Hard Working Land Academy Members Steven and AJ Holbrook Interview (LA 1765)

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

There are Uncovered Deals in Your Existing Mailer (LA 1763)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Hello.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today. Jill and I talk about how there are uncovered deals in your existing mailer right now.

Jill DeWit:
Yep. It happens.

Steven Jack Butala:
Every once in a while, Jill and I talk to somebody or it gets back to us and somebody says some version of this. “Yeah, I sent the mailer out and it just didn’t work.”

Jill DeWit:
Right. I actually got an email that got to me. There’s an individual, let’s just say the name rhymes with clue, who has got very close to our transaction coordinator because he’s submitted several deals. And the ones that he submitted that were not-

Steven Jack Butala:
I know who you’re talking about.

Jill DeWit:
They were not accepted. They’re all valid reasons. I wrote back, “Hey, this location stinks. There’s no access.” There’s really good positive things. But then there’s some that are good. So we have one right now that we funded-

Steven Jack Butala:
Is this the show?

Jill DeWit:
I guess I should hold it.

Steven Jack Butala:
“I guess I should hold it.” Yeah, hold it, Jill.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. And I hope by now you know that Jill and I personally instruct a handful of new and existing Land Academy members in a class called Career Path. If buying and selling land is your career or you want it to be, let us know. Please email support@landacademy.com. See if this level of involvement is for you.

Jill DeWit:
It’s called Career Path.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, career path.

Jill DeWit:
Did you say it? I don’t know if you did.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yep.

Jill DeWit:
Okay, good. Sorry. Victor wrote, “To those who have done minor improvements on a property, like underbrush clearing or minor tree trimming, did you ever see any difference in the amount of time it took to sell?” I don’t.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is a very intelligent question and it’s probably rooted in experience. In fact, I know in your case, Victor, it is because 20 people responded to this in Discord, and ultimately I responded too, and so did Kevin. And the answer is no.

Jill DeWit:
Right.

Steven Jack Butala:
I know you have this deal. I know it’s a great deal, and you go all the way down and there’s a river back there and it’s beautiful and all that. And I know it’s your first deal. Congratulations, by the way. I’m sure you’re going to do great. But in this case, I know a real estate agent came to you and said, “Look, this property’s great, but you can’t get back to the river. And if you can clear some of this stuff I might be able to sell it faster for more money.”

Steven Jack Butala:
And so this taps into a bigger thing for me as a business owner and as a real estate deal maker, and that’s the real reason I included this question in this episode. Throughout your entire career people will come to you and say, and have this notion … I’m going through it right now with an employee and they’re not going to be with us for much longer. “If you just do this one more thing for me. Please, do this one more thing, then I can get my stuff done.”

Steven Jack Butala:
In this case, the real estate agent saying, “Yes, but if you can just do this one more thing, can you just clear this?” And trust me, it will not end there. That’s a personality issue. And I’m sure that many of you listening have had personal relationships like that, where the person in your relationship comes to you every once in a while and says, “Yeah, I like this thing about you over here, but you really need to work on this thing over here for me, because it’s just not working for me. So if you could just work on this one more thing, then it’s going to be okay.” So be very, very leery of that professionally and socially

Jill DeWit:
Counseling by Jack. I didn’t know we were going to there. Now can I add to this?

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh sure.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.

Jill DeWit:
Now it very rarely pays off. You go, “I did all that.” And sometimes you get it scheduled, you might go down the path and get it scheduled and someone’s going to buy it. And you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even need to do that.” It’s more just, if you buy it right and it’s a good property, the right person’s going to see that. And you know what, and they’re not going to appreciate it. You rarely get your money out of it and the energy out of it that went through to do whatever it was.

Jill DeWit:
I’m here to tell you, we have bought and sold all kinds of crazy properties, including mobile homes with holes in them. And you know what, because the right person’s going to come along and they’re going to … You might fix it up and they’re going to rip it off anyway. You’re like, “Great. They just replaced the mobile home that I repaired.” That’s it. You can’t truly guess what they want, especially in the land environment.

Jill DeWit:
I’m a huge fan of … I don’t see it so much nowadays, but I remember back in the day with houses, you always hear of a carpet allowance, a flooring allowance. Huge fan of that, because how many times people come in … I’ll tell you right now. Our personal primary residents, they spent huge amount of money touching up spots of this very expensive Italian plaster finish, for me to come in and paint all over the whole thing. It was a waste of time and a waste of energy and a waste of money. So I wouldn’t do it.

Jill DeWit:
And so truth time, I only do what’s required. If there’s something that is required by the county for some purposes, for example, I’ve had to maintain this green belt kind of designation. I had to get kind of a forestry expert to go out and rewrite a report, and that’s required every time it changes hands or your taxes go up times four. That I understand. And I don’t want to pay times four taxes because I’m in all of the property right now. But it’s very, very, very rare that you have to do something like that.

Steven Jack Butala:
In this case, and in many, many cases this day and age, you can solve this problem or these problems by doing it electronically. If you’ve got a great graphic or a picture or drone shot of a lot.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, like staging a property.

Steven Jack Butala:
Of a lot. You can say, “This the footpath down to the amazing river.” And you don’t have to clear it.

Jill DeWit:
Clear it if you want. Don’t clear it if you want.

Steven Jack Butala:
Don’t spend any real money on site.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Spend money on marketing. Spend money on a great video that says, “Here’s the river.” Point it all out, so that while you’re looking at it on the internet you can see, “Oh my gosh, this is a foot path.”

Steven Jack Butala:
And then pull a Jill, make it real positive. Like. “There’s a foot path, here it is, down to the river. If you wanted to, you could clear a path to put a vehicle down there, but we don’t want to spoil that. We want you to do that, you do as an owner to enjoy that.”

Jill DeWit:
I’m going to pick it, it may not be what you want.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Hold on a second, Jill. Make it a positive thing. “It’s untouched forestry that leads down to the river where you can create your own camping site. And by the way, it’s priced so this far under retail so that it’s an untouched camp canvas.”

Jill DeWit:
That’s what I capitalize on, what you just said. In every one and 100 deals someone says, “Well, are you going to stake it out for me?” I go, “Hold on a moment.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Like serving steaks?

Jill DeWit:
Right. Sure, I could go to the county. I could get their guy. I could plan it out. I could pay and da, da, da, have it all done and walked and staked for you. “But let me tell you, the amount it cost me to do it is not going to be what I charge you for my time and my energy and expense and the work just getting it all set up. Or you could take that savings right now because of the way this is priced, and decide if you want to do that later on. You’ve got all of the GPS coordinates, you know where it is so you can decide if you want to do that.”

Jill DeWit:
And then mainly when I say, “Sure, I’m going to do it, but what I’m going to charge you is not going to be what it costs.” They’re going to be like, “Nope, never mind. I’ll handle it, Jill. Thank you very much.” That’s kind of what I thought.

Steven Jack Butala:
These people, meaning real estate agents and often title agents, they all need to be managed. If you let them they will rule your life, and they have to be managed.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:08:39].

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic, there are uncovered deals in your existing mailer. This is the meat of the show.

Jill DeWit:
Right. I was talking about a member that … This actually got back to me because he is worried about his mailer not having the bang for his buck. I’ve got a list here of every mailer he sent out. Every county it went to, there’s 10 here, and how much he mailed. And I got a couple things that are going to jump out right away. “So there started off good, and then now look at our mailers later on.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Wow. Well, please read that.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
Without the [inaudible 00:09:16] edge.

Jill DeWit:
Nope. We started off sending 1,272.

Steven Jack Butala:
To county X.

Jill DeWit:
Not bad. Next mailer was 1,919. Not bad.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’ve done multiple deals with this guy, by the way.

Jill DeWit:
Right. I’ve got one right now that we just funded. We’ve got one for 1,920. That’s the one in that particular county purchased for 37. It’s listed for 90 with a great agent, I think it’s Whitetail. We got another one here for 2,766, and then another one for 3,066. So this is not bad.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill, can you explain what these numbers are? You’re just-

Jill DeWit:
Okay. I’m sorry. Give me a second, thank you. Okay. What I’m telling you is, this individual sent out this number of units of mail, direct mail to-

Steven Jack Butala:
Offers.

Jill DeWit:
Right. With offers to sellers. This is the number of envelopes and offers that got in the mail.

Steven Jack Butala:
Excellent.

Jill DeWit:
Thank you. So anywhere from 3,066 units of mail offers to sellers in one county, all the way down to in another county, 263 offers in the mail. That’s too low. That’s not going to work. You need to send more mail.

Jill DeWit:
And what my point, what I’m trying to draw out here is, and when I get back to this person I’m going to let them know, they’re not sending enough mail. Do you understand? They started off great. I say your minimum … Your minimum used to always be 1,500, to get a deal.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. And I want to send this message very clearly.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill and I are about to do a 50,000 unit mailer. Why? Because I don’t want it to fail. And if I send out 10,000 units, there’s a small … It’s not going to fail, these mailers don’t fail. This is what this show is about.

Jill DeWit:
But if you send out 1,000 or 300-

Steven Jack Butala:
If you send out 300 mailers, you’re not going to get any real response.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. You stand a chance to fail.

Steven Jack Butala:
And so why not just send out 50,000 and then go do five deals? And maybe you just end up doing the one deal where you make 50 or $80,000. And the mailer costs 20.

Jill DeWit:
My whole point is, it was timely that this email got to me. It got through my transaction coordinator to me because they become friends because of deal submittals and things like that. And good guy, and we’re doing a deal with him right now. My coordinator says, “Look, this guy’s worried that his mail’s not hitting and he’s not getting results.”

Jill DeWit:
I have two things to say. Number one is, I see the list and I’m really glad that he sent this through. It’s not enough. That right there is not enough. When you send out too few offers, number one, you’re not going to get as much response. Well, that makes it bad right there. And then number two, the response you do get, you’re going to find yourself trying to scramble and make a deal out of something sometimes that isn’t there. When you send out 300 and you get maybe 10 responses, I’m like, “Great. I got to make one of these 10 work.” That’s not what you want. I want you to send out three, five, 8,000 units of mail at a time and have 20 and 40 things to sift through, because then you’re not going to make a mistake. Then you’re going to look at these differently.

Jill DeWit:
That’s number one, it starts with mail. So uncover deals in your existing mailer, maybe you’re not sending enough. Number two, we just coached someone new on this just the other day, personally. You’ve got to answer the phone. You’ve got to dig in these initial phone calls. So much happens in this very first phone call that’s going to make or break your mailer. If you, first of all, don’t answer the phone, now you’re down 50% of chances, so think about that. You just cut that in half. Because by the time you call them back, are they going to answer the phone? Who knows. They threw away your letter, they don’t want to talk to you anymore. Are they going to return your call? They called you right then for a reason. That’s number one.

Jill DeWit:
That’s number two actually. Number three is, you’ve got minutes to forge a quick relationship with these sellers and see if there’s a deal there. And you’ve got minutes to have a nice conversation, to befriend them, to get on the same team. Even if they’re calling you back and telling you, “You’re nuts. I think the software’s stupid. How dare you?” Your job is to calm them down. Answer the phone, calm them down. Explain, “I didn’t mean to do that. This is not my goal in life to piss people off like this. This is not why I have a phone number, this is my business. And, “Hey, do you even want to sell? What is the number?” And get it out of them, just get that conversation going.

Jill DeWit:
And we’re not even to due diligence, we’re not even to do that. So many people are not uncovering deals because they’re missing them because of these three initial things.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’ve ever taken a sales class, just sales 101, picture a funnel. This is what they teach you in a sales. There’s a funnel at the top. And then as it goes down, like a funnel, like any type of funnel that you use in cooking or a putting motor oil in your car, the mouth is big and you weed it down into the nozzle.

Steven Jack Butala:
And so this mailer, this mailing concept that we do, is a brilliant way to create leads at the top of that funnel that are very, very warm and very, very ready. They’re hot leads, they’re hot. And so that’s the work of the mailer. The work of the mailer is to get the brim of that funnel full. And they’re not going to fall down on their own, a couple of them might. But your job is to take them now, as a salesperson, from the top of that funnel and drop them down through. And that doesn’t happen by luck. It happens by what Jill’s talking about, establishing a relationship, making them feel comfortable, establishing trust, and then following through on what you say. And so yeah, 200 warm leads are not as … Or sending out 200 mailers might generate-

Jill DeWit:
A couple of calls.

Steven Jack Butala:
… maybe, maybe two warm leads at the top of that funnel. So now you’ve put the onus on you. You’ve given yourself probably what’s an impossible task of converting two warm leads to the bottom of that funnel, versus sending out 50,000. Now you’ve got what? 500, 200, whatever the number ends up being at the top of that funnel. You’ve given yourself a very accomplishable task of converting the two or three or four or five of those warm leads into sales, or acquisitions in our case.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s how this is. I’ll tell you, and I’ll end on this story. Jill may or may not remember this, but there was a time where there was a gap, a pretty substantial gap, during the last downturn where our phone … We’ve been sending out mail for years. Our phone number was still on. And so we weren’t answering it because we were in the survival mode doing other stuff, because there was just such a downturn. Anyway, Jill and I together turned it back around and we went back and looked at that phone number, the inbound phone number that’s been on our mails for so many years. And there were probably 100, 200, maybe 300 caller IDs in there.

Steven Jack Butala:
I sat down with Jill and she’s like, “You know what? I’m going to call all these numbers. I’m going to dial these numbers.” And she called several people and said, “I see that you called on February 5th,” or whatever it is. “And chances are you called because we sent you an offer to buy your property. And so I’d really be interested in taking a look at it.” And Jill converted, I don’t know, how many sales out of that? I can’t remember.

Jill DeWit:
Right.

Steven Jack Butala:
And so that’s what this episode is really about. You have to create these deals for yourself. They’re all warm. The mailer does a fantastic job of creating that top funnel, warm lead scenario. But it’s up to you to close these deals. I will tell you on a personal note, I suck at this. I suck at that top rim, warm lead scenario and converting them so that they drop through. She’s great at it.

Jill DeWit:
Right. I want to add one little note though. Too much time can’t pass. Because if too much time passes they’ve moved on, so you got to do it quickly.

Jill DeWit:
Happy you could join us today. Five days a week you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow the episode on the Land Academy Show is called, how a double mailer works and why you are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill DeWit:
Good. That’ll be good, I’m excited. Hey, by the way, I have something to say. In case you didn’t know, I’m just leaking something now in the post show, is Land Academy enrollment has been closed. And I’ll tell you right now, by the end of this month, it will be open. And hmm, there’s a holiday coming up at the end of this month and there might be a special running then. So if you’re thinking of joining Land Academy, hang on there, watch your email, watch our social media. Towards the end of this month we’ll be reopened and there will be something awesome to offer you to join. That’s all I have to say about that.

Jill DeWit:
Can you scroll down? I wasn’t going to read that. I replaced that. Sorry about that. Excuse me while I talk to our … Can you tell we produce our own shows? So I’m skipping that whole little thing there to that. Ready? Three, two, one. We are Steve and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. Information-

Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

Jill Friday – How Long do Land Academy Members Stay in the Group (LA 1762)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Hello.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, Entertaining Land Investment Talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jill’s Friday. She’s going to talk about how long do Land Academy members actually stay in the group?

Jill K DeWit:
I have some stats. I know you like stats.

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com, online community. It’s free. I got to tell you, back in the day, it was nearly impossible to find land without a mailing address, like 123 Main Street. Well, eventually Jill and I put together a website called neighborscoop.com that allows you to find property that doesn’t have an address, which is really almost all the property that we purchase by just using the state and the county that it’s in and the assessor’s parcel number. It’s called neighborscoop.com. Check it out. If you need more information, you can always email support@landacademy.com.

Jill K DeWit:
Cool. Jeff wrote, “This is my third try giving away good deals with some money in them.”

Steven Jack Butala:
This is what goes on discord.

Jill K DeWit:
Why is this? This is funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is a thing on discord right now, giving away deals that people don’t want to do. Just giving them away.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Finding them and giving them away. All right. [inaudible 00:01:16] takers on this one, it’s three strikes and that means they kicked me out of this group. Not sure if that’s funny. No, I’ve an info lot on Shreveport for $2,200. It’s corn lot. Private message me for details, assignment fees just 20% of the profit after you sell.

Steven Jack Butala:
Of the profit after you sell so it’s no risk to whoever takes over this deal. Why would somebody give away a perfectly good transaction, Jill?

Jill K DeWit:
Because they don’t want to do it or they don’t know how to do it, or they just not good at it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Or it’s not in their acquisition criteria. If a deal came in from a way past mailer for 2200 bucks and we knew we could sell it for eight pretty quickly, we would not do the deal. Why? Because that’s not in our acquisition criteria anymore. We’re buy for 30 to 50 and sell for 90 to 150. That’s what we do.

Steven Jack Butala:
We have limited amount of resources, just like everybody. There’s only so much time Jill can spend on the phone and her staff and the whole thing. Is it crazy profitable when you look at the margin? Yep. We’re just not going to do it. That’s what’s going on here. This is one of the things that happens in discord often. I’m going to bring this up now. I just approved right before we sat down to record this, a sneak peek at discord, the tech thing is done.

Jill K DeWit:
Is that good? Good. I can’t wait to see it. Got something on my eyes, sorry.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you go to landinvestors.com and just go to the front page. You can horse around, read and read only fashion with what’s going on that minute in discord. It’s pretty amazing.

Jill K DeWit:
Cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think you will be amazed at the conversations that we’re all having as Land Academy members, which is fitting for today’s topic. Today’s topic is Jill Friday. How long do Land Academy’s members actually stay in the group? This is the meat of the show.

Jill K DeWit:
I went back and looked at some numbers and it’s pretty much what I thought. They join land academy. They get started. They’re doing data, doing mail, whatever. How long do they stick with this? Well, some of them I’m going to say the number is right around 20% are here for a year. They give it a year. What happens after a year? Two things. One is, I find out this is not for them or life happens and more often than not life happens, and I’ll get to that in a second.

Jill K DeWit:
What happens to the 80%? Oh, they’re in it. They’re with us for years. We’ve got some people in here that are… We’re over five years together. We all know each other. We remember being together, live event one, live event two. “Oh yeah. You brought that up there. Oh yeah. I remember when we did this”. Back in the day when we had these live events, someone brought up the day. “Yeah. Remember we did that taco party at your house?”. I’m like, “Yeah, it was fun”.

Steven Jack Butala:
We really did that.

Jill K DeWit:
We did. Yeah. I had you over at the beach and we did the whole thing. That’s 80% of our people. What’s interesting is, the people that leave, that 20%, that life happens, you would be shocked at how many come back.

Steven Jack Butala:
Everybody.

Jill K DeWit:
80% of those guys, they figure it out and they come back.

Steven Jack Butala:
Figure out their life event.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. When people leave here, it’s usually like a breakup. Exactly. I always hear the same thing because I have my team reach out to them and we have an offboarding kind of questionnaire and most of the time it’s not, you it’s me.

Jill K DeWit:
This happened. We’ve had people with illnesses and major life changes. They’re like, “I just can’t handle it. I get it. I know you guys are right. I know it’s possible. It’s usually the common thing. I can’t wrap my head around it right now and I’m not focused and then I’m not going to do a good job”. To which we say, “I get it. We’ll be here”. We always say that, “We’re going to be here. Don’t worry about it”. Give them a year, six months, whatever it is and then here they come and I love it.

Jill K DeWit:
What’s great about it is, they know we’re here and they know what we’re all about and you’re going to come back swinging for the fences, man. When you get in here and you realize what’s going on, and if it doesn’t work for whatever reason and you take a step back and you kind of get everything together, you’re like, “Okay, now I’m going to do it. I’m going to go big and that’s it”.

Jill K DeWit:
Even why do we have such good retention off the gate, out of the gate? This is my feelings and I have conveyed this to my team. I’m really adamant about you doing your homework and doing all your research before you join Land Academy. I don’t want you just to try it out. See if it’s for you. Please go and do everything you can.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s one of the reasons we open up discord. You’re working on that. We want to be able to share with you a sneak peek about what kind of deals we’re doing, the people in the community, how we communicate, how fast things move, what support you have. You can get a sneak peek of that.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s why also I give a one time invite. If you want to be on our Thursday member calls, just send a note to our team support@landacademy and you’ll get an invite. Sit there, log on just like everybody else like you’re a member of Land Academy and watch us communicate and talk and look at deals and all that. It says, “I want to make sure this is for you”. I want you to make sure this is for you and that the timing is right.

Steven Jack Butala:
Last thing that we want to do is sell somebody education and then charge them every month for something they’re not going to use and don’t care about.

Jill K DeWit:
And be unhappy with. It’s dumb.

Steven Jack Butala:
We don’t ask you for your credit card number ever and never will. It’s not what this is.

Jill K DeWit:
No, we’re here to help. That’s why we keep the attendance, the enrollment down to… I’d rather work with a smaller group of really solid people who are really here doing it like us, or they want to get to the level of us.

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too. Me too, Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s just so much easier and it’s just so much more fun. I want you to be able to dive in. I want you to do all your homework. I don’t care if it takes a year. If you’ve had a phone conversation with me and you’ve been on the fence, you’ve probably hear I’ve said, “We’re not going anywhere. I’ll be here. If it’s six months, I don’t care. Save up. Do what you got to do. Finish what you got to do. Get that kid in college, whatever it is, we’ll be right here. When you come and you join, I want you to be all in because you know what? I’m all in helping you. We’re both all in helping you. We are going to push you to succeed and check on you. Make sure you have everything that you need”. That’s why we do our calls and all our communication, and it’s what we’re doing this podcast.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill’s got a data set that she works from to see where… She and her staff manage the membership part of this. I don’t. What I look at and manage is offers owners. I can tell you with huge, up with a big smile on my face that a couple months ago we sent out about 750 mailers, last month we hit a million on behalf of our million mail, this is a pieces of mail went out.

Jill K DeWit:
In a month with our group.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a lot of retention. There’s only a few people that leave every month. For the size of the group, it’s pretty extraordinary.

Jill K DeWit:
No, it’s great. Yeah. I’m very proud of this group. I’m so proud of Land Academy and our community. I can’t imagine, I’m not going to tear up, I promise. Let’s see, this is 2022, so it’s seven years, going on seven years, and where are we going to be in 10? I can’t even think in 10 years, three years from now. Yeah. It’s going to be amazing. We’re again, we’re not going anywhere. Happy to join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode, you are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
Did that question come from Chris?

Steven Jack Butala:
I thought you did it.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I don’t know.

Steven Jack Butala:
I honestly thought you wrote it.

Jill K DeWit:
Maybe it was Chris. Chris helps me.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, maybe Chris from last week?

Jill K DeWit:
No, no, no. Our Chris. Oh, from last week? Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
It actually rolled over. That’s fine.

Jill K DeWit:
That was it. That’s good. Chris who works on my team enrolling new Land Academy members and if you don’t know Chris, go on landacademy.com and schedule a call with someone and it’s probably going to be Chris. Chris is awesome. Anyway, this is a question that comes out. People want to know, so here we are answering it.

Jill K DeWit:
Hey, thank you for tuning in. By the way, stand by. We’re still working on this. It’s going to come here. I had to put it on hold because it’s bandwidth, but we’re working on being able to online, notarize your documents. Don’t leave your desk. Don’t leave your resort like I’ve done and run to find a UPS because you have to get a document notarized. Don’t worry. We got you covered. We’ll be able to do it right from your cell phone, with the help of my team. It’s legal online notarizing. There’s a very few states that allow it and ours happens to be one. It’s based on where we are sitting, not where you are. You can be on the beach, call us on your phone. We’ll get that document notarized for you. Isn’t that great? If you have any more questions, just send a note to support@landacademy.com.

Jack and Jill:
We are Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Information.

Jill K DeWit:
Inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

Jack Thursday – 5 Things I Refuse to Spend Money On (LA 1761)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Howdy.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday and I’m going to talk about five things I refuse to spend money on. I should have called it, refuse to spend too much money on. Some of these are really unavoidable.

Jill K DeWit:
I got some that are just automatic, I can think of.

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. And don’t forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel. Comment on the shows you like.

Jill K DeWit:
Dave wrote, “I’ve got the VP of Business Development for a large senior living community asking me to birddog suitable land for them. Anyone ever indulge something like this by actually sending a mailer in an area with buying criteria that might be different than what you would normally do otherwise? The risk seems pretty obvious, but the upside could be pretty big. I’m thinking. What do you all think?”

Steven Jack Butala:
I started my career on this very thing, in the very early ’90s, buying and selling long-term care facilities and associated companies, and land even, to people who already own long term care companies. So I responded to this person in great length in Discord, and I said, “Yeah, I would do it. However, here’s a few things that I learned that you really need to do before you get too excited about it.”

Steven Jack Butala:
If it’s a nonprofit group, we’ve done this, Jill and I have done this for people, apartment owners, in Los Angeles with mild success. And I only say mild because mild, not extreme success, because Jill and I got really frustrated with the amount of time that. Just know that it’s a client. When you’re buying property on behalf of yourself, you can make a decision really quickly.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Jack Butala:
When you’re buying property on behalf of anyone else, especially if it’s an organization and there’s multiple people making a decision.

Jill K DeWit:
They’ve got to love all over it and feel it and I can’t take it.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, mild success, But if you’re really, really young and you’re super ambitious, you can get a mailer out. I’ll tell you what’s great about senior living or any specific use type property like this, maybe properties for subdivisions. These people live and die by these acquisitions so they have to make a decision. So you got that going for you. Number two, they’re very specifically zoned. So you can do a mailer, in an entire state, if you’ve got real good data, assessor data, for that specific zoning, like people who want trailer parks. That’s specifically zoned. RV parks, very specific zoning. Self storage and on and on and on. So when you find a client that’s on a real aggressive acquisition schedule, it’s not hard to put those things together.

Steven Jack Butala:
If they’re for-profit group, you need to find out who’s making the decision and you need to sign a contract that says, “You’re going to pay me 2% of whatever you buy, whatever I send you. And I’m not going to represent you in this transaction in any manner, because I’m not a licensed real estate agent.”

Steven Jack Butala:
If it’s a nonprofit group, and I did the majority of work myself long time ago for nonprofits, you really need to put a suit on and go to the next board meeting and find out, take their pulse about how thirsty they are for doing acquisitions. Because nonprofits all say they are. They want to expand and do better and spread their mission and the whole thing. But when it comes to reality, the vast majority of the time is that they just don’t have the [foreign language 00:03:26] to do what a for profit company does. Tons and tons of money to be made here. Requires a lot of patience and organization.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday. Five things I refused to spend money on too much money on. This is why you’re listening.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I’m excited to hear. You said one of them might not be legal?

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, I refuse to spend money on illicit drugs and hookers.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh.

Steven Jack Butala:
But that’s not on my list.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s lucky for all of us.

Jill K DeWit:
Thanks for that.

Steven Jack Butala:
I can’t stand spending money on rent.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh.

Steven Jack Butala:
Or a mortgage and having a mortgage. I can’t stand it.

Jill K DeWit:
I know that.

Steven Jack Butala:
It crushes my soul.

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
Does it make better financial sense? Yeah. Most of the time you should not pay off your mortgage. Most of the time, in specific markets. Didn’t you say you were an accountant or something and you’re smart with money? Yeah, I just have a personal issue with having any type of debt. That’s my number one I can’t stand spending money on this. If I have like credit card debt. Just crushes my soul.

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
Makes me a terrible person to be around permanently.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. If you’re taking notes, please underline the word permanently.

Steven Jack Butala:
Hey, do you have a list?

Jill K DeWit:
Oh wait, we’re going to go through yours first and I have a few that I jotted down.

Steven Jack Butala:
I can’t stand spending money on insurance. Why? Because I don’t have a choice.

Jill K DeWit:
This is funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
The cards are stacked against me.

Jill K DeWit:
Mines are so different.

Steven Jack Butala:
I have to spend money on insurance every month.

Jill K DeWit:
That I never use.

Steven Jack Butala:
That will never get used. Why? Because if I use it, my insurance goes up.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
What kind of scam is that?

Jill K DeWit:
Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

Steven Jack Butala:
Same thing with bank fees, which we have enough money where we got out of that now.

Jill K DeWit:
What else?

Steven Jack Butala:
Stuff that makes me feel better and look better. Like a new shirt.

Jill K DeWit:
Gee, I wouldn’t have known that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Or a nicer pair of shoes to look nice. I can’t stand that stuff. Or, “Mr. Butala, they’re the executive suite is available at the top of the hotel for an extra $500.” Nope, nope, nope, nope. Can’t stand that stuff. That stuff that just, “Oh, I’m so rich and I feel great about myself.” Forget it. I think it makes me a terrible person.

Steven Jack Butala:
Number four, number four. Crap that depreciates like furniture. We just bought this house. It’s fairly big. And Jill and I fortunately are on the same page about this and 99% of the stuff that’s in this house is used. We’re fortunate enough to live in an area where there’s these consignment shops that have some nicer furniture that’s passes the Jill test. That’s what I call it. Everything passes mine. I would buy a golf cart and drive around in this house with no furniture.

Jill K DeWit:
Look behind me. Look behind. I’m trying to think of anything. The only I bought new is the one little table right over your head there. Everything else in the or that-

Steven Jack Butala:
The pianos used.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, the pianos used. The couch is used.

Steven Jack Butala:
All of it.

Jill K DeWit:
The bar is used.

Steven Jack Butala:
Trust me, it’s not cheap furniture, but it’s used, so it’s half.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s less than half.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s lightly used, which is great. But it’s used.

Steven Jack Butala:
And my final thing that I cannot stand spending money on is freaking taxes. And that can come in the form of any type of tax, income tax. I don’t have issues too much with payroll taxes. I have no issues paying property taxes. This country was founded on property taxes. In fact, there was no such thing as income tax in this country at all before World War II, it all got started because we needed to fund a war that we didn’t start. Think about that.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Now it’s completely out of control. I don’t care if you’re right or left, it’s out of control how much tax we pay.

Jill K DeWit:
I agree.

Steven Jack Butala:
And at sales tax, I think the internet takes care of that. That probably eventually will go away. But see, I have control. I have control over sales tax. I have control over property taxes. I don’t have to live in a big house that has a lot of property taxes or a state that pays crazy, requires all that. So stuff I can control, I can deal with it. That’s my list. I do have lists of stuff that I love to spend money on too.

Jill K DeWit:
I like these. This is great. You can keep going.

Steven Jack Butala:
I love spending money on education.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
We couldn’t afford it. Our third kid went to private school. The first two, I regret this every day that we didn’t put them through private school. We just didn’t have the means then. It’s just a different time in our life.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true.

Steven Jack Butala:
I love spending money on and don’t care how much it costs, travel and entertainment. In accounting it’s called T&E, travel and entertainment. And Jill and I do not suffer from lack of a good time.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t care what the price is on that.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true.

Steven Jack Butala:
I have no problem spending money on, this is my final one, on anything that I think’s going to reasonably appreciate. So I call them balance sheet items. Like I bought an old Corvette. I’m probably going to make 50 to $70,000 on that car and have fun with it while I own it. So I love spending money on that. I love spending money on land and reselling it. Love it. I love every phase of that.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is going to be a different list, isn’t it? For you?

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, you want to hear mine?

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure. Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
All right. While you’re doing yours, I thought I’d jot a few down too. So some of ours are the same. So things that I refuse to spend money on is expensive furniture. I’m with you there. I can’t. I can think of one time I fell in love with one item and that was it. And then in the end it’s like, “Eh, so what. Big deal. Everything else I’m very happy.” Things that I don’t, fluff gifts. I hate fluff gifts.

Steven Jack Butala:
I have gifts on my original list.

Jill K DeWit:
I hate fluff gifts.

Steven Jack Butala:
I do too.

Jill K DeWit:
“It’s so-and-so’s birthday. I need to get them something.” Do you? Is there something really good or you just going to show up with something? Lord knows, we don’t all need more candles for starters.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Or just stupid things like that.

Steven Jack Butala:
That was on my original list.

Jill K DeWit:
Fluff gifts are dumb. You talk me-

Steven Jack Butala:
I thought it was going to make me sound like a negative person, but we left it for you.

Jill K DeWit:
Anything that’s going to go in someone’s closet. You got it. It’s good. Things I refuse to spend money on. Cheap or poor quality items. We’re a little bit different there. Not necessarily the hotel room, but I learned this, you get what you spend, like what am I trying to say? You get what you pay for. In things like food, clothing, jewelry, I’m going to spend a little money on that stuff. I’m in it.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m with you on the food.

Jill K DeWit:
Right. My number four. You’re going to love this one. Things I refuse to spend money on. Expensive wine.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
It is wasted on me.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, me too.

Jill K DeWit:
I am not a wine drinker. I don’t care how much it costs. You put it in front of me, if I like it, I’ll keep drinking it. And don’t tell me, just don’t even tell me, because I don’t care.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think 15 to $18 for a bottle of wine is about the tip, tip, top. And I think you’re going to get everything you would get out of a $200 bottle of wine.

Jill K DeWit:
Right.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think there’s radios clicking off everywhere for this.

Jill K DeWit:
I won’t want partake in a $2,000 bottle of wine. I’d be like, “Hey, it’s wasted on me. You guys all enjoy it.”

Steven Jack Butala:
I would give it to someone else in the restaurant.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s what I’m saying.

Steven Jack Butala:
Whoever can enjoy this, please.

Jill K DeWit:
Someone else at the table can have it. I don’t care. And then my last thing is the same as you. I hate paying money on taxes. It makes me cry. But I know we have to and it’s okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’ll leave on this. If you own a business, a little business like these businesses we have, like buying and selling land. You have crazy amount of control over how much taxes you pay. And I don’t mean cheat. I’m not advocating that at all, I’m not even saying fib. You have a lot of control over how much property you buy, how much you don’t buy, whether or not you have a real estate designation with the IRS. All kinds of things that are ordinary and necessary expenses for you to succeed at buying and selling land. And that’s just not the case if you’re a medical doctor with a crazy paycheck, you have no choice but to pay those taxes.

Jill K DeWit:
Do your homework.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re in a great tax position, yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Just do your homework and do it right.

Steven Jack Butala:
Surround yourself with some good people, some local accountants that understand and have the same point of view as you do.

Jill K DeWit:
I love it. Good show. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week. You can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow’s Jill Friday, and she’s going to talk about, well, how long do Land Academy members actually stay in the group? You are not alone in your real estate ambition. How long do they stay in there, Jill?

Jill K DeWit:
I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Steven Jack Butala:
I knew you were going to say that.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
I just got to poke you sometimes.

Jill K DeWit:
I know you do. Yes, you do. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we really appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button. And don’t forget if you are already a Land Academy member, make sure you are connecting with us and communicating in Discord. It’s awesome. You want to find out more, send a note to support@landacademy.com.

Jack and Jill:
We are Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Information-

Jill K DeWit:
-and inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

Blind Offer Mailer Campaign Competition in 2022 (LA 1760)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Hello.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining real estate investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today, jill and I talk about blind offer mailer campaign competition in 2022.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I guess that’s it. We’re done. Just kidding.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m so sorry, but you’re not the only person sending mail out. It used to be like that. I used to be one of two people that sent out mailers.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. I do know that.

Steven Jack Butala:
We used to talk to each other all the time, me and Steve Seal.

Jill K DeWit:
Mm-hmm. That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com online community. It’s free.

Steven Jack Butala:
Last year, a ton of Land Academy members came to Jill and I, needing extra help getting their blind offer campaigns in the mail.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill and I took a look at it. We took a look at how we personally send out mail, why it’s so efficient. And we realized that we had some staff that rock at doing mailers effectively and getting them out, right to the point where then I would go in and price it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, we made that available to the public, well to Land Academy members. We’re calling it Concierge Data Plus.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s a year later. Hundreds of members are outsourcing their entire mail process with this product.

Steven Jack Butala:
Whether you’re brand new and you don’t want to go through, it’s good, it’ll work for you. Or if you’re five, 10 years into this and you’re sick and tired of doing mailers yourself, you can outsource it.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is a good product for you. Check out Support@LandAcademy.com or offers the number two, owners.com. See if it’s for you.

Jill K DeWit:
Cool. Aiden wrote, “If anyone in the group doesn’t like the sales aspect of this business, we need to chat. My partner and I joined the group last summer and have been able to close approximately 65 deals since last July.

Jill K DeWit:
We partner with another member of the group, for the data and the mailing aspects and our team handles inbound leads, due diligence, sales, transaction coordination, acquisitions, and dispositions. We all feel like we’ve built a pretty decent system, and we have a great team in place.

Jill K DeWit:
We’re currently sending out 30,000 mailers a month and have a bandwidth to handle more inbound calls, analyze more deals and get more contracts. If anyone here is potentially interested in partnering up, we’re looking to do the data, mailing, preliminary due diligence and the sales aspect of business and partner up with someone who’s more interested in experience in the second half of the process. I’m located in…” Do you want me to even say?

Steven Jack Butala:
It doesn’t matter. Sure. It’s okay.

Jill K DeWit:
“East coast state. We would like to partner with someone who is also in east coast states,” although it’s sprinkled around the country. So, it doesn’t really matter.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
“And then send me a message, if you’re interested.” This is cool. This is clearly in Discord, probably in the Partners Wanted section in there. That’s cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
On Monday we talked about, this is not the place to save time or money. These guys are not doing either. They’re not saving time or money because it’s their full-time job. So, let’s do some math.

Steven Jack Butala:
They’re sending out 30,000 mailers. That costs about $15,000 a month. Oh my God, Jack, $15,000 a month. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. $175,000 a year, but they did 65 deals.

Jill K DeWit:
Mm-hmm.

Steven Jack Butala:
So our average probably group-wide, the average net on a deal is what?

Jill K DeWit:
50?

Steven Jack Butala:
20 grand?

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I thought it was higher.

Steven Jack Butala:
Maybe 30.

Jill K DeWit:
All right. I think that the average is actually higher, but okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
Okay. That’s millions of dollars.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think, probably I’m just being [inaudible 00:03:50]

Jill K DeWit:
You’re being conservative and I appreciate that.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s like a million two. So yeah, they spent $150,000, $170,000 on mail, all of their time, full-time work, and they generated 1.2 to 1.6 million.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep. It’s amazing. That’s this group, by the way. You’re just listening. You’re like, what do you mean?

Jill K DeWit:
So if you’re not good at one part of it, don’t worry about it. Figure out what you are good at and find a partner. Together, you guys can kill it, like many people in Land Academy and like us, by the way.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly. This is great setup for today’s topic, blind offer mailer campaign competition in 2022. This is the meat of the show.

Steven Jack Butala:
On the first Tuesday of every month, jill and I have an advanced member closed call, once a month.

Steven Jack Butala:
The purpose of the call is for all of us to get together. I don’t know. There’s probably 25 of us at this point, 30 maybe. 25 that show up for it, anyway.

Jill K DeWit:
Right.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you join Career Path, you automatically are in the advanced group forever.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s cool. Uh-huh.

Steven Jack Butala:
So we all talk about how we’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working, how we might need to change our operations.

Steven Jack Butala:
It always comes up, mail competitions. This is why I wrote this topic. It always comes up. There’s always one or two people that say, it’s just not like it used to be.

Steven Jack Butala:
My grandfather used to say, oh, times have changed. In 1929, you could do this. You can’t do it anymore.

Jill K DeWit:
Right. Yeah. Thank goodness.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s the nicest way I can say that, and I’m old or getting older. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff-

Jill K DeWit:
We didn’t have cameras everywhere.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a lot of stuff you can do in the eighties, that you just can’t do anymore, like be a criminal, because-

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, there’s cameras everywhere.

Steven Jack Butala:
Can’t do that anymore.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh.

Steven Jack Butala:
What’s happening to this business as we grow further, is that there’s more people sending mail.

Steven Jack Butala:
Do people who own properties get 50 offers a month, like some places, homeowners do? No.

Jill K DeWit:
No.

Steven Jack Butala:
We own tons of property, Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m here to tell you. Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tons and tons of property. We get two or three or four offers a month.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m shocked at how little I get.

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s interesting. And it’s cute because I usually know who they are.

Steven Jack Butala:
It doesn’t say Jack and Jill on the ownership record.

Jill K DeWit:
No, they don’t know it’s me.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s some obscure LLC that Jill and I own. So, we’re not special.

Steven Jack Butala:
Once in a while, and we’re going through this right now, we get somebody who calls Jill back and says, “We’re selling our property and let’s do the deal. We’re all set to go, on your price.”

Steven Jack Butala:
They call back two or three or four days later and say, “I got another offer,” to which Jill says, “Oh, that’s too bad. Well, thanks for looking. Good luck. I’ll see you later.”

Jill K DeWit:
I do not. That’s hilarious.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s the problem. That’s the problem, if you’re going to cower.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I got two things to say about those.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s this thing called competition.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Go ahead.

Jill K DeWit:
You’re right, so this is the truth. Because I’ve got one right now, I’m like, “Fine. What’s it going to take?,” because I know there’s more money in this.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s funny because there’s a deal right now that he’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to be that guy.” I’m like, “You’re exactly being that guy to me, because you told me we had a deal. Now you’re calling back and…”

Jill K DeWit:
We opened escrow, we would’ve closed by now. I’m not kidding. But he’s dragging his feet because this other offer. I said, “All right.”

Jill K DeWit:
I’m here. I’m checking with him three times a week to say, “Hey, how are you? Have you heard anything? Oh, they’re going to flake out.”

Jill K DeWit:
Here’s my point here. So to follow up with you, do you mind if I just-

Steven Jack Butala:
No, jump in, please.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m running with it now.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.

Jill K DeWit:
I have two offers. I’m not kidding. Well, people don’t follow up and they don’t do it. They don’t get these deals. There’s so much on the table that people are not acting on.

Jill K DeWit:
So, you think there’s competition? People may send out letters, but they do nothing. I’m going to get to that in a second, too.

Jill K DeWit:
Here’s an example. I have two offers right now, on my desk. One person I know, in Land Academy, one I don’t know.

Jill K DeWit:
What’s really funny is these offers are pretty high because we’ve actually had these… They’re two properties I’ve had my inventory, you kind of forget about buying.

Steven Jack Butala:
They’re tax sale properties.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I’ve had them in there forever. I’m like, “You know what?” They’re smaller. They’re not real deals that I’m doing right now. I’m like, “You can have it.” So, I signed them. I’m not kidding. I signed them and sent them back. That was 10 days ago.

Jill K DeWit:
One of the guys, I got a followup. I got automated response email that said, due to heavy volume, we’re a little bit behind, and we’ll get back to you soon. I’m like, are you guys kidding me?

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s an outrage.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. And the other one, he was immediately responsive, but then he went dark. I’m like, do you want these or not, kind of thing.

Jill K DeWit:
So here’s what you need to do. Are people sending out mail? Yes. Are they getting the deals? No.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s right.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s not hard. So here, you have three things you have to do. Number one, answer the phone.

Jill K DeWit:
These guys are not responsive. They’re not answering the phone. They are not responding to email. It’s too easy. This is why I know that Land Academy people are killing it.

Jill K DeWit:
Number two, win them over. It’s not that hard. Make friends with them. It doesn’t need to be an hour. You can befriend someone in five minutes and figure out what they’re interested…

Jill K DeWit:
“My wife and I we’re going to do this because it’s near this place I love to fish.” “Oh, how cool is that? What kind of fish you guys do?”

Jill K DeWit:
There’s how you befriend them, and you could have a little conversation. It’s that easy. You don’t have to be into fishing too, by the way. Sometimes the less you know and the more they tell you, the more important they feel, and then the more they like you. So, it’s easy.

Jill K DeWit:
And then number three, act fast. You answer the phone, you win them over, you find out the property. You say, “You know what? Let’s do this deal,” even if it’s a different number.

Jill K DeWit:
They say, “You know what? Eight doesn’t work for me, but can you do 10,000?” “You know what? I can do 10. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m opening escrow tomorrow morning, because it’s six o’clock now here. So I’m going to open escrow tomorrow morning. I’m going to give you a call between 10 and 11. You’re going to be around?” “Yep.” “Good. I’ll get the escrow number, and so you can watch for emails. Let me make sure I’ve got everything here, dah, dah, dah,” and then follow through and do it.

Jill K DeWit:
You need to push, push, push, push until these are in your name. And if you need to relax a little bit like, whoa, that was a lot of work, fine. Once you own them, you can chill out a minute, if you need to, seriously.

Jill K DeWit:
I want you moving them through the system, but if you need to catch your breath a little bit, ’cause you got so much coming at you, you need to suck it up and do it and buy all you flipping can right now and then take a breath.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay, now I got to get a guy to sell this one. I need to do this. I need to do that. Figure that out. It’s fine. That’s fine.

Steven Jack Butala:
If they call you back, no matter how mad they are about your pricing, somewhere deep in their soul, they are a seller.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Jack Butala:
Somebody, just on the most recent advanced call, told this story. We sent an offer out on a property for $7,000. They were livid. They called back in a huff and said, “You’re off your rocker,” to which they said, “What’s your number?” “$150,000,” that was their response.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, the property’s worth 250.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Jack Butala:
So they bought it and resold it for 250.

Jill K DeWit:
I think they got them down to 120 or something like that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
I made a joke about, can we meet in the middle? It was just joking, but that was it. 7,000 became a hundred and something.

Steven Jack Butala:
Please hear me on this and what Jill’s really saying. She’s so in the middle of it, that she doesn’t see this. This is a compliment. You have to do these deals. They don’t do themselves.

Steven Jack Butala:
Some of them take a huge amount of work and babysitting and handholding and sending notaries to their door and all and some of them don’t. Some of them get signed and sent back and you open escrow and the deal’s closed in a couple weeks, depending on a lot of variables.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is not the place to save time or money. This is the place to get deals done and get them resold.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s a full-time job. You don’t have the personality like me, to call people back and go through all that, it makes you want to pull your hair out. That’s truly how I feel about it. Find yourself a partner like Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re just like Jill, and you can’t wait to answer the phone and you wake up in the morning just to see who’s on the other line… truthfully, that’s what Jill does, but you can’t stand doing the other part, find yourself a Jack. We’re all over. Both types are all over Discord.

Jill K DeWit:
Mm-hmm. Exactly. If you do this stuff, by the way, you will have no competition.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re in the very, very first inning of competitive land acquisitions, against each other. If you think about how many real estate agents there are, licensed real estate agents, for every house that gets sold, it’s staggering.

Jill K DeWit:
Brilliant.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s thousands of real estate agents, trying to get listings in one market. Usually, one or two real estate brokerages get 80% of the listings. Why? Because they know what the hell they’re doing. They’re not afraid of competition.

Jill K DeWit:
They’re aggressive.

Steven Jack Butala:
They don’t wake up and say, “Well, the party’s over. There’s too many real estate agents.” Yeah, they do whatever it takes, advertising, having a dynamic personality, [inaudible 00:13:17].

Jill K DeWit:
Trolling the neighborhood.

Steven Jack Butala:
Absolutely. Sending out flyers, sending out mail, getting on the phone, cold calling, whatever it takes.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Jack Butala:
They do it to get deals done. That’s what we do.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a bunch of people in Land Academy that do the same thing that. It just cracks me up when this competition thing comes up, it’s that.

Jill K DeWit:
I love it.

Steven Jack Butala:
People say stuff like this. “Well, last year my mailer response was 38% and now it’s 32% this year. It’s over.”

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Every person that says, “Oh, I’m not going to do this. There’s too much competition,” I’m like, “Thank you. And now there’s one less.”

Steven Jack Butala:
By the way, I’m going to end on this.

Jill K DeWit:
You keep thinking that.

Steven Jack Butala:
When Jill and I started Land Academy, we looked at each other for about a week and said, “Why are we letting the cat out of the bag here?”

Jill K DeWit:
Are we nuts?

Steven Jack Butala:
This is going great.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Why would create competition for ourselves?

Steven Jack Butala:
We finally decided together, that Land Academy is a way for us to create partners for ourselves. Whether it’s deal funding, land funding, like we do on the money side or whether it’s partnerships to go in together, buy big pieces of land, which we were involved in on a bunch of them, where we all together are… we’re either better together or we’re not.

Steven Jack Butala:
We decided that we were going to give it a shot and it worked. We have tons of partnerships now.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I’m going to say, we also took a look back and really did some numbers because that’s who you are and said, “Look, look at the universe of properties that are out there. There’s no way we could even conquer one state. There’s no way.”

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s 55 million properties out there.

Jill K DeWit:
I’d die before we got through the whole state. I could spend my career in a county.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s 55 million properties out there. And every single day, every single day, people wake up in the morning and they either need money or there’s a life decision that goes on.

Steven Jack Butala:
Maybe somebody got ill, somebody passed away. This stuff happens. Life happens. And they decide, today’s the day I’m going to sell that piece of land because I know we’re never going to use it.

Steven Jack Butala:
And then they open a letter from Jill and I or any land Academy Member. And they say, “Yeah. Well, here’s the answer.”

Steven Jack Butala:
The week before, maybe they would’ve called back and yelled at us.

Steven Jack Butala:
The timing was right. That’s what you’re looking for. You’re looking for a person in a circumstance in their life, that’s going to say, yeah, today’s the day I’m going to sell.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Happy to join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow’s Jack Thursday. I’m going to talk about five things I refuse to spend money on. You are not alone, in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I’m dying to know. Is it all business stuff or is it life stuff?

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, it’s all life stuff.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay, good. Don’t tell us. Don’t tell me any. Is that okay?

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.

Jill K DeWit:
All right. Save it. I think this is good.

Steven Jack Butala:
Some of it’s not legal.

Jill K DeWit:
Hello. All right, [inaudible 00:16:15]. Well, now I’m personally interested for tomorrow. So, this thought to be good.

Jill K DeWit:
Hey, thanks for tuning in. By the way, did you knew you can connect with us on Clubhouse? Yep. Jack and I are live on Clubhouse, on the first and third Thursday of every month, at 12:00 PM Pacific Time.

Jill K DeWit:
So log onto Clubhouse. Get the app if you don’t have it. It’s like a radio show, if you want to think about it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. It’s like an old school radio show. You can call in, the whole thing.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. You kind of raise your hand. We bring you on stage. You ask questions. You chat with us. Pretty darn fun. We do it for an hour, twice a month. So, go on to Clubhouse, find the Land Investing Club, follow that, follow us and you’ll get notified.

Jill K DeWit:
We are Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. Information-

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration…

Steven Jack Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

James Beckman Land Academy Member Interview (LA 1759)

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

Land Investment is Not the Place to Save Time or Money (LA 1758)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Stevie, Jill, here.

Jill K DeWit:
Hello.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Stephen Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how land investment, the environment, is not the place to try to save time and money.

Jill K DeWit:
Or even specifically, getting it going. Please don’t… There’s things you can’t skimp on. I know we’re going to go through a list. I’ll ask you. It’ll be fun. We’ll make a list of things that you can skimp on and you cannot skimp on, like how much you spend on a sandwich. Skimp on that. How much you spend on mail, don’t skimp on that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Buy a used car. Don’t buy a new one. Even if it’s one or two years old. We all know this, and we’re all entrepreneurs here. Our whole listening base, I’m sure, is some version of an entrepreneur, and everybody loves to save money. You know where you save money in this environment? When you buy a piece of property.

Jill K DeWit:
Not everybody loves to save money, by the way.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, really? You think it’s just me?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I’m not even going to tell you how much I just spent on concert tickets. Let me tell you real quick.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.

Jill K DeWit:
All right. I got us tickets for… If you’re listening, I’d love to know if you know who this is. Rufus Du Sol. I personally love, love, love Rufus Du Sol, and I just got us tickets to go see them in Santa Barbara, general admission. Just no seats, on the floor, on the front. You ready? $400 each.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh my gosh. It’ll be worth it, though.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. I’m like, “I don’t care.”

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a good break for us, too, just to go out there.

Jill K DeWit:
Ah, yes.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t care about saving money about stuff like that, either.

Jill K DeWit:
See? See? That’s the thing. Not going to save money on that. Will I save money on how I get there? Sure. Or where I stay? Yeah. But on the show, on the event? Heck no. That’s an event.

Steven Jack Butala:
Actually, I have a bunch to say about this. Let’s do the commercial first. I think the gist of it is, if you’re saving money, if you’re being frivolous about how personally comfortable you are, that’s silly.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep. [inaudible 00:02:09] hear more about that. Okay. Go ahead.

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free, and I’m hoping that you know by now that Jill and I personally instruct a handful of new and existing Land Academy members in a live class called Career Path. If buying and selling land is your career, or you want it to be, let us know. Check out support@landacademy.com and see if it’s for you.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That reminds me, Career Path number five is scheduled for October. It’ll be the week after this event, so apparently, this concert will be our kickoff.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, that’s why you just…

Jill K DeWit:
I just thought of it.

Steven Jack Butala:
It fit into your schedule.

Jill K DeWit:
No. Oh, no. I would have moved the schedule to go see Rufus Du Sol there. Don’t even think about that. You know what’s funny? It’s either the next night, or it’s not long after that, they’re playing the Hollywood Bowl. Can you believe that?

Steven Jack Butala:
Rufus Du Sol’s playing the Hollywood Bowl?

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
You did the right thing.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, of course.

Steven Jack Butala:
Santa Barbara’s way better than Hollywood Bowl.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Okay. Enough about our little personal lives. I’m sure you’re like, “Get on with it.” Okay. This is so cool. Josiah wrote… What would he call himself? Josie the…

Steven Jack Butala:
The wetlands pro.

Jill K DeWit:
… Pro or something? Yeah, that was really funny the other day. Josiah wrote, “April was a crazy month. I did $303,228 and 23 cents of gross sales on properties, with a total basis of about $126,000.” That’s just April, everybody. “Most of these properties I had known for more than six weeks. I have an escrow, or purchase, five properties, for a total acquisition cost of approximately $249,000, with approximate resale value, quick-sale price of $750,000.”

Steven Jack Butala:
He’s going to have a multimillion dollar year.

Jill K DeWit:
What’s his year going to be like? Yeah. “Between vacations and weddings…” They didn’t even work that hard. “… I didn’t even work that hard. This business continues to blow my mind.” I love it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too.

Jill K DeWit:
“Hiring a bookkeeper has been extremely valuable for me. What gets measured gets managed.” That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s an accounting principle.

Jill K DeWit:
Hey, congratulations. I love Josiah. Yeah. He was Career Path two or three?

Steven Jack Butala:
No, three. Last one.

Jill K DeWit:
Three. Okay. Career Path three, and…

Steven Jack Butala:
And we’re in four right now.

Jill K DeWit:
A neat, neat guy. You know what’s so great about Career Path two is then, we toss you into the advanced group after that, and we all get together as a group once a month and get to catch up with everybody. And so, we all stay in touch. You’re never really done with us.

Steven Jack Butala:
Josiah’s a musician, too, and we just did an interview with him, and it aired, I think two, maybe three weeks ago. It’s on wherever you listen to the podcast, or on YouTube, and he’s always in a hammock. He’s in a hammock during the interview.

Jill K DeWit:
He’s awesome.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic: land investment, and that environment, is maybe not the best place to save time or money. This is the meat of the show.

Jill K DeWit:
I was going to say Josiah’s example. Josiah’s point, what he wrote. Always in Discord or Land Investors, but it was valuable to this show. It’s like, “You got to spend some money to make some money.” You have to spend 80, $90,000 sometimes on a deal to sell it for 200. That’s how you’re going to make a hundred and not work that hard. Think about it. Do one deal and make $100,000, or do 10 deals and do $10,000, $10,000, $10,000, $10,000. I haven’t said it, I don’t think, in a while, but man, as fast as you can add a zero, your life will get better and easier, because you’re doing less transactions, but bigger numbers.

Steven Jack Butala:
Especially if you’ve got this… Land Academy’s packed full of deal funders, Jill and I included. It’s hard for people to get their head around going from a $10,000 profit to a $100,000 profit without getting another set of eyes, or maybe even bringing in a funder who’s really used to doing this, and not a passive funder, more of an active funder like us. I’m not selling anything, here.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I’m a passive funder.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, but you’re very active in the deals that you choose to fund. That’s my point. It’s like, If you’re sitting…

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I’m medium. Sorry. I don’t don’t know if you knew that, but I…

Steven Jack Butala:
No, I didn’t.

Jill K DeWit:
No, I don’t really weigh in a lot unless there’s a problem.

Steven Jack Butala:
Still, you have to like the deal to do it. That’s my point.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, but I don’t babysit it at all.

Steven Jack Butala:
No, no. You’re not going to do a bad deal. You’re not going to fund a bad deal. You’re going to spend a ton of time and really look at the deal, but then, after that, you’re gone.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s right. That’s what I mean. Yeah. I’m going to make sure it’s good, and then I say, “See ya. Call me when you need me to wire the money, and call me when it’s sold.” That’s about it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Money in, money out. We’ll spend 10 minutes with each other.

Jill K DeWit:
Totally. That’s funny. That’s true. You know what’s so interesting? I’ve read an article today. In Philadelphia… I don’t why this was a big deal, but… Year over year, increase in land values. [inaudible 00:07:27] land in Philadelphia, they just reported 21%.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. It doesn’t surprise me at all, because Philadelphia’s land value started out at $1, so now it’s $1.20.

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t think so.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m telling you, Philadelphia’s… Anyway.

Jill K DeWit:
But still, it’s a good… We’re all experiencing these. This, I think, ties in. We’re all experiencing these crazy numbers. And so, what do you need to spend on as a land investor? What do I spend my time on? What do I spend my money on? Let’s look at it that way. I say, you spend your time on research.

Steven Jack Butala:
Learning. Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. You spend your time on…

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s free.

Jill K DeWit:
… learning what you’re doing. You spend your time on picking an area to send mail. Those are all very valuable. Then, you spend some money and get real good data. Somebody made a comment the other day that the old way, even, of calling a county and trying to get a list… I think the county laughs at them, or at least this county did, because the counties all know, and we all know, that we can get data ourselves through DataTree, and stuff that we use.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s where you spend the money, too, getting really good quality data. Then, you’re going to spend the money on the mail. Don’t mess around. Spend some time, again, making sure you price it right to get these offers in the mail. That’s your time. And then, spend your money on getting the mail out. Please don’t do 1,000 here, 500 [inaudible 00:08:56], 200 here, and 300 there. Man, blasted. We were just talking to a guy the other day. I don’t know if we did an interview with him recently or not, but he does what? 12,000 a week, I think, was his average right now. That’s a lot, but hey, depends on what you want to make.

Steven Jack Butala:
I just manually approved a very slight but important price reduction for somebody on Offers 2 Owners, which I almost never do, because he’s sending out 50,000 units a month.

Jill K DeWit:
Is it the person I’m talking about?

Steven Jack Butala:
It was just a few cents. Maybe. I don’t know. Actually, I don’t know their name. I know that the guy who runs O2O, Aaron, he’s like, “Can you approve this?” We almost never do that, because it’s so cheap already, but this is so much volume it’s [inaudible 00:09:42] silly. But the reason I wrote this topic is because there’s a constant undercurrent. Not so much right now, but there’s always an undercurrent of questions in Discord, which I understand. When you’re new, you have a lot of questions, which I think is great. That’s what it’s there for. There’s this gut reaction and response, and I had this in life, to try to save some money on… “Where can I save some money on a mailer? Where can I save some money on data?” I’m a decade past that now, but…

Jill K DeWit:
It’s not the place.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is not the place for that. This is the place to overspend on data and mail, because one deal’s going to pay for all of it.

Jill K DeWit:
We can save on office space. Do this from your kitchen table.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Jill K DeWit:
Business cards, don’t need them.

Steven Jack Butala:
All that.

Jill K DeWit:
Website, spend $500. Get a guy an offer up. Good enough for now.

Steven Jack Butala:
As much time as you can spend researching, like Jill said earlier. Going through old podcasts, not just with us, but everywhere else you can find information on the internet is great. The more time you can spend… I know I’m going a little… Talking out both sides of my mouth, here. The more time in this hot market that you can spend researching a land with your boots on the ground, and maybe make a weekend out of it, is better. That’s time really well spent, when you can go look at where you’re sending mail.

Jill K DeWit:
Spend money on the tools, too. Have NeighborScoop. Have everything you need so you can quickly do your due diligence. Some of the times, too… I’m a firm believer of this, and even more so as I’ve gotten older. Let me tell you this: I pull in experts all the time. Sure, I could spend a week and learn… Fill in the blank. I’m not going to do it. Airtable’s a great example. We just paid big bucks to have a pro reconfigure our Airtable for us and make it great.

Steven Jack Butala:
Boy, what a difference.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Right? I could do it, but no. Now, I’m past it. There are things like that that… Even your website. Even though you’re going to skimp and have somebody just for $500 do a decent… It doesn’t have to be beautiful and fancy, and it doesn’t have to be you to save $500. Your time is worth more than that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s one of the things that’s great about this business, that I was really attracted to when I started out. When you look at a company like Lyft… Lyft started as an idea, then they raised capital, and they got a development team, a tech development team, to write an app that’s on your phone for one city, I think it was San Francisco, to launch to prove the concept, and then they got a bunch of drivers.

Steven Jack Butala:
Now, they’re millions and millions and tens of millions of dollars into this thing upfront to see if it’s going to work. Uber and Lyft is what I’m talking about. Lots of upfront capital. We don’t know if it’s going to work. It turned out it worked. Then, they expanded it, and they were able to effectively get drivers and get riders. This is diametrically the opposite in this business, which is what I love about it. For a couple $1,000, you’re in. Maybe less. And now, you’ve got a sea of people wanting to fund your deals in a discord environment, so you can scale up. Josiah’s a great example. When he started, he’s a musician. And he was in Career Path saying, “Yeah, I came from the LandGate group. This is really wasn’t for me.”

Jill K DeWit:
“I’m a licensed agent.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. And so, now he’s probably going to make a couple $1,000,000 this year.

Jill K DeWit:
Doing things are all different, and [inaudible 00:13:15].

Steven Jack Butala:
And I’d be really interested to know from him… I’ll ask him next time we interview him… how much money he had into this business. Not buying land, because if you wanted to, you wouldn’t have to spend any money on that at all.

Jill K DeWit:
But experience and education.

Steven Jack Butala:
Just education, and time, and research, and all of that.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That’s very interesting.

Steven Jack Butala:
And I bet it’s not $5,000.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s good. I love it. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is an interview with the Land Academy member James Beckman. We had a blast.

Jill K DeWit:
Cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
You are not alone, and your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. It’s going to be you and James.

Steven Jack Butala:
You didn’t ask me what I like to save money on, what I like to spend money on.

Jill K DeWit:
No, I didn’t. Okay. Okay. What do you like to spend money on?

Steven Jack Butala:
Good alcohol, fast cars.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I was waiting for that one. Garage.

Steven Jack Butala:
Real estate. I’ll spend money. Yeah. Man stuff. Old shotguns.

Jill K DeWit:
What do you like?

Steven Jack Butala:
Even then, I still have to get those cheap.

Jill K DeWit:
What do you penny pinch on?

Steven Jack Butala:
Food.

Jill K DeWit:
Underwear, clothes, hair products.

Steven Jack Butala:
I have a life partner sitting next to me that… If it was just me, I might spend a little more on that.

Jill K DeWit:
Do you know what? You’re going to go high-end on car stackers, and things like that, but on the other stuff, “No, no. Dollar store.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s talk about you, Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Sorry. All right, go ahead. Throw me under the bus.

Steven Jack Butala:
What don’t you look at the price tag on, and you don’t care how much it costs, you’re going to buy it?

Jill K DeWit:
Makeup.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s good. That’s a good answer.

Jill K DeWit:
And face lotion.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think that’s actually okay, because…

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. Quality.

Steven Jack Butala:
… you need that. I don’t want to out you to the world, but Jill has very sensitive skin, so I think that’s money well spent.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Is that bad?

Jill K DeWit:
I agree.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t think you look the price tag in Cartier.

Jill K DeWit:
I do. I pay attention. Doesn’t necessarily stop me, but I do pay attention, and take a step back, and breathe, and think, but yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Now that I’m thinking about it, all the cars that I own, their value is less than the single car that Jill owns. All my cars combined.

Jill K DeWit:
Not true.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think so. It’s pretty close.

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t know. All right. Thank you for tuning in. By the way, we recently reduced… Excuse me, reduced… released our newest and up-to-date, latest educational project for Land Academy, and it’s called Land Academy 3.0: Catching Up with Land Academy. We spent months creating the most up-to-date for 2022 educational program you can find out there to help you succeed at doing what we do: buying and selling land. It’s five hours of how-to video. It’s free to existing members, and when you join, it’s there for you. If you want to find out more, call 833-522-5545, or send a note to support@landacademy.com.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack in Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
We are Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Information…

Jill K DeWit:
and inspiration…

Steven Jack Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

Jill Friday – How Fast and Accurate We Help People Buy and Sell Land (LA 1757)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steven and Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Hello.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy show, entertaining land, investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewit broadcasting from the valley of the sun.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today is Jill Friday, she’s going to talk about how fast and accurate we help people buy and sell land.

Jill K DeWit:
Let me tell you what this means. It’s about experience. We, because of who we are and the years of, gosh, what did you say? 25 for you and pushing 15 for me.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s almost 30.

Jill K DeWit:
You know, of experience doing land deals. I, we both and I learned from you, so I’ve got that behind me. We can pretty quickly assess a property and tell you if it’s a good deal, not a good deal, things to do, what to do. You can’t get that. That’s not a six month endeavor, like, oh, I got this.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not just, [crosstalk 00:00:53].

Jill K DeWit:
I nailed one county, I got this, I can help the planet.No.

Steven Jack Butala:
And it’s not just us. We have a.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Just a massive library of [crosstalk 00:01:00].

Jill K DeWit:
Of our…

Steven Jack Butala:
Transactions that we’ve reviewed.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
On behalf of our members and [crosstalk 00:01:04].

Jill K DeWit:
So you can.

Steven Jack Butala:
We have a live Discord channel where all of our members are conversing with each other and doing deals with each other, from a funding standpoint and all of that. So it’s not Land Academy is, we downplay it, probably too much. The Land Academy group of investors is quite amazing, it’s not just Jill and I.

Jill K DeWit:
Right, but I’m going to talk about that a little bit more

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community, it’s free. Back in the day, it was nearly impossible to find land without a mailing address, which is most of the properties that Jill and I deal with, or that all land investors deal with. To solve this, we used to access this very crude database that I created, where you just post the APN, the assessor’s partial number and the state and county where the property is, was, and or is and it would locate the property relatively quickly, which would set off a chain of events. And a half hour later, you would know where the property is and all the pertinent statistics that were involved. Well, that got to be pretty old. So we re-created it and web enabled it into a company called neighborscoop.com. So that can happen in seconds now instead of hours or days, so I get used to.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh my goodness.

Steven Jack Butala:
Check this out @neighborscoop.com.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s one of those massive time savers that I can’t believe how we used to get by without it. It’s amazing. All right. So Greg wrote, I apologize if this post is somewhat long, but I just wanted to say, I wanted to thank Stephen and Jill so much for starting this whole thing and teaching all of us how to do this when they could have kept this all to themselves. Thank you guys so much for everything you’ve done for everyone here. Thank God without faith and prayer, none of this would be possible and thank everyone here who provides feedback and helps teach us newbies the ropes.

Jill K DeWit:
Starting out, it’s easy to doubt your next move or fear the outcome of making an inexperienced decision that may cost you and y’all don’t have to share your thoughts or provide any feedback. So I appreciate everyone who takes the time to respond and help out. This is truly changing my family’s life forever and giving me the opportunity to provide a better life for them. I never been able to, God bless everyone here. I saw that you showed me that. That was so nice. Thank you for saying that and thank you for putting it in Discord for everyone to read and [crosstalk 00:03:32] your kind words.

Steven Jack Butala:
I never get tired of hearing of that. Thank you very much.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s so awesome.

Steven Jack Butala:
Appreciate it.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m so glad, that’s how we’re here. Okay. Now we got, now you just fueled us for another year. Seriously.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s your Friday. She’s going to talk about how fast and accurate we help people buy and sell land. This is the meat of the show.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. So this came up. I was thinking about this as a topic, because one day last week someone had messaged me in Discord and they were in one of the, I think they were in one of the career paths classes, one or two last year. And they quickly sent me a note in Discord, like, I need your help on this deal. I want to make sure I’m not making a mistake. Here’s the details, here’s a photo, what do you think? And I jumped in. I’m like, okay. I had like five minutes to pull it up in neighbors group real quick, do a little recon, look around, quickly, jump in Zillow, run some numbers, pop it in Google earth, take a look at the slope and a few things and I wrote them back and I said, all right, here’s what I, and I said that I have two concerns.

Jill K DeWit:
One is this and the other is this. And I said, you know what? There’s only, and, but it’s not deal killing. At the current price, I would not do this deal. If you can get this guy down to this price, then to me, that makes sense. And I think you can work through this stuff. And I’m like, have a great day, bye. And I had to run and the message back was, ‘Holy cow, thank you so much, that saved me.’

Jill K DeWit:
I’m like that, that’s, I was thinking, that’s the power of us. You can’t, even on our deal review, our Thursday deal reviews. We cover, I don’t know, a 30, I don’t know, 10 to 30 a week that we go through for people and answer the questions and do this exact thing and we should, what the great thing is too, is we can show them on the screen as we’re going through our thought process and figuring out if we would do the deal and if it makes sense, and if the pricing works and does that access satisfy us. That kind of a thing, that’s so priceless.

Jill K DeWit:
I wish I had that. I used to have to, I would, back in the day I learned what I knew from you. I would make my own opinion and then I would come back to you and say, ‘I think this, this and this am I right?’ And you would go, ‘Yeah.’ Or ‘No, you forgot about this.’ Or, ‘You know what? The price needs to be this, instead of this,’ I’m like, okay, got it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Now she doesn’t listen to me at all.

Jill K DeWit:
No, I don’t.

Steven Jack Butala:
She doesn’t need me for anything.

Jill K DeWit:
But what’s great is now I’m taught even my staff, my transaction team, they write down things. I think you’re going to like it because of this. Or I think you’re not going to like it because of this, you learn. But it takes years to develop that. My own transaction co-coordinator has been with me more than two years and it’s still, it’s, there’s still stuff to learn and that’s good. So you, so I’m happy and proud to be here and help everyone. And then as a side note, I want to make sure everyone knows that we’re here and we’re happy to help. If you’re not a Land Academy member, by the way, and you’re doing this on the side and you want us to review a deal, did you know, we will. All you have to do is ask my team, side note, ask again on one of our Thursday calls.

Jill K DeWit:
If you don’t know that we do that, we do that. We let guests jump in on our Thursday close member calls. So you could a see what they’re doing and what deals and how it goes and how we do it. And B, if you want me to look at one of your deals, I’d do it. We would totally do it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Once.

Jill K DeWit:
Send note to support Land Academy. Yeah, you get a onetime invite, not forever. That’s true. Not just, yeah. I want to join the Thursday calls. I’m not a member. No. You want a onetime invite. You got, maybe you’ve got some deal that you’re really losing sleep over right now and you want to get a glimpse of who we are and what we do and all the stuff that we’re talking about. Absolutely. And we’ll, you can jump in on the call, you can weigh in, like everybody else does comment on stuff and communicate with us and then throw a deal in there. We’ll happily look at it for you. So, that’s just who we are and why we’re here.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s no more effective place, no more robust content wise place to learn to buy and sell land on the internet period. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, without, except with the exception of Jack Bosch, every single person out there who teaches this or thinks they can teach it or slapped up a website.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s kind of funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
About buying and selling land was once a Land Academy member.

Jill K DeWit:
They’ve come through us in some form or another.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That’s really funny. It’s good. So we’re happy to be here and happy you could join us today. Five days a week you could find us here on the Land Academy show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode, because you’re not alone in you’re real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I was talking to somebody about that. It doesn’t come up very often anymore, but back, I think when we were starting out, people didn’t know who we were and our experience and now words out.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. And there is a lot of back in the day testing for, viable testing, testing, proving the concept. Can you buy and sell land? Can you do it effectively? There’s a whole period that we went through with that. And all of that’s gone now. Now it’s like, how, all right, when can I get started?

Jill K DeWit:
Worked out great, people.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
We have now been noticed in the industry as the heavy hitters.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
I love it. People find other people first and I think that’s great because there are other people out there in our space that help people with not a lot of money, doing small little deals and just kind of testing it and seeing is right for them, we do that too, but there’s other people that, but when it comes time to alright test is over, now I know this is, not only is this great and this buy and selling land is awesome. This is what I want to do, now I want to make it my business, I want to do some big deals, I want to do some higher dollar amounts, higher acreage, fill in the blank. Where do I go? I want to make this a business.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yes.

Jill K DeWit:
And scale it up to.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yes.

Jill K DeWit:
Crazy numbers.

Steven Jack Butala:
Not hot.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not a hottie.

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t want to do a thousand a month anymore. I want to do a thousand dollars a day.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yep.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. That’s when you call us.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly.

Jill K DeWit:
And that’s where we’ve kind of become in our arena and it’s perfect, that’s who we are. Thank you for tuning in, by the way great news, we are working hard on this, this is, it’s coming. We’re going to soon, hopefully this quarter be able to do online notary for you wherever you are in the world. So imagine this, let me paint this picture. You’re buying a property from a seller, you’re doing your own closing, you used to go and find a remote notary, overnight documents to them, they would drive out, see this seller and do it all in person. Not anymore. Now we’re able to, we’re working on being able to do all that online from the computer, our notary sitting here in Arizona will be online with your seller in, fill in the blank state. They will hold up their ID. It’s going to be very inexpensive and it’s immediate. Now you have to wait two days for documents to come back to you and all that, so it’s awesome. We haven’t even named it yet. So if you want to know more about it, just send a note to support@landacademy.com.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. [crosstalk 00:11:09].

Jill K DeWit:
We are Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Information

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.

If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.

The BuWit Family of Companies include:

https://BuWit.com

https://offers2owners.com

https://landinvestors.com

https://landacademy.com

https://landpin.com

https://parcelfact.com

https://countywise.com

https://deedperfect.com

https://ownersdata.com

https://houseacademy.com

I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.