This is episode number 2243. Jill and I are talking about the truth about neutral letters and open-ended land offers. Your offer to a potential seller needs to include an offer price. Otherwise, it’s not an offer. It’s just a letter of interest. We’ll talk about it in a minute. How do I know this? It’s because I spent years attempting to do it another way.

We’ve tried them.

We tried everything. We sent out everything.

We still do. That’s one of Jack’s roles in all of our companies to stay ahead of everything. If there’s something new, half the time he’s thinking of it already. He’s dreaming it up. It’s not like he just caught wind of it. He’s like, “I think I might have a better way. Let me try this, and then if it works, we’ll all do it.” This has been one of the things that he came up with a long time ago. He’s going to share his experiences. I can share about being on the receiving end, because we get them.

The Problem With Incomplete Data

Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy Member Discord Forum. We take a deep dive into land-related topics at your request.

Our question is from NM again. NM wrote, “While scrubbing data, I found that after scrubbing the zip code, there are some records with zero value in the mailing address, mail city, and mail state. Should I populate those findings by Googling mail zip code, or ignore them from my mailing?”

Jill and I are neck deep into developing or overseeing the development of what will end up being an easy button to buy and sell land and houses.

Amazing tool.

We resolved this among many other things that are now, we’re expecting Land Academy members and ourselves to manually execute all this. We’re developing a pretty amazing software program because we finally got the right people, the right developers, and the right handlers of those crazy developers to make this a product that’s very usable. One of the components of this, and I’m whoever you are, nailed this.

You nailed this section. We just reviewed it. I just reviewed it with the developers, where you scrub the data. The data set that we work with comes directly from the assessor of each county. There are 3,400-plus counties, and each of them has an assessor who manages a database. Believe me, they are not data people. Their guys are with cowboy hats and stuff. It’s not their fault. Their data sets can be incomplete and, quite frankly, a mess.

There’s a certain percentage of data records in each data set that are undissolved for a lot of reasons. This is years and years back to cowboy tours. In some cases, before that, on the east coast, to just have incomplete data, a lot of those incomplete fields are in the address. That means that they haven’t gotten a tax bill, by the way, since the day it flowered. I’m kidding, obviously. Should you go out and try to figure out and complete that assessor database? Heck no. That’s crazy, not good news for your time.

On the flip side, you need to get them out of your data set because they’re just, they’re no good to you. You’re just sending them a letter, and if you have incomplete address data, you just want to get them out of there. Yes, remove them. Don’t go around the internet chasing to find out who they are. Just please know this. We’ll release this year, at least that’s the plan, an amazing product that resolves all these issues.

I’m so excited.

The Ineffectiveness Of Neutral & Open-Ended Offers

Our topic, the truth about neutral letters and open-ended land offers. Here are a few choices you have. To communicate with sellers about your interest in buying their property, you can send them a postcard that says, in the worst case scenario, “Dear occupant, we are interested in buying your house. Please call us at 1-800-IMTERRABLE-AT-SENDING-MAIL.”

Nice.

Who’s going to respond to that? No one. There is no one that will respond to that. “I spent $3000 on that, which didn’t work. Don’t listen to the Land Academy show, and I just want to save $0.13. I’m going to put the names out there.” “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we’re interested in this postcard in buying your property at 123 Main Street, Shredder.” “Dear Mr. or Mrs. Smith, I’m interested. We have looked at your house, which is located at 123 Main Street, and we believe that we would like to buy it for $300,013.42.”

“That’s intriguing. How did they come up with that number? Who the heck is Jill? I’m going to look her up on the internet. This is Jill. They’re in this business. This looks like it might be real. I was thinking about selling my house this year anyway. Might be worth the conversation.” See the difference there? Neutral letters. Forget about the postcard thing. We’ll say some version of, “Give you a call. We’d really like to buy your house.” The result of that will be seven million phone calls, and everybody’s going to want to sell their house for $1.2 million or some number that’s grossly.

They’re making me move numbers.

Leveraging Direct Offers For Efficiency

Open-ended land offers or range offers. They all have the same effect. Here’s the deal. The way that we send mail leverages our time and our resources. If I send out 10,000 letters and I know I’m going to get a 1% response, that’s about 100 people. I know that about 50% of those people are going to say, “Please take me off your list, I’m not interested in selling.” That’s the nicest way I can say that. That leaves 50 people.

If you put in the time, effort, and education upfront, you’ll have a lifetime of buying and selling real estate effectively. Share on X

About twenty people are going to say, “Yeah, we’re thinking about selling, but not for that price.” That leaves about 20 people. Between 10 and 20 recipients in general, this is for land, not houses. The numbers are different for houses. You’ve got to send more mail out. Those 20 people are 10 people who end up with some of those properties you’re not going to want. They’re landlocked, and there are issues with the due diligence period.

To finish the thought, there are probably five or so that are now just talking to that are interested in selling. Maybe a couple of those are for the price that you sent, and you like the land. You have utilized your time and your energy and your resources and capital and allowed the mailer to do work for you. In this other way, with neutral letters and open-ended land offers and postcards and all of that, you’re creating a massive amount of work for yourself at a lot of expense and time.

It’s not doing the job for you. Now you have to do more work. You have to negotiate, have a conversation with tons and tons of people who aren’t real sellers. You have to establish a value for all the properties that come back. That takes an incredible amount of time, and you have to talk to them. You have to talk, spend 10, 20 minutes talking to each. Trust me, I’ve done it, it doesn’t work.

If you want to spend twenty hours a day talking to people, you can buy a few pieces of property. Nobody wants to do that. You need to leverage this tool to your benefit and send out really well-thought-out offers to places that you have vetted, locations that you have vetted as a place where, if you get the responses that I just talked about, there’s a good chance you’re going to turn a piece of property. I have done all of these things. What’s so intriguing about postcards?

They’re cheaper. What’s so intriguing about doing neutral letters? I don’t have to price a mailer. How about an open-ended land offer? Same deal. It’s a lot easier for me to put together a mailer like that. Look, if you put the time in and the education and all that stuff up front, you have a lifetime of buying and selling real estate effectively.

I don’t have anything to add. That was beautiful. That was great. I don’t want to confuse anybody with any other thoughts or comments.

There’s a reason that every year, Jill and I teach a course called Career Path, and that about 20 to 25 people attend it. Every single one, with very few exceptions, says something like this. “Yeah, I made $2.1 million doing the land academy thing last year, but I’d like to make four this year.” There’s a reason for that. They didn’t send out postcards. There’s this thought that “I’m going to send out 3000 postcards and I’m just going to see if it works. I’m going to see if it works. If it works or I get some response, then I’ll do the letters like you guys say.” If you do that, that will be the end of your real estate career. That’s the tragedy.

That is sad.

Join us next week for more content about buying and real estate. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.