Are you ready for the upcoming real estate price adjustment? Join Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit on The Land Academy Show as they dive into what they believe is an inevitable market correction in 2025. From declining new home sales to concessions made by builders in areas like Phoenix and the Southwest, the signs are all around us. This week, they arm you with a step-by-step plan to prepare for the shifting market—whether you’re new to real estate or a seasoned pro.

Today’s episode kicks off the series with the critical first step: learning how to leverage reliable information and analytics to make informed decisions. Tune in to discover how to avoid guessing, act strategically, and position yourself for success in a changing market. Stay ahead of the curve—because while others panic, you’ll be ready to profit.

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Listen to the podcast here

2025 Real Estate Market Prep: Step 1- Leveraging Reliable Information And Analytics

I’m Steven Jack Butala.

I’m Jill DeWit, and this is the Land Academy Show.

The 2025 Real Estate Price Adjustment

This week we’re talking about preparing for the 2025 real estate price adjustment forward/reduction that I believe is inevitable. There are all kinds of reports of new builders, builders that are publicly traded, that build new subdivisions, brand-new houses. They’re all over Phoenix, and they’re all over the Southwest, where Jill and I live and spend time, and they’re reporting not-good sales and a lot of concessions. In fact, if you check the news, it’s not in the forefront of the news, I’ve noticed, but it’s in there. It’s in the news, and it’s not the best news. I think it doesn’t make for a great media story or a good media story.

Do you remember Roberto in California? I just was on Facebook, and it came up on my little feed that Roberto is marketing, because he’s a real estate agent in Tennessee, a big, major townhouse complex where they built out 10% of it, and they’re selling the other 90%. I’m not kidding. It’s in different phases of being done, and they’re selling the whole thing for like $6.5 million. I’m like, that’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about. They started it. It’s not going that well. They’re just going to try to dump it and get out.

I track the data on all this stuff all the time, specifically what pertains to our business, buying and selling land, and buying, selling, reselling houses, and all of that. It’s everywhere in the data. It’s coming out in the media and examples, just like what Jill’s talking about. This week we’re going to talk about, all five days, five different topics about how you can prepare, how we’re preparing, and how you can prepare to make some money on this thing next year.

This is not our first time. I know a lot of people are like, “The sky is falling. It’s coming. It’s going to be over. What do I do?” You could pivot. You’ll be all right.

What I would love for you to do, I don’t care if you’re new or old in the real estate sector or in this space, is ask somebody, or ask yourself, during the last downturn, which was around 2010-ish, probably technically between 2007 and 2012, ask yourself or ask somebody else if they or you bought enough real estate during the downturn. Everybody’s going to say, “No, we should have bought every single thing in sight.” That’s the theme here. How and where are we going to buy property next year to capitalize on this downturn? We’ll talk about this in great detail all through the week.

This is not a crash. I don’t believe that anything like what happened last time, where there’s massive reductions in value and equity, and foreclosures, and just a horror, just blood-in-the-streets scenario, is not going to happen this time. What I really believe we’re going to experience is market adjustments, the way that the stock market adjusts itself when it gets too high or too low. We’ll experience 20% to 30% in some markets, maybe even 40%. What does that mean on a $300,000 house or a $400,000 house? In extreme cases, it’ll come back down to $300,000. On a $1 million house, you’ll see it come down to around $800,000.

It’ll pretty dramatically affect things like what Jill just described, new construction. There’s going to be a lot of people that are in the middle, the houses with dumpsters out in front of them. This is not good for them. When they complete these houses in 2025 and get them ready to resell, they’re rehabbers, which is not us. If you’re brand new to this, we don’t rehab anything. All we do is buy assets and resell them. We buy them as cheap as we can and just resell them. The rehabbers are going to get caught with their pants down here.

Blood in the streets, caught with your pants down. What else have I got already?

I don’t know. You like it. I’ll keep going.

It’s okay. It’s not for me.

This is Jill. Jill’s saying, you’re embarrassing yourself, not me.

It’s fine.

Our specific topic is this, step one. We’re going to run through steps one through five. Step one is to get and establish a source of education. It’s imperative that you get a source of data so that you’re not guessing. We don’t guess here. We don’t guess about anything in real estate. We have a theory, we back it up by data, and then we act on it. We’ll talk about data and education. Tuesday, step two, we’ll talk about securing a source of capital. This is also imperative. In fact, all of these steps are.

If you don’t have a stockpile of money and investors that you know on a first-name basis and who trust you, you’re going to run out of money after the first or second deal. If you’re buying $300,000 houses and prepping to resell them when it’s over for $400,000, I don’t know about you, but even us, we would run out of money pretty quickly doing that. On Wednesday, step three, talk about analyzing local markets and what you’ll call driving for dumpsters.

Thank you.

We all know, hopefully by now, that driving for dollars is maybe the biggest waste of time in real estate ever. Driving for dumpsters, theoretically, is not.

I’m going to take credit for that. I’m going to take credit for data is the new bacon. I got that one a couple of years ago.

There are huge variances in local markets, and we use zip codes for that. Jill and I, just before we sat down here, looked at two adjacent zip codes and found wildly different statistics, just wildly different. One’s great for doing what we do, one’s absolutely the worst. We’ll talk about that on Thursday. Step four, establish deal flow. Nothing’s going to happen at any point in your real estate career unless you have a pipeline jam full of 10 or 20 acquisition opportunities, bare minimum. I’d rather see it at 30 or 40. You can make the best choices.

Finally, on Friday, execute. You need to get ready. If you’re already involved in real estate and have been for years or decades like us, it’s not hard for us to switch, turn the flip, flip the switch, on or about the decision of are we going to buy it or not? Growing your staff, I saved the hardest for last. Each day 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.

Breaking Down Zip Codes For Accurate Pricing

Brenton wrote, “How do you approach pricing in zip codes where price per acre varies significantly? I’ve noticed that price per acre tends to be more consistent with certain clusters, but are quite different across the entire zip code. To improve my pricing accuracy, I sorted my mailer data by high school and identified which high school zone my comps were in. Fortunately, there are multiple high schools within the zip code, which made it easier to refine my pricing. Are there any other strategies that you use to break down a zip code into smaller areas for more accurate pricing? I also noticed in one area, price per acre actually increased as the acreage increased. Has anyone else encountered this? Would you price accordingly, or would you price all properties based on the lower price per acre? Thank you all for any help.”

This is a very good question. As I’ve said many times, there’s art and science to pricing land. The older I get, the more art I think there is, and the less science. Once you get the basic statistic, the basic technical skills down to price a mailer, you’re going to start to have thoughts like this. Visualize this with me. Visualize opening Google Earth or anywhere, or Google Maps, or anywhere that you can use a scalable application on the internet to look at geography. You open it, and there’s the United States. You pick a state. Let’s pick Texas. You zoom into Texas, you zoom into the counties, and you zoom into the zip code. You’re going closer and closer and closer to the DFW area.

There's art and science to pricing land. Share on X

This is where the difficulty starts. DFW’s got, I can’t imagine how many zip codes. I can’t imagine how different, like we just said a few minutes ago, how different those zip codes are from a pricing standpoint and a product quality, or a product. Some houses are more expensive, some are less. Same thing with land. For years, for decades, actually, people have joined Land Academy and asked this type of question. This one happens to be written very intelligently. It made sense to Brenton here to isolate product type within a high school district or school district.

Smart.

You can do it that way. You can do it through range township. You can do it through census tract. You can do what I call, ultimately, APN scheme pricing. You take the APN scheme, and you price it together. It all is trying to solve for like-kind pricing. If you take a zip code and you scrape the internet, or however you choose to download data from the internet, about active sales and completed sales, you’re going to have, ultimately, always a bell curve. You’re going to have outliers that are real expensive price per acre and outliers that are real cheap.

This is where the art comes in, you have to make those choices. I choose to address it at the end of my mailer, but I love this concept. Brenton, if you’re brand new to this and you’re learning, I think that you’re biting off a little bit more than you probably can chew in the beginning. Zip code pricing, for the rest of us, taking the bottom of what your bottom average for zip code pricing for land is, is going to get you where you need to be. It’s going to get that pipeline of acquisition opportunities full.

Understanding Price Variations By Acreage And Statistical Anomalies

That answers part two there. When the pricing increases as the acreage increased, how would you mail it?

It’s hard to explain this on the radio here like this without a visual, but a 40-acre property, when you price it as price per acre, always sells cheaper on a price-per-acre basis than a half-acre property. That’s just the way it is. In economics, it’s the bottle case theory. A bottle of beer is more expensive than a case.

I wonder why this one area had increased. There was something going on there, or 1 or 2 properties were skewing it. There’s some other reason, usually.

Jill and I are invested in and heavily involved in smaller rural communities. There’s always somebody who sold, somebody built a palace and sold it for $40 million, some crazy number. The rest of the properties sell for $500,000 or $600,000. It really messes, statistically, with averages and means and all of that. You’ve got to get those out of there somehow, or you’re going to always over, you will almost always overstate, you will price your mailer too high. That’s always been my big gripe with auto-pricing applications and AI. They don’t take into consideration those things.

I thought it was very sweet. You brought up the radio.

The radio?

Yeah. Do cars nowadays even have a radio?

You don’t know this, I just ordered an original. Jill and I have an old Volkswagen bus.

With a broken radio.

I ordered an AM radio on eBay, an actual AM radio from the early seventies. That’s weird. I don’t know if cars have radios, Jill, probably not.

I was just curious.

I think they have them, but you clearly don’t use them.

You really don’t.

Do you even drive your own car anymore?

Yeah, of course I do. I’m like, I don’t have a self-driving car, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t think I’ll ever have a self-driving car. I should knock on something, but I am not comfortable with that. It’s over my line a little bit.

Preparing For Market Adjustments And Using Data Tools

Our topic, how are we prepping for the inevitable 2025 real estate market adjustment? Step one, we establish a source of education and data. For us, establishing a source of education is a little bit behind us. We are the source of education, but we’re not the only source. I use Adam Data and RealtyTrac to see where, what tragedy is happening, where, and how we can potentially capitalize on it from a foreclosure standpoint and everything else. You need to go around the internet and choose the applications and the places for education that make sense to you. We also use Reonomy.

You need to browse the internet and choose the applications and resources for education that make sense to you. Share on X

Are you talking education or data, or both?

Education. If you are real serious about capitalizing on this market in 2025, Land Academy is a great source of education. This is all we talk about, but it shouldn’t be the only source of education. Certainly, there are other sources of data that you need. We are licensed providers for DataTree. I can’t imagine our real estate life without DataTree.

Avoiding Easy Buttons And Building The Right Partnerships

DataTree is an aggregator of all taxing municipalities, all 3,144 counties or taxing municipalities and their assessor rolls. It’s the most comprehensive source of data that I know of to send out mailers and to do market research when they come back. You need DataTree, and we provide it at a very aggregate cost. It’s much cheaper. I’m not selling anything here, I’m just saying there’s no way you’re going to make a bunch of money in real estate without data next year.

Correct, and don’t buy secondhand data. Don’t buy a list. You never want an easy button, and you never want a list. You want to go get it, and you want to pull what you want to pull. You want all of it. You’re not just someone with the ten columns that someone thinks you need.

When I say a source of education, surround yourself with people that have already been successful at this. You can get all the data in the world and cram as hard as you can for the next 30 to 60 days before the market actually starts to adjust itself, but if you can’t come to somebody in a group somewhere, or let’s say it’s your rich Uncle Skeleton, and say, “Should I be doing this deal?” you’re going to make some serious mistakes, and you don’t want that. Make sure you’re in an environment where people are succeeding in doing the same thing that you are. See what data they’re using. See how they do it.

Good. I really agree.

Reonomy is good. DataTree is essential. RealtyTrac, not sure I could live without it. PropStream is becoming ever more.

There’s going to be a new one in five minutes. Some of the things, though, it does scare me. Just be careful you don’t do easy buttons. You know what’s funny is CoreLogic for a while had ListSource. I think it stopped. I think it’s gone because we all were smart, and we weren’t using it, as we shouldn’t. Getting our own data and finessing it to how you want.

CoreLogic is the API behind ParcelFact, which Jill and I designed, and we own and operate. ParcelFact is the fastest way that I know of to get an answer about whether or not I’m going to travel down the path with the seller. You send a bunch of mail out, an offer comes back, or you have a conversation with the seller. You analyze it. You need a place to look at very quickly, decide if it’s in the right stratosphere, or if you need to adjust it. ParcelFact does that.

How much time do you think someone should spend being educated? I have a number.

Six months.

That’s what I was going to say. That’s hilarious. I think that’s a really good number. Six months of following, watching, diving in, reading everything you can. Analyzing someone else’s deals and figuring out how they made those decisions. I agree with that, totally. Understanding the data so you can go off and find your own. Totally mirror that person because they’ve already hit that area. You want to learn what they do, what triggers they look for, and then go find your own.

You’re going to hit speed bumps. You’re going to make mistakes, even if you’re already in real estate. We have people in our group that are seasoned real estate agents. It’s difficult to keep food on the table being a real estate agent unless you have some special mental problem. We have a lot of people in our group wanting to change over from being primarily a real estate agent to an investor, which I think is amazing. I love these types of people because they always come to us with a different vision. That was a compliment.

You're going to hit speed bumps, and you're going to make mistakes, even if you're already in real estate. Share on X

Data has not been really a part of their life. Even if you’ve been in the industry for a long time, whatever version that is, maybe you’re even a developer, most people come to us not understanding that there’s all this data out there to help you stop making any negative decisions. If you do make a bad decision, you can go back and look at the data and say, “That’s why I made the decision. This zip code is a disaster. I should never have been trying to do a real estate deal in the first place.”

This requires an open mind. That’s part of the education process of changing, cutting yourself down to size. Only you can do that. Relearning some of these things, because there are so many applications and so many sources of information and education out there that are making you a better investor. It all requires a real open mind and a partner. I would heavily recommend getting a partner who wants to do stuff.

A data partner.

A talking partner.

Thank you.

Join us Tuesday, where we talk about step two here for prepping for the changes in the 2025 real estate market. We’ll talk about securing equity as a source of capital, not debt. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.

Important Links

• Steven Jack Butala’s LinkedIn
• Jill DeWit’s LinkedIn
• Land Academy
• BuWit
• House Academy