, obviously but more often than not, because we’re we are seeking out the people that own their houses out. In a perfect world, I don’t want to mess with that. If I have to choose between the two, I want someone that owns her house about outright. There’s so many of them that we buy from and sell from and we don’t have to deal with the banker or even that. What you’re saying too, I think helps fuel frenzies sometimes.

I completely agree with you. This will devalue existing assets.

If it were me and I’m next door to this and I see what’s happening, I might get out. “Sweetheart, the kids are grown. We’re going to downsize, anyway. Things are going down. We should sell now.”

“Before it gets worse. Plus, the house that we want to move into is very cheap now.” This market is just going to get smashed in the face. When markets gets smashed in the face, people who are well informed and that’s the reason that you’re reading this. You’re certainly not reading it for the entertainment value. We can get all crazy about it but you got the sentiment. The SFR market nationally will be devalued between 20% and 40% in 2025. Is it going to crash? No. Is it going to be more acute or less acute on the market? Is each market dependent? Yes.

Follow me here. I may or may not be related to somebody who was heavily involved in stock market day trading. The last time I recall, you’re going to make more money in downturns and upturns. There you go. That’s it.

Real estate is an inefficient market. Thank, God, because that’s how we make some dough. Though it’s perfectly efficient, and this is what I mean. The stock market, I believe, is an efficient market. If I have a share of stock and the stock’s trading for $100, I have a shared stock and I want to sell it for $101. I don’t have a choice about the number that I want to sell it in general. There’s calls and put it all kinds of stuff that can happen. In general, the markets going to buy what it perceives and it’s going to do it pretty quickly. I can’t buy a share of $100 stock that’s trading for $100 value for $20. I just can’t.

In real estate, we can do that. It’s like a fishing market and that’s what we choose to do. We don’t buy $100,000 house for $100,000 ever. Take advantage of that. Not only that and a stock market in general for lending like us. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. There might be people who do. They’re probably are, but we’re not. We don’t know that. We do know what’s going to happen next year with SFRs in the Southwestern market specifically.

The main thing in step two is, you’re not reaching out. Everybody’s got something on the MLS and scraping and sending them offers. You’re going a layer below that. What you’re doing and we can show you and help you, is you’re utilizing assessor data to pick the areas that you want and to send the offers that you want to all those sellers and they’re just going to get an offer in the mail and we’re going to create a deal. It’s the same thing that we do with land.

Join us on Wednesday where we talk about establishing a relationship with homeowners. They got our offer. They’re calling back. Some of them are mad, happy, and want to know what to do next. Jill’s going to talk about establishing a relationship with that person so they get out of it and what they expect. You’re not alone in your real estate ambition.

We are Jack and Jill.

Information.

Inspiration.

To buy undervalued property.

Important Links

• Discord – Land Academy Forum
• Land Academy
• House Academy