This is Episode 2,133. Jill and I are talking about avoiding analysis paralysis when land research becomes overkill. We talked about all the positive stuff about research when it’s appropriate. Choose one that’s not appropriate, which I’m not sure if there ever is a case. When does it become a scenario where it’s stopping you from getting anything done?

That happens.

It happens to me.

I see it a lot.

This week all week, we’re wrapping it up. It’s Friday and it’s Land Research Week. Each day on the show, we answer a question about our land-related question on the Land Academy member Discord forum, and we take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

Lizette wrote, “When you are scrubbing your data, do you remove properties where the bank is the owner?”

I love this question. It’s simple, and it brings up a topic that we have not talked about on the show for a very long time, which is scrubbing in any given data set if you dream with me for a second. If you are staring at an Excel list of all the people who own 5-acre properties in a county or a ZIP code, you can see the ownership names in there. You are going to see companies like LLCs. You are going to see individual people who own properties, like Jill DeWit.

You are going to see churches might own it or some type of hospital or maybe an Air Force base. All kinds of things in there. One of them that you are going to see are banks. Banks end up owning property not because they want to, but because people stop paying their mortgage. There’s a substantial number of banks where in the State of Minnesota who’ve taken it back for back tax reasons and all kinds of that. We do not.

Your job is to remove that stuff so you don’t waste $0.50 sending an offer that no one’s going to respond to. If you send an offer to buy a piece of property to Bank of America. Is it going to get responded to? No. It’s never going to make it out of the mailroom. I have a massive ongoing list of entities to not send mail to, where I believe it’s a waste of time like utility companies and all kinds of people that are never going to see it. The USA is a huge one. They own a ton of property that has been assigned APNs, and you are wasting your money. Banks is one of them.

Churches come up a lot, and we have done a lot of deals with churches. Escrow companies come up a lot. They end up with property because people like us might sell properties on terms, and the people that are paying us because they bought them from us and stopped paying. The escrow company ends up as an owner. You can buy properties from them.

LLCs, corps, HOAs, and trust. Those are good.

In the beginning, use my list, and then as your career goes forward, start to apply common sense. Trust me, you are going to come up with things like this. I’m sure banks are there for us. Our topic is avoiding analysis paralysis when land research becomes overkill.

The Power Of Checklists And Deadlines

Look into me. I have two points to make here. Two points that it happened, sending out the mail and pulling the trigger to buy it. Both of these it’s the same answer. I got to cut myself off or the mail’s not going to go out. I got to cut myself off or, “I’m not making a decision, and I’m going to lose this deal.” Pick one. Either one can happen. In each scenario, it’s best when you have a checklist.

When you are picking an area to mail, not only is there a checklist, it’s in chapters 3 and 4. Picking out the area, and then getting the data and like the question that was asked about scrubbing the data, pricing the data, and getting it out. That’s bottleneck number one. I find a lot of people stuck on not moving forward in their careers.

Many people struggle to move forward in their careers because they lack a checklist and a due diligence cutoff. Share on X

They are like, “I still want to run the numbers again. I want to spot-check one more time. I want to sleep on these and make sure it’s right. I don’t know. Whatever it is. I have 10,000 lines. I want to go through all of them.” No, you don’t. You have a checklist. You need to use that checklist and then have a cutoff time. That’s two parts. You have to have a deadline. If you don’t hit it, then that’s it. It goes out. You did your best. Period. Otherwise, you won’t get the mail out, and if you don’t get the mail out, you are not going to buy anything.

How Analysis Paralysis Affects Decision-Making

Here comes analysis paralysis period number two that I see very often. You got that out. They came back. Now you have twenty deals that you are looking at. You are here analyzing which is the best one. “What about the access over here, but what about that one? Is this priced right? What’s the timber worth on here? Do I need to do this over here?” You can hear me even throwing out random things. Your head will be filled up with random things if you don’t do two things.

One is to have a checklist and stick to it. For that, it’s our 8 A’s. You go through the 8 A’s and you are making a good decision. Listen to another show if you want to hear that in-depth. We go through them a lot, what those are and then, you know you are making a good decision. Two, again, a cutoff time. I do a lot of speaking on this within Land Academy about due diligence periods.

You should have a phase one and a phase two due diligence cutoff. Phase one is you go through the 8 A’s. For me, it’s five minutes per property. For you, if you are new, it might be 30 minutes per property. That’s okay. If it passes your phase one due diligence, you give it your 30 minutes. You still like it, now you move it to phase two. That’s maybe a couple of hours in a week and then you have a decision by Friday, period.

If you don’t, again, you are not going to buy anything. You have twenty deals staring at you. If you sit and spend in which you can, you can go down that rabbit hole on one property, thinking, “I’m going to be the one that figures out this title issue or this access issue.” You come up for air and realize you spent 40 hours this week on that one property.

It may not be a good property. You’ve got to cut it off, or you are not going to move forward, and you are going to lose a deal. That’s the sad reality of what could happen. You spent 40 hours trying to do it, and in that time, the guy’s brother-in-law said, “Shoot. Mike, for $5,000 I will buy it,” and now the deal’s gone.

Jill, you smashed it. Deadlines. Our lives are packed full of deadlines every single week through a calendar that we share socially, professionally, and everything else. Without them, nothing ever gets done. Why don’t people meet deadlines? Here’s my theory because they are afraid of what happens afterward. “I know I can do better on this mailer. I need another hour. I need another week.” You don’t want to answer the phone. That’s why you are not getting the mail done, or you don’t want to spend the money on the mail. There’s something else going on. Why didn’t you take that last class in college to graduate? It’s because you don’t want to go out into the workforce. There’s a whole kind of stuff. Why didn’t you get married? “I’m afraid.” You should be afraid of that.

People miss deadlines because they fear what comes next. Share on X

I go, “Wait for it. It’s coming.”

I saw an interview thats stuck with me forever. It’s a million years ago.

That is a good question. Go ahead.

It was about how an animated movie like Shrek gets done or whatever these new animated movies are. Back in our church kids’ day, it was Shrek. It turns out they had put teams of people together. It takes about two years to do one of these movies. Each 3 to 5-second clip, 2 or 3 people get assigned to it, and that’s all they work on for two years. They interviewed these people on these teams, “What are the challenges? How do you do it?” They all said this, “The only reason that my five seconds in this movie is done is because they cut me off. It’s never done because you are an artist.”

If you look at things like a piece of art, all artists, painters and such say, “I had to cut myself off.” “No, all those paintings up there, Sam, they are not done in my mind.” That’s the case with me, too. When I’m done with the mailer, it’s I’m not done. The egg timer in my office went off, and it forced me to send it to Offers 2 Owners. The same thing with musicians. I had the same interview with Sting, the lead singer of The Police. He said, “All the songs I have ever done are not finished yet. I forced myself to be done with it.”

I was going to say in every sporting event ever, the losing team always says they weren’t done.

“We needed another quarter, and we would have beat those guys.”

We would have been fine. One more period and we would have won.

The Root Cause Of Analysis Paralysis

Jill smashed it. All kidding aside, analysis paralysis is a symptom. The cause of analysis paralysis is what you should be asking yourself, “Why is this mailer not done? Why is it taking me fourteen hours to go through due diligence on this piece of land?” It’s because you don’t want to buy it. You are afraid you can’t sell it, and you don’t want to part with the money. There’s something going on. Once you realize that’s what’s going on with you, you’re either going to overcome it, or you are not.

“I worked a ton of time to save this $30,000. I don’t want to spend it on the mail. I don’t want to spend $30,000 on this piece of land. I’m not sure I can resell it for $60,000.” These are all valid things. What’s not valid is driving yourself and your loved ones crazy because you have analysis paralysis and never get it out. It’s never done, and now you’ve got 52 things that are unfinished. Join us for five more episodes. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.