Identifying Pricing Breakpoints In Real Estate
In this episode, Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit dive into the concept of the real estate breakpoint—an essential strategy for finding the sweet spot in pricing within any market. Discover how understanding the pricing breakpoint can help you make smarter investment decisions, whether you’re dealing with houses, land, or other property types. This episode offers insights and tips to help you navigate the complexities of real estate pricing and leverage this knowledge to your advantage. Tune in as Steven and Jill share their expertise on how to identify and capitalize on breakpoints in your target markets.
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Identifying Pricing Breakpoints In Real Estate
Introduction To The Land Academy Show
This is episode number 2021. Jill and I are talking about how to find the pricing break point in any real estate market. This is a popular topic on The Land Academy Discord. It’s something that I’ve been doing, I guess, not consciously or I’ve been doing it for Jill and me before I send out a mailer or price a mailer for years. I want to share it.
Do you mind giving like three sentences of what the breakpoint is? Take a little bit of the suspense of what it is and then we’ll tell you how to find it.
Understanding The Pricing Breakpoint
Every market has a breakpoint for real property assets. In its simplest definition, a pricing breakpoint is that point in pricing, a ZIP code, let’s say, where people are very interested South of the price in buying an asset, not as interested slightly North of the price, and then way North of the price, not interested at all. It’s too expensive.
Every market has a pricing breakpoint. Understanding it can mean the difference between a quick sale and a property that lingers. Share on XI see it as sometimes it’s a point of what they can afford or this is interesting. I’m going to ask you these questions when we get into it. There are things you have to weigh, like what they can afford in that ZIP code or in that area and then where do they see the value because that’s a whole another thing? Maybe they look at what’s possible. All those things that I’m sure way into if it were me, and I know what you’re going to explain more about this too.
I’m giving you the Jill version because I think it helps at least for people who are reading who are like me. I’m explaining it to two people. You other 900, hold on a moment. I need to talk to these two. To me, it’s like not only what they can afford and where they see the value and all that stuff, but there’s a day on the market thing too, like everybody jumps on these below this point and then above this point, they either have to think about it, they can’t afford it, there’s something else going on.
If you’re in a housing market and everything above $300,000 is aging on the market, it’s sitting there, but everything below seems to sell pretty quickly. Everything at $250,000 sells as soon as it goes on in the market. Everything else is equal, which it’s not. We’ll get into that. This is not complicated, but it’s something that you should be conscious of, whoever you are and whatever type of real estate investor you are. I don’t care if it’s warehouses or skyscrapers in Manhattan. There’s a breakpoint for every market.
You’re so good at it now that it’s second nature. As we’ve been traveling the country, we are still sitting in our RV, we are in month three now of traveling, it’s very easy for me to ask Jack this question. We’ll drive through a town and go, “Look at this. This is on the market for this. This sold for that.” One of my next questions is, “What’s the breakpoint?”
All the time.
That’s what’s so funny. We didn’t even know we were doing it. Now it’s that one sentence that comes up all the time and you’re so quick and so good. You can go, “For $275,000. That’s a breakpoint.” “Got it. Thank you.”
You heard it here first because now, everybody else thinks they can teach this stuff.
As we’re recording this, it’s August 15th, 2024.
More importantly, Jill, how do you feel about your new hairstyle and haircut?
Does it look that much different?
No, it’s good.
I had to go six weeks because we’d been on the road. Here’s the other beautiful thing about life on the road. Good luck.
Mabel’s Beauty Box.
Betty’s Beauty Box.
She has a lot to say about this. All I’ve been hearing is Betty’s Beauty Box.
This is a Jill breakpoint. This is perfect timing for this. We’ve been traveling the country for three months. We’ve pretty much been all over anything South of Denver and West of the 25 is that about right? I don’t know. South of Denver and East of Colorado Springs or West of Colorado Springs, we’ve been there. I don’t care how small it is. I’ve probably seen it. I’ve crossed the continental divide about 25 times or more in a month. I know everything from Lake City to Salida, Canyon City, Telluride. Everything around Durango, Dolores, Ignacio. If you don’t know what Ignacio is, I can tell you what Ignacio is and every little thing. We’re going through these wonderful, amazing, beautiful towns.
Sometimes we stay there for a week.
That’s how we get in and get to know them. We do. Jack often says, “We could make this our home. his is great. Look at all the motorcycle trails for me. I saw three stores. Does that count for you, Jill?”
You buy a house on the river with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2,500 square feet for $180,000.
To which I tell Jack, “I have a breakpoint. My breakpoint is this. When I’m stuck and my only option is Betty’s Beauty Box, it’s not going to work.”
That’s her gauge for whether or not a town is livable is the quality of the salon.
I need one. If I can get one good one, then I can make it work. Where we were a week ago, that did not exist.
There’s no data that I can find or data source that says Betty’s Beauty Box or the Four Seasons or whatever’s in between that satisfies you.
I could drive 30 minutes, but beyond that, I’m out. That’s a little much. Anyway, that’s my little breakpoint.
There goes that $180,000 acquisition.
Back to the hair. My bangs are getting long and it’s getting a little straggly, whatever, and I’m all fixed up. Thank you for noticing, Jack. I appreciate that.
Each week on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord Forum and take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request from our Land Academy community. Let’s take a question, Jill.
Jenny put this in the Land Academy Discord channel. Sorry, it’s closed for members. Within that, we have all kinds of sub-ones for Career Path people, my ladies’ group, my personal coaching thing we started. Everybody has their own little subgroup, depending on what’s going on. We can talk and share in another closed environment some stuff. We also have a channel called Funny Things. In there, this person wrote this. Here’s the seller. They sent out an offer. The seller got it, digested it, and wrote back to sweet Jenny and they said, “Here’s my seller’s response to an offer. I would buy properties all day long at 20% of their market value.”
This comes back to a story about Jill and me attempting to buy a house in Torrance, California, a Southwestern suburb, a profitable one or can be for people like us in Los Angeles County. Jill and I lived there for many years. If you look back on the show, you’ll see the Pacific Ocean behind us for several years. We found a property. It was listed. It was on the MLS, which is unusual for us. We befriended and still have a bunch of friends there. A couple of them are real estate agents and Jill went to one that she likes. Her name was Jenny also and said, “We’d like to offer this amount of money for this house.” Jill’s friend is a very successful real estate agent because she’s a type AAA personality, a crazy person.
She gets stuff done.
She said this sentence, “I would buy the property for that price.” This is years ago and it hit me like a ton of bricks. That’s what we do. We create real estate deals that are 20%, maybe 30%, or 40% in some cases of the actual retail value without changing the asset at all, without ever going to see it in the case of land. That’s what we do but people still say that this sentiment. I read this and I had to put it in here.
It was like a flashback. “I’ll do that with my own money.”
“I’ll buy properties all day long at 20% of the value.” I’m fact, I had somebody say this to me, “If I give you a dime, how about you give me a quarter back?”
That’s not how this works.
That’s what this is. You’re creating a real estate deal based on a seller’s circumstance, based on their willingness to sell, whatever that ends up being. When you extrapolate it like that, forget about land, forget about pricing a mailer, forget about Jill’s hair, all of it. You are buying an asset that’s worth, let’s say it’s worth $100,000 for $25,000. That’s extraordinary when you truly pull it out of that.
Finding The Breakpoint In Real Estate
The next topic is How To Find A Pricing Breakpoint In Any Real Estate Market. Here’s what you need to know. There’s a statistic in real estate called the pending ratio. If you ask a real estate agent what the pending ratio is, they’re going to look at you cross-eyed and say, “What does that have to do with how pretty this house is and do you want to buy it?”
The pending ratio is quite simply you’ve got active listings and you’ve got pending listings. In any given market, let’s say there are 200 pending listings. That means that they’re under contract and going to be sold. You have 200 active listings. That’s a snapshot. It’s not 30 days old or any of that. If those statistics, it’s 200 pending, 200 active, or 100 pending, 100 active, and then you have a 1.0 pending ratio.
If you have pending property that is less, so you have 100 pending properties and 200 active properties, your pending ratio is going to be smaller. It’s going to be 0.5 and obviously the reverse is true, 300 pending, 200 active. You’ve got a 1.5 pending ratio or 150% depending on how you look at it. That’s great. More properties are being sold than are actually on the market.
That’s the dream of going online and looking that up and seeing. I love that. What was it, like 100 active and 150 pending? Be like, “I need to throw one more in there.”
It needs to be a great asset and it needs to be cheap. Jenny’s complainer here. What if you could magically take all the ZIP codes in the country and you could sort for the highest pending ratio to the lowest? You can. If you go to Realiter.com, horse around on there, and look at their research, you can literally download 26,000 ZIP codes in this entire country and look at their pending ratios.
In fact, we’ve talked about that and I did a demonstration on it and it’s pretty amazing and it’s free. “Great, Jack. That’s the top 100 ZIP codes everyone’s going to send mail.” Maybe. Wouldn’t you like to be the first one to do that, though? There’s more to it than that. When you look at any data set and statistics in general, everybody knows that a larger data set is always better.
If you have a market like I’m real familiar with Arizona, so downtown, Old Town Scottsdale, which is 85251, at any given time, there’s a lot of assets for sale, 300, 400, 500 properties for sale and 200 or 300 that are pending. Great, I’ve got a market that I know the pending ratio is pretty attractive. I have a lot of data, so I know it’s real. How do I get involved and make that work for me? What’s different about me is that maybe somebody else might be manipulating the same information.
The answer is Jill. You need to get in there and get the data correct, price it correctly, send an offer out that’s not too low, not too high, has some respect. There are templates on Offers2Owners.com, the printing company that Jill and I have, if you want to take a look at an example. When the people call, they need to be received by you or whoever your partner is.
In my case, it’s Jill with enthusiasm and reality. That’s when you’re off to the races and you create that real estate deal that we were talking about earlier. It starts with finding out where that breakpoint is, this pending ratio will show you where that breakpoint is. It can get sensitive. It might be 3 bedrooms and 2 baths if it’s in a rural area with land and you have less data.
It becomes a use issue. Agricultural property is different than property that’s on the water, waterfront property. In general, infill lots are going to be very consistent, like houses. You have to find that breakpoint where you have enough data. In some cases, you’re going to have to educated guess because you don’t have enough data, especially with land but it exists.
Some of these breakpoints, like you mentioned, it’s not 100%. You brought up a good point that I didn’t even think about earlier, but we’ve noticed and you can explain more. It’s not always the price. It could be waterfront. Is the waterfront price below X blows everything else away?
Now you’ve got a sub-data set. That’s what you’ll see. Now you need all waterfront property. That’s three bedrooms and two baths or more. It gets a little bit more challenging, but it’s all there. The point is, buying an asset under the breakpoint, the established breakpoint, you feel very comfortable, and the breakpoint’s $300,000 for the asset that I want. I need to be buying assets in the $250,000 range if I want that $50,000 of equity in my pocket.
Congratulations. This is why you’re here and why you’re listening. People don’t know this stuff. People don’t know that you could dig in and check things so thoroughly, so you’re making a smart decision not what you’re mailing but what you’re buying here. I know that there are still people out there who wake up every morning and they look at the MLS. What got listed in the last 24 hours and what can I get it for? Does it make sense to buy it as it is a thing instead of taking a step back and making strategic offers?
Due diligence. This makes due diligence easy for Jill and I. In fact, it happens in a matter of seconds. Due diligence seems to be a real pain point for a lot of new people in the real estate market buying some land or houses or anything else. “I don’t know if I should be buying it or not.” If the breakpoint is $300,000 in a market, you’re buying it at $248,000, you’re buying it because somebody passed away and the kids don’t want to deal with it. That is your due diligence in most cases.
Due diligence made easy: Identify the breakpoint in your market and use it to make smart, strategic offers. Share on XWe have the eight A’s for a reason. This is a good little side segue about due diligence. We have the eight A’s, things you need to always check to make sure you’re making good acquisition decisions. I’ll go through them real quick here. Access, Attribute, Acreage, Affordability, Alive, Adjacent, Afraid, and Abundance. There we go. We’ll talk about that more later, but now, at least, you have them. You want them to have all those, but it’s interesting because I reviewed a deal with some gals in a coaching session. We were all excited. I got all excited about it. It was the money part. That was the point where people weren’t even sure how to look at it. You have to develop that skill.
I’ll show you. You’re either going to learn, it’s going to take you a couple of years or I can show you in a couple of months. There are things you have to learn to look for and that’s how we have these groups, too, that we help people to speed up the learning curve and say, “We all signed off on this.” I even signed off on this but then we dug a little bit further and I went, “Red flag. Look at the days on the market. We have some problems here,” and we uncovered some stuff and I showed this individual. “I need you to go and do a deep dive into all these stats over here then you’re going to know if it’s good or not.”
If you’re sitting there saying, “Jack, can’t you make this simple?” This is complicated. If that’s the case, I want you to take this away. This is the takeaway from this episode. The lowest-priced property that is under contract and fits your acquisition criteria is probably very close to the breakpoint in that market.
What you’re going to see if you go on Zillow or Realtor.com or any of those, you’re going to type in XYZ ZIP code and you’re going to type in only houses, freestanding houses at more than 3 beds, more than 2 baths. You’re going to get a bunch of results and sort them by the lowest number. If that ZIP code has a lot of like kind assets, there’s no waterfront property, there’s no crazy high rises or any of that, it’s all a subdivision. The first property you see is probably very close, if not the breakpoint.
You’re going to do exactly what I said on Zillow and the first property that comes up in the ZIP code is $329,000, your breakpoint is probably around $300,000 in that market and it’s pending, especially if that property has not had a lot of days on market, and it hasn’t been out there for 120 days or anything, maybe a couple of weeks and it’s pending and someone’s going to buy it. The next one, you go to 342. The next one is 343, 344, 348, 350, 370. That’s your break point. You want to be buying properties at $250,000 in those markets.
Jack, this is Land Academy, we’re talking houses. Can you explain how this parlays into land?
Houses have snuck their way back into our lives because of the economic scenario out there. It’s getting harder and harder. There are tons of properties for sale on the market right now. Tons of inventory. However, you want to statistically look at it. There’s a lot of freaking property for sale. It’s going to continue that way. There’s a lot of property now being foreclosed on, I learned. It’s the 15th of August. They released a report that foreclosures are at 15% over last month. It’s not crazy yet.
When the market's tough, understanding where the breakpoint lies is your secret weapon to making profitable deals. Share on XThese are crazy numbers. I mean, not crazy, but I was thinking about all this stuff that’s happening. This is interesting.
Just like we did in 2009, Jill and I together have added flipping houses, not renovating them, buying them and reselling them in their current condition into our lives because when there’s a lot of property on the market, then people can’t sell their properties especially not because mortgages are kicking in for a bunch of reasons I don’t want to complicate it. We’re talking about houses because we’re buying and selling them. We’ve rolled that into looking for smash-it-out-of-the-park amazing acquisition deals on land.
I’m a Land Academy member and I’m used to trolling how you thought where I’m trolling all kinds of properties. I usually start to troll for houses and then I use that information to help me make good decisions to buy land. Are you saying as me Land Academy member, I’m smart, I’ve been with you for three years now, I’m in it, as I’m trolling, as I’m picking up on this house data, don’t discount it, consider mailing that.
Trolling for houses is easier. When you look at a ZIP code and there are four houses for sale and two that have sold, you don’t want anything to do with that ZIP code. What you want is a market that’s, I don’t know, 30 or 40, maybe 50 properties that are for sale, and 30 or 40 or 50 properties that are pending. That’s a good medium one. The pending ratio is close to the number 1 or 100%. You’ve got to figure out what asset type they love. I can tell you right now, it’s 3 bedrooms and 2 baths with a certain amount of square footage, depending on the age of the scenario. Now, your job is to find out what that breakpoint is. Send some mail.
Interesting. It’s not hard when you take a step back. Can you even pick up on it? When you do it so quickly for me, you’re obviously in trolling mode on your phone. This is how it happens for us in real time. We’re driving through the town. That’s that. That’s I’m like, “What’s the break point around here?” You’ll give me a number that’s going to be a $500,000 house and a $200,000 house. I go, “What’s the break point? When is too much thing?” Are there things that you pick up on? Are you looking at a whole big map of all these properties? Can you remember the show numbers?
Yes.
At the beginning of the show, what was I going to say?
Not what 10% smart as those guys.
The show, the television show numbers where it’s like that guy, he’s so brainy. All he sees is all these numbers on the screen and then all of a sudden they come together and fit into something like that. “He sees it.” Does that happen to you when you’re looking at trolling? No, that’s what I’m kidding. I’m not kidding. I’m like, that’s what I’m asking. I can just, Jack, humor me here. I know how smart you are. I don’t even think that you’re doing it, but I think you’re doing it because you’re that smart. I see you looking at all these numbers and you’re going, “Ping, got it. Darn it, you’re right.”
If you find that thing attractive in a man, then yes, that’s exactly how it happens. For the rest of you, I’ll tell you the truth.
That’s at least how it looks from the outside in. How a lot of women think that men, when you’re in love with a girl, you don’t see flaws or you don’t see when they have lipstick on or when they don’t or whatever. A lot of women say that to each other. I’ve heard people say that to them my entire life. He’s in love with you. He doesn’t care that you’re 40. 40% of your PMI is you’re here. He doesn’t see that. He doesn’t see your morbid.
He doesn’t know that you’re wearing the same sweats for a week and you haven’t washed your hair. “He’s in love with you. Don’t worry about it, honey.” That’s good. I like that. Please explain all these doll ties together. I don’t feel that way.
I automatically, probably subconsciously, find every breakpoint in every market where I can get to my phone and look at it very quickly. The truth is if we’ve been doing this for so long, we can drive through it. I was honored. I can tell you generally what the breakpoint is.
I’m stuck on the other thing. To finish that thought.
It is finished.
I’m not done. To finish the dating analogy. He’s in love with you. I have to share it. You are sweet about it. You are nice that you wouldn’t do that. I don’t think so, but you would say as I’m walking out the door somewhere, if it’s summer that I want to impress somebody and you picked up on a problem, you would go, “Can we talk? Where did you get those shoes?”
Yes, that actually does happen.
It’s very nice.
She handles it well. I do.
A lot of women don’t handle it.
I’m like, “No, they’re out of here. Great. What else?” I still have a stack of clothes that you have. You vetoed in the last three months in the rig and that’s great. I’m going to donate them. It’s, “No skin off my nose. I’ll replace them.” Place something better.
There are way more comments and questions that don’t get answered by men than there are things that get talked about. Do these jeans make me look fat? Does this property make me look fat?
You can’t do that. Yes, I do remember that.
Just say nothing and say, “You look great today.”
I was thinking about earlier when you brought up the Jen question and I’d buy it for that price comment. It’s interesting how, over the years, that happens, it still happens every once in a while. We send out thousands of mailers a month and they’re calling in and occasionally, I’ll get on the phone, especially in a new market or what we’re doing. Maybe it’s a personal thing. I’m taking those calls or at least the first wave I get involved. It’s cool. We will hit other investors and they will call back and say a version of this, “Look, I don’t want to sell this asset. I’m digging in on this and this is why, whatever it is, but now that I know who you are and how you’re finding this stuff, how do I get on your buyer’s list?”
That happens all the time.
I love that. The smart investors go, “After you buy some of these at this price, will you please call me first? You buy it at 20%, 25%, I’ll buy it from you at 40%, 50%. Love it and then I’m going to do this to it.” I’m like, “Sure, no problem. I will happily pitch to my buyers.”
Happens with houses all the time. They don’t have the math, interest, or negotiation talent. They have some other way to create equity for themselves, which I’m not judging at all. It’s not the way I want to do it. I do not want to renovate a house, make it look beautiful, and create equity for myself by resetting the highest price per square foot on that block. That’s not the business that Jill and I are in. We don’t like it. We’ve done that successfully and it’s no fun. Neither one of us gets high off of it. We both get, literally, endorphin high off of acquiring a property that’s worth half of what we’re going to sell it for. In the case of houses, we know how we’re going to make $80,000 to $120,000 on it in the next three weeks.
That makes sense. It’s only the acquisition. That’s what I love about it because I know how it’s going to work out in the end. Everything that we’re talking about, Jack knows the break point. Jack knows how to pick the right market. Jack knows it’s hot, not too hot. All the things I figured out. It’s interesting too, some of the markets that we’re hitting. I don’t have a lot of competition. As I say that, you’re here listening, but people don’t all get to that point. You said it’s a lot of work. There’s a lot that goes into it. I have people who have been in Land Academy for over a year and they haven’t sent out mailers yet. There’s still some hesitation, but they want to do it. They will do it. I’m like, “Hurry up. We can’t miss it.”
Back to the point here, the pending ratio on these mountain towns doesn’t look attractive when you compare it to, let’s say, old town Scottsdale, Arizona, or some of the like Austin. I always check Austin, Texas, because it’s such a hot market. There’s so much activity there. It’s not anywhere that I’ve ever sent a mailer and probably never will. I check it against that because it’s a gauge on the other side of what I want to happen. There’s a lot of inventory on these mountain towns and there’s a lot of days on the market which all translates this to me, then I have to buy it cheaper, which is easier to do because the stuff’s been sitting around on it.
The listings go up and go down. They get a letter from us and say, for $100,000 less than the last listing price was, and they say, “I’m sick of this. We’ve been trying to sell this house for two years. I’m going to sell it to you.” That’s so far below the breakpoint that I’ve established in that market and they don’t know what breakpoint is and don’t care. They’re talking to sweet Jill. That’s all they know. She had her checkbooks open and she loved the house. That’s it. You don’t have to look up and find the best pending ratios in the entire country and that’s where this only works.
Advice For Real Estate Investors
It’s not the case. You have to read the market for what it is, understand what the pending ratio is and where the breakpoint is, and then go in hotter from a price standpoint because it’s going to take longer to sell. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with no competition all over this country. We drove through multiple markets like that this summer, and we’re going across, we’re going east here in a week and a half. As we go through, we’ll look at the breakpoints there. The breakpoints are going to be even better.
It’s going to be interesting. That’d be a fun game.
This works in every market where there’s enough data. If you look at think about a central South Dakota scenario, there are maybe three houses and some of the ZIP codes sell a year. That’s not enough data for me. That stuff where there’s no data and I’m flying blind, we avoid that. That’s probably what happens, too. For the most part, they probably have never received the mail or maybe so you can buy some property cheap. Starling works everywhere.
Here’s my final little tip. If you want to go somewhere with no competition, I’ll tell you.
Betty’s Beauty.
That’s it. It’s Betty’s Beauty Box. If you find a little town with Betty’s Beauty Box in it and no data, send them an offer. They’ve never got one.
You should do stupid stuff like this. I know you’re right.
They’re like, “What is this?” Every single one of them will sign them and send them back.
What’s the big deal with Betty’s Beauty Box? They have talent in there, don’t they?
No, they can’t support it. There’s not enough.
They could color your hair.
Hold on a minute. This ought to be good.
That’s what I’m asking you, seriously. Be careful here, Jill, because the audience is not that small.
I’m sorry. Sometimes there’s not enough volume. It’s hard. It’s a lot of work to open your own shop, run your own business, and do all that. I got my hair done in a town that’s somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000 pe,ople and even she’s having to make some business decis, rentrent s,pace and figure out other ways to bring in money because there’s a volume.
It’s not a lack of talent.
No. It’s the people.
2,000 is not going to support a real salon.
I think a lot of people either don’t care. They don’t care about it. They’re going natural or they can’t afford it or whatever other reason.
There are not enough people.
They’ve been doing it themselves for so long.
If one in a thousand people care, then there are three people in the market that care and it can’t support a business. It’s not a lack of talent, no I understand.
No, it is not the talent at all. That’s not it.
That’s with any business. It’s not big enough to have a grocery store or it’s not big enough to have a bowling alley or whatever. No, I understand.
It’s not enough to survive on. That’s the thing.
Jill, do you have anything inspirational to share?
I was thinking about this. As we’re talking about this and talking about, “Thank you, Jack. I thought I figured out this. Now I have to look at this now. I thought I figured out the trolling and the red, yellow, and green tests. Now you’re telling me I need to look at the break point. I have to roll this into my thing.”
I want you to be thinking about what you’re good at. I don’t want this to hold you up. There are people in Land Academy right now who I wish they’re trying to learn this on their own. There’s a breakpoint there. I’m worried about them. If they’re going to spend six months learning this on their own, they’d be better off bringing in somebody else and finding a partner. I guess that’s my inspirational thing.
Take a step back. Think about what you’re good at. Think about your Excel skills, let’s someone like this. Think about your time. How much time do you have to commit to this? How much this might slow you down? I’m trying to put this into an example. I’ll use myself. If I was starting this all over by myself right now, like I didn’t know you, I joined Land Academy. I don’t have a Jack. This is me. I know I’m going on the phone. I love all that but I’m sitting here trying to digest all this. I’m going to be looking, and I have a day job and I have a kid. I’m like, “Shoot.”
I would immediately ask you out to dinner and we could talk about it. You don’t have to worry.
There you go. I look good because I get my hair done and I maintain myself and I don’t wear the same sweats for a week.
I do. All those things, actually.
I have to be honest with myself. I need to brush up on my skill skills. That’s this weekend gone. Maybe next weekend, too, to get this. I got to sit and study trolling and watch the program a little bit. Now I’m two more weekends gone. Now I’m a month in. I mean, this is reality. I go, “Now I got to figure out the trolling and wrap my head around it. I got to figure out this regular green test.” If I was on it, I’m talking 90 days.
That’s good.
I’m trying to download data and learn to scrub it and get the mail out. That’s another 90 days. Now I’m six months in.
These are all good and very real numbers.
Let me think about this for a minute. What if I bring in some help and get a partner? Maybe even not a partner like we’re not splitting it, but maybe I can find someone who’s good at this and pay them. I want you to think about this stuff. It’s not nuts and every level of that exists in Land Academy. I promise you, there are people in Land Academy who are data nuts, but they can’t do what I do. There are a lot of partnerships, and even if you’re not in Land Academy, whatever you’re doing. This is all-encompassing. You shouldn’t be working on stuff you’re not good at.
If you want to get good at it, and you’re willing to dig in and put in the time, then stay with it because you’re like me. I suck at painting, I’ll tell you right now. Pretty much any art project, I’m not good. There’s one that I like. My latest one is I want to give pottery a try, but clearly not that much, but if I wanted to, I would dig in and I might spend a year on it. It’s going to I know it’s going to suck and hurt and it’s going to might still might not get there, but I’ll dig in. Are you going to dig in or get some help? This is for me. Pottery is a hobby. I’m not going to make money on it. If I was trying to make money on pottery, then I would still hire somebody that’s good at it. Does that make sense?
That’s a good parlay into mine. Math helps everything. If you don’t like math, real estate is not the right career for you. I don’t mean being a real estate agent because I’ve never met a real estate agent that can do any math. I mean a real real estate investor. Actually, real estate agents can multiply 6% of anything quickly because that’s their commission. Math helps everything. If you have to, it’s what I’m saying what Jill said, if you don’t like it, don’t do it. If you’re sitting there stopped reading already by now, but what breakpoint should make a point?
I know that $300,000 houses in my neighborhood are selling fast and $400,000 houses take six months to sell and I already know all that. You don’t need to tell me that. If that’s your deal, okay but maybe you want to know how to do it in Florida on your phone and while you’re looking at Zillow while your wife’s driving around.
It’s important and congratulations if you do know that. You probably don’t know it. You can’t apply it to every single ZIP code pretty quickly and that’s what you want. I used to call it an inferno. If you’ve got an inferno in your belly for what I said now, this is what this episode is about. You are going to smash it. If you want to know more, you’ve got it.
Knowing the pricing breakpoint in your market is your edge. It helps you price offers strategically and avoid overpaying. Share on XIf you’re looking stuff up while we’re talking right now and realize how much of an edge you have as a person and a real estate investor in this market because you know this stuff, then man, don’t wait any longer, smash it. However that work, you see that working for you, go after it with all you have. If you’re being cynical or satirical about it because you don’t like math, this is not for you.
Brilliant. This was a good show. Thank you. Good topic.
Versus the first 2010.
Finally, this is a good show. I learned something.
Join us next time for another interesting episode. You’re not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
