I’m Steven Jack Butala.

I’m Jill DeWit, and this is the Land Academy Show. Land Academy is the place to go for all the education, tools, and support you need to start and grow your land investment business. Can you believe it’s been ten years, by the way?

Celebrating 10 Years: What We Got Right & Wrong

This is our ten-year anniversary of starting Land Academy. We’re recording this after a week-long open-to-the-public seminar about what was successful, what wasn’t successful, what we quite honestly enjoyed about it, what we didn’t, what we accomplished, and what we didn’t accomplish. We decided that this episode should be the summary of all that, our summarization.

I can’t wait to talk about this. I like how you worded what we accomplished and what we didn’t accomplish, what we set out to accomplish, and what we failed at.

It’s always that way. If you accomplish half the stuff you’re trying to accomplish in life relatively on time, you’re winning.

That’s a good rule for goal-setting. You want to set lofty goals, not too easy goals, because if you hit them all, then it’s boring. You don’t want to have goals that are just unattainable. This is good. I like this.

We’re talking about what we got right and what we got wrong.

That is in ten years of the Land Academy.

I think you have notes.

I did make notes. I put some thought into this. It’s so great having ten years. It’s so nice when I talk to people and I can say not only do I have sixteen years doing this full-time with you. I’ve had some real estate experience outside of this, but nothing like this and not full-time like this. You have 30-something years of this coming into it. Already, when people find us and ask questions, they’re like, “You know the real estate thing,” but it’s so nice after ten years that I can say, “I know how to build an education company.” We do. We did it. We build a community and provide tools and things, so I feel really good about this. My point is I have three things that I’m very happy with and proud of. I have three things that we could have done better.

Good, only three. My list is one in 30.

I should have said three, and I should have said 33, but you’re right. Let’s start. Let’s get the hard ones out of the way. Please join in, chime in, and tell me if you agree or don’t agree. Things that we got wrong, I thought, “Marketing is easy. I can sell land easily. I know how to get good pictures, get them on the Internet, get excitement, post them on Friday, and have three offers on Sunday. How hard can Land Academy be?” That’s a whole different beast starting this, not just creating the content, but the marketing of it.

Buying and selling land successfully is, by far, and this is my opinion off of your topic here, the easiest thing that is involved in all of what we do. We probably spend maybe 5% of our time buying and selling land. The rest of our work hours and our staff’s work hours, and we have separate staff for both of those, involve Land Academy. We are mostly dealing with existing Land Academy members and helping them move forward in their careers.

Why would you do that, Steve? You sell this program. Here’s why. It’s rewarding, first of all, but more than that, we’ve created Land Academy to create sources of lenders and partnerships for ourselves. We are constantly running out of money because we’re spending our money, doubling our money, and reselling property at a pretty high velocity. This is in 2015. Now, we’ve got pretty much what I would call a limitless source of partnership opportunities to do deals with the people. That worked almost overnight.

That means you have unlimited sources of capital, too, by the way.

It’s not just us. We created this. There are so many partnerships that have been lifelong partnerships with money people and with operations people within our group that it’s great to hear. It’s an amazing place to develop a partnership.

Here’s a number two for me on the things we got wrong. If I had known what was involved with building the websites, the education, connecting it all, the payment systems, and everything that goes around, just not talking to people yet and just the mechanics of all this, I don’t know if I would have done it. I’m like, “Sure, okay.” You get so far in, you’re like, “We can’t stop now.” Would you have done it differently?

No, I would not have changed anything, how we capitalized it, none of that. Largely, it’s because Jill and I have divided up the things that we’re interested in doing. Jill’s very interested in all the people part of this, and I’m not. I’m interested in the technology part, the data part, and the actual real estate piece. She’s interested in a lot of those things, too, but there’s no way I would have done it myself. Let me put it that way.

Same here. 

No chance.

Could you imagine? No. It was so much easier being a team doing this. This is way back in the beginning. If you would have told me that I would have to be at our dining room table at 9:00 at night when I’m exhausted, fixing the checkout, explaining the checkout page, stuff that Jack set up, maybe there was something goof with it, you’re on another project, and I had to jump in and fix it in the back of the website, I’d be like, “My gosh.” We did it. We got through it.

I had an entire very successful business before I met Jill.  

Talk about that.

We were the people to buy and resell property on eBay. At the time, we were the largest seller in that category. The Great Depression, the real estate depression, hit. My business was set up just online. We were not set up to talk to people. We avoided that. Jill came along, and she said, “What happened to your business?” I said, “This is what happened.” She said, “Show me the properties that you have left.”

We had a ton, just a ton of paid-for land at very good prices. She said, “Where are the people? Show me a list of the people that you’ve sold property to.” She went to work without us even talking about it. She looked at those two things, and she sold a ton of the property that I just had sitting there. It was nuked for more of it, just left it there. She created a ton of cash, and then we went off and started buying a ton of property. We bought a thousand properties that year. I think it was 2011.

You know what’s funny about that? People are worried about 2025. They’re like, “You weren’t doing it in 2009 and 2010.” That was a time when it was a hard thing and a problem. I watched a lot of the “competition,” other people in our space. There are not a lot, but just other investors out there. Nobody was teaching anything. We were all just quietly doing our own investing. They didn’t make it. It broke my heart, but we always hung in there. We always kept food on the table, and that’s a lot of why people come to Land Academy and stay with us. If anyone’s weathered a storm, it’s us. You’ve been doing this for over 30 years, so you’ve weathered more storms than that. It’s amazing.

It’s a lot of transactions leader. Jill and I were constantly running out of money in a good way because we were blowing through our self-funded acquisition budget every single month. That was a decision for us to start Land Academy. Almost immediately, partnerships developed. The huge pivotal point for me financially was that it allowed us to buy with a partnership funding. I say this to you because I want you to put yourself in our shoes. If you’re reading this, I want you to put yourselves in our shoes and stop. Just forget about money. 

What it allowed us to do was buy houses. We bought a lot of properties for $150,000 to $250,000 and resold them for $50,000 to $100,000 more. We still do that. That’s a huge capital-intensive business. It’s not like buying a piece of land for $30,000 and selling it for $90,000, which we did then and we continue to do now. There’s some real money, and always has been, in buying and reselling single-family residences without renovating them. We renovated one property. We’ll never do it again, like many people.

We’ve done it. It’s not fun. The third thing that I put on my side of the sheet for things that I got wrong is going to be, “I don’t need a big staff. I can manage a community of 500 people. No problem.” There’s a lot going on, especially when we started to add different tools. When we launched Land Academy, it was just a program. That first weekend, everybody that joined us was like, “What just happened, first of all?” Thank you to those of you who have been there this whole time. We so appreciate you. They said, “We need to be able to communicate with you. We need to be able to ask questions. How can we get with you?” Jack made this amazing community. It was Success Plant back then.

This was before Discord. It was before there were tools like that.

I don’t even know if BiggerPockets was going then. Maybe. Anyway, we had our own online community. We created that. I thought, “We got this,” and then it grew so fast. I just was not prepared for what was all involved in that. I’m so happy that as it grew, we grew. Sometimes, you don’t know. I love this. Sometimes, you don’t know what you can handle until you’re faced with it. I learned what I can handle. Now, I’m like, “Bring it. There’s not much I can’t handle.” It’s great. Managing a staff, which has grown and shrunk over the years, depending on how things are going, what we’re working on, and where we are, to an Atlantic community of around 500, was not easy, but it was so worthwhile. 

Sometimes you don't know what you can handle until you're faced with it. Share on X

The number one thing in my mind when it comes to buying and selling land is capitalizing on purchasing grossly undervalued SFRs, which is house academies single-family residences, and reselling them for more in markets that are just incredibly hot. Incredibly, there’s a lot of movement. There are a lot of properties being sold per week and several zip codes. They’re not hard to find. That’s what we’re working on, and here’s really why.  

Interest rates are going to go down. I think everybody agrees. Interest rates are going to go down, and we’re way overdue, quite honestly, for a rate change by the Fed. That will happen before the end of the year. When that happens, there’s going to be a huge push to move the existing inventory, house inventory, out of the existing system. A lot of people that have had properties for sale for a long time, or people that have been thinking about listing their property, are going to take a lot less. When interest rates go down and affect mortgage rates, then prices go up. We’ve got to do a bunch of deals before that happens, a ton of deals. That’s what we’re working on.

Introducing The New End-To-End Real Estate Tool

Can I add? There’s a Part B. My team would go, “You’re forgetting something.” We have this amazing new tool.

Land Academy does.

It doesn’t have a name yet. It’s still unnamed at this moment as we are recording this, but it will be very shortly. This is going to be end-to-end. We just did a sneak peek on it at our live event that we did. It is a sneak peek behind the scenes into this tool that’s going to help you with everything in your business. It’s going to help with a regular green test. It’s going to run a regular green test for you. It’s going to help you with pricing. It’s going to help you with your CRM. It’s going to help you get the mail out easier and faster, and all will be stored in one place. Your CRM, your mailer, your market selection, everything will be in one place. I love it.

Jack’s so sweet. He’s like, “I want a pizza tracker.” There’s a pizza tracker along the top, too, to keep you on track so you know what you should be doing today and help you not let anything fall through the cracks. It is even going to include things about establishing your business. There’s a whole business section before you even go to the mail part. We can’t put a mailer together unless we know the name of your company. We need your address. We need this. There are all kinds of little resources hidden in there, too, that are going to help you be so successful in our world.

We modeled this after the pizza tracker, Domino’s Pizza.

It’s cool.

Imagine, from the thought in your brain about, “I think I’m going to have pizza tonight,” to the point where all the things that happen in between, and it shows up at your door. It’s the same situation with real estate. “I think I’m going to get involved with buying and selling real estate.” From that thought, it takes you to getting a check in your hand at the end. It keeps everything in one place and allows you to utilize all the tools and the specific people on our staff to get the deal done. I don’t want to call it an easy button. 

There’s still a huge amount of intuition as a business owner that you will have to exercise, but it takes the garbage out of it. It takes the tasks of running the red, green, and yellow tests manually away. It takes the agony of pricing a mailer out of your life. It allows you to get the mail in there and allows us to close the deal for you on the buy and the sell side. That’s just a few of the things. It is a game-changer for buying and selling all types of real estate and not just land.

I’m so excited.

I don’t think anyone else is equipped out there from a staff standpoint to pull this off.

No. Nobody has the experience. 

We have staff that close our deals. They would be the same people that are in our closure deals.

We have former title company owners on our staff. 

Yes.

That goes without saying, so we know how to do this. 

We own our own commercial printing company. I don’t think a lot of people do that.

We got this.

I’m looking forward to the response. Hopefully, the amount of deals that we all get done together increases.

I already saw. We saw a little bit of the response. They’re like, “How soon can I have it?” It’s coming. I’m so excited. I want to move into the question of the week. This comes to us from a person named Steven, also. This is from our online community in Discord. Steven wrote, “I’m looking to buy a property that is currently listed. We agreed on a price that is far below the listed price. This is my first time buying a property that is listed. Is there anything I need to watch out for? Are there any legalities outside of a normal deal?”

Buying Listed Property

Here’s the deal. Listed property always concerns me because why isn’t it sold? The first and obvious question to that is A) The listing looks like crap, which they almost all do, or B) It’s too expensive. I’m going to use an example here just for serious round numbers. Property is listed for $200,000. It’s been reduced four or five times. Now, it’s at $150,000. No one’s looking at the listing. You can tell on Zillow and a lot of different places. It’s just not getting any attention. 

It is not your acquisition price. Forget about that. What is your sale price going to be? The seller started at $200,000 and moved it down to $150,000. It’s not selling, and nobody’s looking at the listing. Are you going to buy it for $140,000 and try to sell it for $150,000? That’s just most people’s approach to this. It is not. You need to buy the property for $20,000 or $30,000, maybe $50,000, and sell it for $100,000 because that’s how we do it when we send out a mailer. It has to be a shake-your-head and amazement reduction in the actual listing price, the current listing price. Usually, that’s hard to accomplish.

Also, make sure. Are there any other fatal flaws? Don’t try to cut out the agent because there are contracts involved. You need to bake that in, too. When you’re making your offer price, that seller is responsible for getting that agent paid out, and I would want that. That’s fair.

I have a lot to say on this.

Go ahead.

My real concern is why we are shopping for existing listings.

That’s the key.

Why didn’t we send a mailer out? A mailer is way more effective at getting an asset, a $100,000 asset, and purchasing it for $20,000. Off-market deals are way easier to put together than properties that are already on the market. That said, Jill and I have had two or three really specific, extremely financially successful scenarios just like this. One was that it was listed for $800,000, and we bought it for $90,000. If somebody said that to me, I would say, “That’s a beautiful gambling story. I’m glad you gambled and won that one time, but how many times did you lose?” That did happen.

Those are round numbers, but that did happen. I don’t know why you would go out there and shop the MLS unless you did it like this. “I’m going to make an offer on 2,000 properties. I’m going to see which of the two.” There should be two or three people, just like you would send out a mailer for 2,000 or 3,000 mailers. “There are two or three people that will probably accept my offer.” How much work is that?

How are you making these offers? You’re not picking up the phone.

It’s a massive undertaking.

That doesn’t work. 

I agree with you.

This is if you saw a random one, maybe, or you’re bored. I don’t know. The ones that we’ve done, we did not go out and find. Other people did and came to us for a deal funding. That’s what has gone on. I don’t know. This is not my thing. Is there anything I need to watch out for? Yes. There are a lot of things to watch out for. That’s how we send mail.

Why is it sold?

That’s what I’m saying. Are there other fatal flaws that you need to look up? My final thing on this, Steven, is how much time are you wasting on this? Maybe you try to find one of these a week. I don’t know. I could spend those four hours doing so much more towards my regular business and make more money than maybe one out of the ten weeks. That’s 40 hours in ten weeks I devoted to this for one deal. Do you see how much I could have done in my normal course of business, how we do it, sending out mail?

Probably 90% of the deals we've done were purchased from people who, by the end of the deal, are hugging Jill and saying, “You just solved a huge problem for me.” Share on X

I didn’t dream this business model up. This is the way that it works. I only know that because I tried all this other stuff too. The MLS only works if you’re sending out tons and tons of offers, but then why would you? Why not just send them to everybody? I designed this mailer program a lot of years ago to be easier, not harder. You send out, let’s say, 10,000 offers or some number, 5,000 offers. You let the mail find its way.

It’s going to find its way to 2, 3, or 5 people that are real sellers. They’re going through something in their life where they do not care any longer about the price that they get for the property. They just need and want to sell it like a garage sale. I don’t know how. Probably 90% of the deals that we’ve done, we’ve purchased from people that by the end of the deal, are hugging Jill, saying, “You just solved this huge problem for me.” I don’t see that happening with listed property.

I’m going to move on to wrapping up time. It’s getting about that time now. By the way, as you may have read before, every Thursday afternoon, we have a weekly member closed call. I want to extend a special invitation to you. If you want to attend to get a ticket to join us, all you have to do is send a note to Support@LandAdemy.com. We’ll give you a one-time invite to join our call and see what’s going on, more about these deals, and learn about everybody behind the scenes.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that we have a new show format as recently as 30 seconds ago. You’ve noticed that. We’re really trying to make sure we continue to bring you all the value you love. If you like this episode, please like, subscribe, and give us a rating wherever you’re reading us.

You know what? It was time for a change. See you in the next episode.

You’re not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.