Jill Friday – After 30 days We are Getting Land Deals Done From the Road (LA 1862)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Three, two… Steve and Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Hi.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
And I am Jill DeWit broadcasting from one of the largest football rivalry states in the country. As this airs, it is Friday, September 30th, I happen to know that Michigan State will play Maryland tomorrow and U of M will play Iowa. And in case you’re not sure, the big rivalry game between the two Michigan, Michigan and Michigan State, will happen on October 29th this year. So just getting that out of the way. Boy, have I learned, there’s a big difference whether you wear green, or blue and gold around here, green and white, or blue and gold. And we wear green and white, and I’ve bought more green and white.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’ve earned it, by the way. A lot of people wear those colors, they don’t know anything. I don’t understand that. People I’ve met, “Oh, I’m a Michigan fan.” Really? Why’d you go there? Oh no, I’m just a Michigan fan, diehard Michigan fan.

Jill K DeWit:
Anyway, it’s been fun. Southern California wasn’t as much into it as… Oh, no. Not like here.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t think they [inaudible 00:01:35]

Jill K DeWit:
USC, UCLA.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sports are not their integral part of the world there. Not just Michigan, everyone is Green Bays up here, all over the Midwest.

Jill K DeWit:
You don’t see it like you do. Even in Arizona with U of A, ASU, you see it, but not as prevalent as here.

Steven Jack Butala:
I have a lot to say about this. I’m not going to say anything. Today is Jill Friday and she’s going to talk about, well, after 30 days of on the road, how it’s going, getting land deals done.

Jill K DeWit:
I can tell.

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the Landinvestors.com online community, it’s free. And hope you know by now, we own and operate this website called parcelfact, F-A-C-T, .com in response to back in the day us having a difficult time finding property without a post office address, 123 Main Street. All we had was state in the county that it was in and an assessor’s parcel number. Well, we built a site around that information and now within seconds, while you’re on the phone with the seller, you can get the information that you need about where these properties are quickly.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s amazing. You can just pop it in. And this is what I do all the time. I have parcelfact.com open on my computer, I have it on one screen, and my email on another screen, a call comes up from a seller, put in state county APN because that’s all there is, and I can make sure I’m talking to the right person. I can physically see the property. With one button, I can drop it into Google Earth Pro, drop a man down on the ground, even get real good visuals and check out slope and all kinds of amazing… We have flood maps on ParcelFact, lots of different views. And I get all the tax information, sale information, legal zoning, dream it up, it’s all right there. It’s amazing.
Matt wrote neighbor letters, question mark, I have an in inexpensive property from a kill the deal offer. I think I can get it for 19,000. I know neighbor mailers are a standard practice and I think they’re a fantastic way to spread local word of mouth. I’m going to send 10 to 20 of the closest owners for sure, but then how far out do I go? Should I use the data tree map view to draw a polygon and mail them within a set area? Should I use a data tree map view and then double click and select likely buyers, instead of drawing a circle, and then click through them all and see? Should I just mail the closest of 20 and then maybe pockets on the way to town? Are 100 too many or are they too few? Is there an obvious answer that I’m missing? I’d appreciate any experience or methods you have that you would like to share. Thanks in advance. PS. Something like this would say, “Hey, did you hear about that property on the mountain for less than $4,000 an acre?” Go ahead.

Steven Jack Butala:
My answer is more mail is always better. And so I really think that I would go out a mile, and if it’s pretty rural, I would go out five miles.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s so cheap, really. And these mailers are so few numbers in most cases, geez, you’re probably talking about 100 to 200 people. I personally would use the mapping function wherever you can use it, but then I would check it. It’s really easy and fast to go through 200 lines of data, see where it is, see if it makes sense. And then I would really spend a ton of time writing the mail merge, writing the content of it. So it’s really, really specific. It’s real easy to find out what people paid for their property. So if you say, “Hey, John Smith, I know in 2007 you paid near $38,000 for your property, but I’ll tell you, we’ve got five acres up the road from you,” or however you phrase it. That’s a lot less than that per acre, and we’re going to list this for sale, but before we do that, out of respect for you, we want to give you a shot at buying at it. Please let me know by October 13th. We want to sell the property for fill in the blank. Really, really specific stuff.

Jill K DeWit:
Cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s a good problem to have. Today’s Jill Friday. We’ve been on the road for more than 30 days now. Jill’s been doing deals on the buy side and the sell side. We’re going to see how it’s going. This is the meat of the show.

Jill K DeWit:
Ask me. What do you want to know?

Steven Jack Butala:
How’s it going?

Jill K DeWit:
Good. You know what’s funny? I was thinking about this because Brandon just did this, Brandon took the summer off. Land Academy member and Career Path and helps us with fun stuff on Thursdays, Brandon Coon. He took some time off for the summer and I know he took time off from us. I don’t know what he did with his business, but there’s two ways to do this. I was thinking about it. He might have slowed things down a little bit with this business, because I know his summer time off they have little kids, they really want to go play and spend that time. That’s one of the beautiful things about Land Academy, everything that we do is transactional. I can plan my mailers. I can plan my workout like that. I can strategically dial back my business if I want to take the summer off or take the holidays off, or even hire people to cover my business, answer my phones, because I want to spend time on things.
So there’s lots of ways that you could do this. I’m very lucky, I have a full time staff to do the majority of what I need done, so I can check in and buzz out when I want to. But the point of today for me is we choose. So I talked about one way you could dial back a business, not send some mail out that time, take a little break, have some people answering your phones and have them maybe check every night. I would check at least every night to make sure there’s nothing fantastic that came through. So what? Maybe you spend 15, 20 minutes a night looking at that. That’s not that big of a deal. And maybe just during the week kind of thing, give yourself your weekends off. But what we do is I don’t want us to change. We don’t really let our foot off the gas a whole lot. You probably notice that around here, hence hence the people sitting with headphones on in an RV. We don’t take our feet off the gas almost at all.

Steven Jack Butala:
We could be fishing right now.

Jill K DeWit:
This is true.

Steven Jack Butala:
And we will be shortly.

Jill K DeWit:
But we really don’t. We only took that one Thursday off because we had to because of wedding stuff, we had to be involved in some activities and that was okay, but most of the time we don’t, we really don’t take much time off. And again, it’s all by choice, so we are getting land deals done on the road just as efficiently as if I was sitting at my desk in Arizona. How do I do that? Well, I’ve got people answering the phone, number one. I have in-house staff, but sometimes I turn it over to PATLive too. My staff might be busy. There might be a lot of mail coming in or a lot of offers going on and they know when they get busy, they call PATLive and just turn it back on and they just forward the phone numbers over there, and then they review those calls as they come in. What else do I do? I batch my work.

Steven Jack Butala:
Good. That’s great.

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t spend every day on my phone pulling over from the bike ride to see if some new email came in. I have times of the day and I have times of the week that I will look at everything at once and that’s it, and everybody knows that. Especially signings, I’m not going to be around every day for a deed signing for a sale and that kind of a thing. We batch them together. It is, at the most, once a week. Sometimes it’s every other week, but at the most once a week. So we will arrange to have a mobile notary, not kidding, and we had one literally here today on the sweet lake behind me on sweet Silver Lake in Traverse City, Michigan come to our RV and do a signing with me, and it was really sweet. She was really nice.
And it was funny because she didn’t know how versed we were on all of this. She’s going through the documents and explaining these to me, she probably didn’t believe me when I said we’ve done 16,000 transactions all together. And she’s like, “Huh?” I’m like, “You don’t have to explain the forms to me.” It was really cute. But anyway, we will have a mobile notary. You can do it just like you send a mobile notary out to a seller to get a deal done, you can send a mobile notary to yourself.

Steven Jack Butala:
And shed.

Jill K DeWit:
And guess what I don’t have with me? I don’t have a printer at all.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s beautiful.

Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t that great? So here’s what you do. You have a mobile notary. You overnight the documents. Maybe you’re doing it for yourself. You prepared your own deed, you call your own mobile notary and say, “Hey, I need you to come to me. By the way, I need you to print this out, and here’s the shipping label too. We print these documents out, please come out. I’m going to have you witness my signature and I’m going to have you leave with them. I’m going to have you scan them. I’m going to have you send them back to me completed. And I’m going to have you drop them in the mail.” And they’re going to go, “Sure. And that’ll be $95, whatever it is.” And then I just even pay for that over the phone kind of thing.
All my staff needs from me is to know where I’m going to be and when. And all I said was, “Thursday’s good. Anytime between 10 and one. Here is the address at our suite little RV park. We’re in spot number 31 kind of thing.” And she said, “Great, give me a minute, and I’ll have someone lined up for you and put on the calendar.” That’s it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Could you do this without Airtable?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. You know what? I could. I really, really could, but it’s just so much easier. I know things that are waiting for me. So how it works for me too is people will tag me in Airtable and it sends me a notification in my email. I can see it’s an Airtable notification. I save up those five and look at them all at one time.

Steven Jack Butala:
Right after this, I’m about to review… There’s four or five deals I need to say, “Yeah, we either need more information, or it’s approved, let’s do it or let’s not do it.”

Jill K DeWit:
Well, you have mail stuff too. Well, let me ask you a question. This is my side of the sheet, the deal funding, and a lot of the mailers are specific ones that you do and then there’s ones that you just brush off to me and I take care of, but you do some deal review and some things too on specific bucket property that you have isolated, but you’re also in charge of getting mail out. What are the things that you’re doing from your end as far as picking counties and getting mail out from the road right now so we don’t miss a beat in our business?

Steven Jack Butala:
Picking counties is a natural thing that I do. We did a show earlier this week about… Picking counties, I do that. I don’t know. I always do it. It’s a perpetual thing for me. I enjoy it. I use Concierge Data. When I find a new county or if I want to remail an existing county, I call Concierge Data. I say, “Remail this. Lower everything by whatever, 15%, because I’ve already priced it. Please send out the mail again and send me the new mailer. We’ve already successfully sent out two and a half to 10 acres. Let’s do 10 to 20 now. Please get the mailer, put it all together, and send it to me for my review an I’ll look at it two or three days from now.” Getting the mail out with concierge is really, really, really easy, especially if you have a county all picked out.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s great. I was going to [inaudible 00:13:58]

Steven Jack Butala:
Batching is the whole key to this. We work on Wednesday and Thursday pretty hard. Thursday, really hard.

Jill K DeWit:
Thursday, really hard. Wednesday… And the rest of it…

Steven Jack Butala:
Most of it’s Land Academy. It’s not doing the land deals.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m just talking land business. You know what? Let’s just talk about this. So here’s the truth, and I’ll end on this for me, you can successfully run your land business with an hour a day.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
And here’s the best part of it. Whether you get up early at 07:00 AM and you put in an hour of work before, because you’re on vacation. Maybe you’re in an RV with your family. Maybe you’re camping. Maybe you have Starlink like us or you’re hotspotting it. Something like that, so you can be off doing this because you can do this. So you maybe get up early, do a little bit of work, and then you have your whole day to go bike riding and have fun with the family. Or maybe it’s in the evening. Wife’s getting, or you’re getting, the kids to bed, whatever it is, you’re going to put in a quick little hour of work, and then you’re going to be out there on the campfire with some cherry whiskey in your hand like we do. If you do this like we do, an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, have it all figured out in a system and batched your stuff up, you’re going to find that you can be gone for a very long time. Now you don’t have to go home unless there’s kids in school.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s it.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s it. And we don’t have kids in school with us right now. They’re in college. So there you go. When are we going back? Here’s the answer, we don’t know.

Steven Jack Butala:
Look, it’s really easy to do this part-time or from anywhere. We have multiple members in other countries that just do the work as they need very successfully. We’ve got a father and son team in Ireland that just smash it.

Jill K DeWit:
Lots of people with full-time gigs. They work 40, 60 hours a week and they do this too.

Steven Jack Butala:
Especially with Starlink now, we could be in the middle of the desert or the middle of the ocean and get a great internet connection. It’s the first time ever. It’s probably two or three months into the release of RV Starlink and I can’t say enough good stuff.

Jill K DeWit:
Happy to join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode, because you are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t that funny? We were going to come home, I don’t know, what was our original return date? I think it was early October, and now we’re looking at each other going why?

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s just no reason to go back.

Jill K DeWit:
No.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s getting cold here, so we will go south to avoid that, but [inaudible 00:16:38]

Jill K DeWit:
Well, we’ve still got a few more things here we’re going to do and then… Before the snow hits, we’ll be out of here, for sure.

Steven Jack Butala:
Hey, tell us about Career Path, Jill. You have a couple more slots left you said.

Jill K DeWit:
I do. I’m so excited. Career Path five is coming. We added a couple special unique presentations not only from our staff, but you’re going to beef up mobile homes. And then we have an IRA professional come to talk to people.

Steven Jack Butala:
Self-directed IRA.

Jill K DeWit:
And give us some tips and things that we could be doing there to maximize our profits basically. It’s always changing. It’s ever changing. So whether you want to repeat Career Path because, ooh, I want to get in on that and I want to brush up on some stuff or you’re new to Land Academy, it’s for you. It’s a 10 week program by us, pretty much you’re going to block out a Wednesday for 10 weeks and plan on spending it really… And I mean with us, but it’s on Zoom, it’s on camera. You don’t have to come here. But it’s to get you from wherever you are to wherever you want to be and really make this a career. Check it out at landacademy.com/careerpath. There’s places where you can schedule a call. You could send a note to my team. All the pricing is there. It’s phenomenal.
And as I’m airing, as I’m recording, I should say, we still have some slots, but don’t wait too long, because I don’t allow very many. We cap it at 20. I like to keep it between 15 and 20, so it can make it really personalized and give you the attention that you need and you deserve. We are Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Information…

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration…

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.

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