The first step towards building a thriving land business empire is nailing down the basics. Join Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit for a week-long journey into the five phases of building your land business empire! In Monday’s episode, they tackle the crucial first step: nailing down the basics. Jack covers the technical aspects, while Jill brings her creative flair to the conversation about making impactful real estate deals. Discover how to establish your brand, automate your operations, and navigate industry shifts, all while gaining practical insights to propel your success in the land business. Don’t miss this engaging series designed to inspire and inform your real estate ambitions!

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Starting Your Land Business: The Basics You Need To Master

5 Phases Of Real Estate Empire

This week, all week, we are talking about the five phases of your real estate empire. Each day we’ll take each step. Monday, we’re talking about the first step, nailing down the basics in your land business. I’m going to talk about the technical stuff. As always, Jill’s going to talk about the more interesting, and fun. The all-important points to creating a real estate deal.

I’m going to talk about your logo, your colors, your office space, decorations, all of that. Just kidding.

I cannot wait to hear it. What is your favorite? How do you come up with the logo, Jill? I’ll start off with some fun stuff because this is going to be an intense week.

I’m not even sure you need one.

That’s what I think.

No, seriously. For our land business, we’ve never had a logo. We never even thought about it.

Yeah, we haven’t.

We had a name and all. The only thing that we went with the name of our land business was something that was easy to look up and spell. That’s really it and says what it is. That’s it and make sure it’s a dot com. There you go. Never cared about the colors and all of that. It’s funny. I like how you did this too. I was thinking, by the way, which I learned from you, first gear, second gear, third gear, all that. Today is the first. That’s good. First gear. Cool.

Here are the topics on Monday. Again, we’re going to talk about nailing down the basics of your land business. On Tuesday, which is phase two, Putting Your Land Business On Autopilot. As we go through these each day, I’ll talk about my personal experience and how maybe shifting from first gear to second gear to third gear in my personal land business wasn’t as efficient as it could be as yours could be. Let’s put it that way. On Wednesday, phase three, Expanding Your Land Business Into Other Real Estate Types.

Super important. Thursday phase four, Institutionalizing The Operations Portion of Your Real Estate Business. You’ve heard this probably by now. If you’re an entrepreneur, you probably shouldn’t be working in your own business, which is true. What that really means is you shouldn’t be running the operations portion of your business. You’re the startup people. We’re all startup entrepreneurs here.

If we were masters at operations, we would have other jobs with private equity companies or things like that. We’re startup people. Then Friday, my personal favorite phase, phase five is Staying Out Front Out in front of all of the changes that go on in the environment so that you can survive. The title of Friday’s show is Capitalizing On The Ever-present Industry and Cultural Changes In Real Estate.

We’ll get to the topic here, a great example is there’s more competition and traffic out there than there ever has been. From a mailing standpoint, there are just more people involved in the business because it’s so cheap and easy to get in as you’ve probably decided for yourself already. We’ll talk about how we deal with that. It’s pretty much my full-time job other than doing Jill’s mail.

I was going to say, where is he going with that one? Other than making sure everything on the outside the rig runs smooth. Is that your other job? I’m inside. He’s outside.

Let’s very briefly talk about where we are and what we’re doing this summer. It’s not summer anymore. It’s not even fall anymore. It was below freezing this morning.

It’s fall. We are in the not-quite Pacific Northwest, but we’re in the Northwest. Let’s just say that. It’s still lovely out as we record today. It’s going to be 60, well, in the 60s, like high 60s, but it’s all going to change. We were still in our sweet RV when we left in May. I’ve seen pictures of the house. It’s still there. That’s about it.

We’re out in the West part of the Western part of the country doing real estate deals. It’s a first for Jill and I to ever actually in person do real estate deals. It’s been a blast. We’re having fun meeting a ton of people, which usually is not my first most favorite thing. I’ll tell you a lot of fun people, a lot of interesting real estate, and times of changing.

Learning the culture. Everywhere’s different too.

Limited Comp Information

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

Cooper wrote, “I’m struggling with an area that I mailed and I received a bunch of responses accepting my offers. It repeatedly seems to have very few recently, up to 12 months back, sold comps of similar size properties.” Got us, he’s got the offers coming back. I don’t have a lot of comps. Now to go back and compare them to. “If it does have a recent comp, they can be 25% of the for sale of the properties, which makes me think it’s another land investor or perhaps a one-off property issue.

I’ve reached out to a local experienced realtor for their opinion on several and should hear back soon. Smart. In these situations, how much weight or trust do you put into the limited comp information versus realtor opinion versus sale prices? If there are not many recent solds, would this be a signal or a red flag? Thank you for your time and assistance.”

First of all, Cooper, you’re doing everything right. You sent a bunch of mail out, you priced it hopefully within reason accordingly and you’re receiving positive responses, people are sending your offers and sending them back. I do not place specific emphasis on sole comparison values. There are three or four things that you need to look at when a property comes back. This is what we do on that, Jill and I do on the Thursday call for our members, to review their deals. We have been doing this every Thursday for years and years.

You need to look at how the internet values like-kind real estate in the area that you believe are comparison values. Zillow calls it a Zestimate, Realtor.com has all kinds of comps and then you should look at like you are, sole comparison values, and for sale property. It’s important to remember where comparison values come from. Sole comparison values have to be manually listed on Zillow by the seller or by the person real estate agent or the person who’s selling it and so that leaves a lot of unaddressed sold comparison values because it’s not directly on MLS.

Then let’s not forget about the property that’s been sold Directly like by piece of property and I sell it to Jill or deed it to Jill and vice versa. It never hits the MLS so it does not become a comparison value unless you’re pulling comps from the actual recorder from the county. I don’t want to make this sound complicated. However, you should be able to look at a piece of property that you’re thinking about buying and look at the properties around it and just look at it for a reason. Look at it. Does it make sense that I sent a $30,000 offer out?

All the other houses or structures or land values are two and three times that. In the case of a house, it should be four to five times. This is something that the way that you’re going to get confidence doing this is by doing it often and getting some reinforcement from whomever you choose. This is a very popular topic in Discord. A lot of people had a lot of things to say. One of the things, Jill and I’ll let you go here in a second, is one of the real things that people said was this should be part of the process when you’re pricing your mailer. This is what we call testing for a reason.

At the very end of the mailer that you put together and you’re done pricing it, you go down the list in the mailer in the Excel file or the relational database and test properties. Test them and assume that they came back, that you have a signed executed offer, it came back, test it, test it, test it. You might find that because you haven’t spent any money on mail yet, you might find you cannot value these properties. This has happened to me. Actually, over the years, it’s happened a lot. There’s just no value in anything. I would ditch the mailer and then move on to a place where you have huge confidence in the fact that you’re buying property at 20% of retail.

My turn?

For sure.

I don’t know if we are differing in opinion or if it was a little goof, but I think the land you’re buying should be worth 10% of the house is at least. If you’re paying $100,000 for a piece of dirt, you better be ending up with a million-dollar house. You had said 2 or 3 or 4 times.

Just other land value.

Got it. You had said houses. I want to clarify that. If there’s a million-dollar house, you could spend $100,000 on the dirt. We’re good with that. If it’s a $300,000 or $400,000 house, you cannot spend $100,000 on the dirt. Then as far as the question, you’re like, what do I look like, I’ve got that realtor, I’m working in a realtor opinion. I’m having trouble with these sold comps and I’m looking at them for sale. I start outweighing them equally. I really do. When I look at these things and they come back. I really look at, I want the local opinion because I want to know what he’s got lined up, like how many calls, like the local opinion is going to tell me a lot as far as what people want.

Local opinion is going to tell you a lot as far as what people want. Share on X

It’s been slow or people are just blowing up my whatever. I just sold one last week. I wish I had ten of those. Like, okay, that tells me something. Then the second one of course is the sold comps. I love looking at that three months back, six months back, a year back. Has it been getting better? Maybe even go back once and a while further. If you see like, “Two sold and then 10 sold, and now 50 sold. There’s a trend here. Things are happening.” That’s good. Not just for volume, but as far as, and then you can see the price is like, “They keep going up. Look at this, it’s getting a little more competitive.

Moving up in price because people want to move here, more demand.” Then the last thing is for sale. I really do value that too. Like, what are these people? Not that it’s real because some people do have their own, “We’re going to list it for this price and I’m going to hang out, weird numbers.” You can throw out the outliers high and throw out the outliers low on the active and go, “This is a general opinion I can see of what people think things are worth right now in this area.” Again, I weighed them pretty much equally.

This portion of the business, this valuation portion, I obsess on it to an unhealthy level. I go into a market, even before long before we send out mail, just to see if it’s viable to send out mail or even buy property there. By the time I’m done, and I’m not bragging, I’m just saying if not anything else, it’s not an emotionally healthy part of my personality. I want to know what parts of the market, let’s say it’s a county, that are expensive, what parts are not, which parts are just untouched, maybe because they’re too far out, and I want to know why.

I love this question. I don’t remember getting a question like this. Maybe I’m reading a lot into it, but I don’t remember getting a question like this because it’s very, very in-depth and it’s good. You want to get to the bottom of why. I won’t send or you know what? If a deal comes back like this and Jill and I are looking at each other and we’re saying, “I don’t know if this is a good deal price-wise, I love the dirt, the markets look fantastic, but I just cannot see if we won’t do the deal.”

I’ll change the price.

She’ll go back and say, she’ll knock so much money off of it that we have to do it. There are other bigger factors in this. This could be a whole week, by the way, if the county or the surrounding counties are doing really well, and you’re looking at 40 acres for $18,000 and every other 40-acre property in the area of the state is $180,000 plus, or $800,000 plus in some markets. Then you have to start to say, “I might take a risk on this because it passes all the A’s. I just cannot get any sold comps.”

I just looked at a deal yesterday actually in the very far northeast part of the country in a state that I’ve not done many deals in. I’m just looking at it going, scratching my head going, “There’s not a lot to go on.” There really wasn’t. It was like a buy for $30,000 sell for $70,000 they thought. I’m looking around going, “There’s so few comps that I had to fall back on.” Here’s a good fallback for you Cooper. I had to fall back on what I think is the closest property, which sold for like $40,000 right? This is a buy for $30,000 something. I had to go back and just say, look, and it was a deal funding issue.

I had to go back and say, “Look, I’m sorry, but you got to look at this comp and you got to look at this stuff here. I had a couple of different ones.” I said, “I would even call this agent, and talk to him about it, but based on this best one I can do, I cannot see any way out of it other than not paying $30,000 paying $10,000.” It might work. In that case, I’m like, for $10,000 I’ll roll the dice. For $30,000 I won’t. I’m not going to buy for $30,000 and sell for $40,000.” With an agent and commissions, now we’re both splitting $5,000, barely. That won’t work.

Jill and I earned the process of completing a deal here, and neither one of us liked it at all when it first came across our desk. We realized later that we loved the deal. We hated the price. We just couldn’t make the price work. Jill went back in and got it for $125,000 cheaper.

They had to catch up with us.

Nailing Down The Basics

Yes. This is in the meantime as well. I’m learning a lot doing these deals in person. Are you? I’m not used to this. This has been a decade of me doing this stuff on the phone and on the internet. When Jill gets in front of people and she talks with them, they’re very much more likely to reduce the price. Please test all this stuff for a reason before you send the mailer out. Cooper, this is a great question. Today’s topic, nailing down the basics in your land business. This is phase one of the five phases in this entire week.

I call it first gear. I like first gear. You taught me that. It makes sense to me. You’re just getting started. You’re rolling.

As with the way attrition works, it’s a funnel and you want to make it to the end of the bottom. You want to make it across the finish line here and on all five of these phases. There’s issues with every single, can be issues with every single phase of this. Nailing down the basics in your land business is as follows, and they are the modules in Land Academy 3.0. They’re the basic modules that we talk about in the career path. When does the career path start?

October 28th.

I don’t know when this airs, but I think it’s right before that. You need to get educated. That’s the first part of nailing down the basics in your land business. You’re listening to this because hopefully, you’re utilizing all the free resources around the internet, this included, to learn. Then at some point, you’ll decide whether or not you want to get some paid. Belong to a group like Land Academy, hopefully, it is Land Academy, and learn from other people who have been where you are at one point like me and Jill, and have made it down through that funnel.

The first part is education, the second there are phases to that, and then you get really serious. Eventually, you’re going to review where you want to send mail and get really comfortable and confident. You’re building confidence in this stage by sending mail to an area backed by data. Every decision we make in this is data-driven as evidenced by the question today. She is looking for data. They’re looking for data to confirm his and validate his purchase price.

I have different ones when you’re ready. When you’re done, I’ll go because I have five different things to do.

Get the mail out and then manage the inbound flow, which is what Jill does. The magic that Jill brings to the table is managing and converting those inbound responses from the mail into real estate deals, buying it, and selling it. Those are the basics of the land business. If at any point that doesn’t make sense to you or you cannot stand it, or you’re not willing to get a business partner or hire somebody to do the stuff you don’t want to do, this can be a problem. I think a lot of people find out that it’s not all peaches and cream. There’s a lot involved unless you have a certain personality type for Jill and I. We’re very fortunate because she does the stuff I don’t want to do in vice versa. Go ahead.

Here’s what I think. This is like the very beginning stages here and there are five things you’ve got to have locked in. If you’re going to be successful here in your land business and as a new person. Number one, money. You’ve got to have money to get going, money to send out mail, money to do data, not necessarily buy the deals, but you’ve gotta have money saved up, or it’s just not going to work. You cannot come at this with $1,000. Not going to work. You need to have at least ten, I’m going to be honest, to really get rolling.

The good news is, as we’ve talked about in many other shows, starting a business with $10,000 is like, “What? What are you talking about? That’s amazing. If I wanted to buy a Circle K, it would cost whatever, or any restaurant or pizza joint, or we’ve been there. Every other business, it’s astronomical.” This is really nice. Number two, you need to be in the right frame of mind. You got to be ready. You have to have your family ready, your head ready, your calendar clear. However it’s going to work out with your regular job, how you’re going to fit this in.

You’ve got to have that ready to go. Number three, you’ve got to have tools. You cannot do this. You cannot just sit down and Google your way through this. No. That’s part of where the money comes from. You’re going to need to have access to the data, and phone system.  You got to have a good computer, good software, and a mail company thing. You’ve got to have all this stuff lined up. The fourth thing, of course, is definitely education.

You can't just Google your way through the land business. You've got to have tools. Share on X

We always agree there. Do you want to spend ten months learning to do this or ten years? Think about it. You can catch up and get a lot done in Land Academy in ten months versus, or you just wing it and Google your way through this and get ten years and then maybe catch up to us. We’ll see. I boy, I wish I had us. When we started, that was the thing. At least I had Jack. Jack had nobody. That was really good.

I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought. I was going to give you a compliment.

Thank you. The fifth thing is, basics in your land business and nailing your land business, right? I started with money, your frame of mind. I’m not using the word mindset because it’s overused. Tools, education, and the last thing is practice and experience. Nailing down the basics, you’ve got to do some deals. Until you have at least ten deals, I would say maybe 20 or 30, you’re new. You need to get more experience. Then we can move into second gear.

It’s building confidence. You might have come from another professional environment engineering or something like that or maybe you’re a real estate professional, a real estate professional, or a former business owner, the number is going to be less. You’re going to know when you’re confident. You have to be very confident as a business owner, whether it’s a restaurant owner or a manufacturing. You cross over that point where, “You know what, I actually pretty much know what’s going to happen next.”

You're going to know when you're confident. You have to be very confident as a business owner. Share on X

I’m ready for it.

Ten deals. 10 to 15 deals is good, or 20, whatever you said. Join us tomorrow, where we discuss putting your land business on autopilot. This is phase two, or Jill’s calling it, I guess, this week, second gear. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.