Jill Friday – Pricing Like a Seven-Year-Old (LA 1856)

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 – Land Deal Flow Machine Consistency (ReAir LA 1686)

September 15, 2022 / Jack Butala / Podcasts

Jack Thursday – Land Deal Flow Machine Consistency (ReAir LA 1686)

Transcript:

Steven Jack :
Steven Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Hi.

Steven Jack :
Welcome to the land academy show entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven, Jack [inaudible 00:00:08]

Jill K DeWit:
And I am Jill DeWitt and we are broadcasting from the valley of the sun.

Steven Jack :
Today’s Jack Thursday. And I’m going to talk about land deal flow, machine consistency. This whole episode is about one basic concept and I’ll phrase it as a question. Is it better to buy [crosstalk 00:00:28].

Jill K DeWit:
Sorry.

Steven Jack :
Better to buy a piece of real estate and decide what to do with it every single time, or is it better to buy the same type of real estate over and over and over again and do exact same thing? The same process, the same people are involved over and over and over again. I bet you can guess which one I think is better. 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 and comment on the shows you like.

Jill K DeWit:
Steven wrote. “Hey guys, I am currently scraping data from Zillow for my next mailer, and I noticed that in Zillow, many of the listings don’t show the acreage anymore. You have to click in the listing to find out. So because of that, when I scrape the acreage is not spit out, I need manually go into each listing to find out. Does anybody know of a workaround when scraping?”

Steven Jack :
There’s two. And inconsistent data in Zillow is fairly common. And here’s why. Some of the places in the country Zillow collects data from the MLS. Some of the places they have to be manually input by whoever’s listing the property. There’s two types of people that list the property, real estate agents, who don’t usually don’t know their ass from their elbow, or people like us, but it’s mostly the ass from the elbow kind. And scraping data from Zillow can go great sometimes because sometimes they implement anti scraping software. Sometimes they don’t. So it very much varies from area to area. Don’t get discouraged, the sure fire away to fix this is to get a virtual assistant overseas, to manually input some of that data. It is not expensive at all. Usually wait if you order it, you’ll get it back overnight because they’re working, their day is our night. I’ve done it both ways for years, years and years, we manually order data mining from the Philippines in our case. And now we scrape. But the truth is if I can’t get good data, when I scraped to price and mailer, I moved to a different area to send mail.

Jill K DeWit:
Peaches and cream. What’s, peaches and rainbows [crosstalk 00:02:57].

Steven Jack :
This show it’s been on since 2015, every day.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep. Yeah. You’d think I would not be shocked.

Steven Jack :
Even real estate agents have reached out to me. And said I don’t like your attitude. I don’t think your description of the average real estate agent is accurate. Zero, zero.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. [crosstalk 00:03:20]. Because they’re not listening to this. Because they know.

Steven Jack :
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
All right.

Steven Jack :
Today’s Jack Thursday, by the way. So I get to say what I want.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Jack :
I’m going to talk about land deal, flow machine consistency. This is why you’re listening. Jill and I have struggled with this. So for years and years and years, I bought and sold real estate through one venue, eBay for years, 10,000 plus deals. And then around 2011, Jill and I joined forces and we did it a little bit differently and I have to say, we make a lot more money together than we did separately, but it was a totally a different type of company. We would buy property the conventional way, the way we buy property now. Sending out mailers a lot of times back then I went to tax sales, but we would buy it the same way every single time, process it, get it up on the internet and auction it off the same way.

Steven Jack :
And so we had at one time, 20 or 30 auctions closing a day, Jill and I joined forces and eBay was no longer an option because it changed. The website changed and the money that we were generating, that wasn’t possible. So my dream consistency machine was gone. So for several years we did it in a hybrid way where I bought the property the same way I’ve always been buying it. But Jill sold it and Jill sells it. And so Jill’s the kind of person who has to, and I’m not complaining. It’s just how it is. And she’s very successful at it. Touch every deal, look at it, love it, feel it. And then list it with a real estate agent or close it herself or depending on when and why and the property. So, we’ve actually recently really tried to take in what’s great about how she does it.

Steven Jack :
And what’s great about how I do it and meld it into this machine. And I’m starting now to share it with the entire community, because we’re doing a lot less deals and making a lot more money.

Jill K DeWit:
And a lot less work by us.

Steven Jack :
Yeah. We maybe have if combined, maybe have a whole hour of work into an entire real estate transaction and it’s not like we ever don’t you think?

Jill K DeWit:
No. Yeah. I agree.

Steven Jack :
Don’t you think? What was that face?

Jill K DeWit:
No, no, I’m sorry. I’m just listening. That’s just my face.

Steven Jack :
That’s just your face?

Jill K DeWit:
What face that I made?

Steven Jack :
I don’t know, like a Muppet face.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m just hanging out, listening, letting you run.

Steven Jack :
Check Thursday.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s why I just got here.

Steven Jack :
And it’s not like she and I sat down and planned this out. I think that we both just got tired of each other’s stuff, honestly. And so these deals come in and what’s really changed is we’re building businesses around a sell side, real estate agent that Jill likes.

Jill K DeWit:
I have several and that’s-

Steven Jack :
She has multiple agents that she deals with. So buying them is easy. Buying really cheap real estate is easy.

Jill K DeWit:
Right.

Steven Jack :
Selling it consistently can be like hurting cats. And so recently we’ve really figured this out. So you want to strive for this. You want to strive for that machine consistency. You don’t want to touch and love on every deal and make it some type of-

Jill K DeWit:
Personal-

Steven Jack :
[crosstalk 00:06:42] Making a birthing event.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, here’s the same picture-

Steven Jack :
That should have been the title.

Jill K DeWit:
Here’s my truck and my chair in every property that I buy. It’s not going to always work out that way.

Steven Jack :
In fact, if you can have absolutely no emotion about it at all.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s the best. That’s the downside. That’s another good thing to talk about being a machine here you don’t want to get too hung up on something. You might not sell it maybe and you might make a bad decision if you are just really routine, it does better.

Steven Jack :
Yep.

Jill K DeWit:
It may sound monotonous, but it’s better.

Steven Jack :
Well, wait a minute Jill, you just said real estate agents suck. And now you’re building a line of business around a real estate agent. Yeah. Here’s the difference. Residential real estate agents who have beehive hairdos and an old Cadillac, you don’t want to list your land with them. You want to list it with somebody who’s got a cowboy hat on, who is very, very intelligent about the local market that you’re buying and selling real estate in and has a whole long constituency of buyers and home homeowners and people who live there. So he can, he or she can and reach them with the property that you own and sell it to them.

Jill K DeWit:
Right.

Steven Jack :
You want a guy in a cowboy hat to tell you, well, if you go into this zip code north of this street and south of this road, and it’s more than 5,005 acres and less than $5,000 per acre, I could sell that on all day long.

Steven Jack :
But if you go east of that road-

Jill K DeWit:
Don’t go there, don’t bother.

Steven Jack :
So now you’re building a whole business around a really intelligent, knowledgeable real estate agent in the local market. That’s changed our business and we keep adding lines of business to it. So one line might be in one county. Then we move three counties over that agent may or may not be good for that county. You just keep building lines. And that’s how you really, really get that machine going. Not if you’re spending an hour on every deal and you’ve got land [inaudible 00:08:52], all the funding that goes on in discord for land academy. So now you don’t have to come up with any real money and you’re using concierge data to do all your mailers. This is millions and millions of dollars that we are, and many people in our group are generating.

Jill K DeWit:
And not doing a lot of work.

Steven Jack :
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s my best part.

Steven Jack :
Yeah. I mean, I would argue, correct me here. I bet we spend 10% of the time in our land business that we do in land academy.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh wait, wait.

Steven Jack :
It’s 90% land academy and 10% land business.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. That’s correct. Yeah. I agree. Happy you could join us today.

Steven Jack :
That’s it? You don’t have anything to say.

Jill K DeWit:
No, you covered it beautiful.

Steven Jack :
She’s done.

Jill K DeWit:
Rainbows and cupcakes.

Steven Jack :
Good thing tomorrow’s Jill’s Friday.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the land academy show.

Steven Jack :
Tomorrow is Jill’s Friday, your goals are your goals alone. You are not own in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
This came up on week one of career path, number three, which we are into right now. And it was so great. Everybody went around the room, introduced each other, shared where they are, what they’ve done, not just in land investing, but in prior businesses and careers. And then they laid out their goals and it’s such a variety, huge variance in goals of what everybody wants to do. And so we’re going to talk more about that tomorrow. I thought that was. I love week one. That’s really fun. We really get to know each other. I love career path too. It’s really kind of fun. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you’ve found the content valuable and we appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube channel, hit the subscribe button.

Steven Jack :
We are Steven and Jill

Jill K DeWit:
We are Steven and Jill.

Steven Jack :
Information.

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack :
To buy undervalued property.

Jill K DeWit:
Actually. It’s not kind of fun. It’s very fun.

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:

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.

How to Buy Your First Parcel of Land (ReAir LA 1679)

September 14, 2022 / Jack Butala / Podcasts

How to Buy Your First Parcel of Land (ReAir LA 1679)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Good day.

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, Jill and I talk about how to buy your first parcel of land, the ever present question.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. People watch, they hear us, they see us. They’re like, “I can do this. Okay. What do I do? Ready, I’m here. I showed up. What do I do? Is there a list somewhere? Do I just pick from them?”

Steven Jack Butala:
Keep going. This is great.

Jill K DeWit:
Do I just, I don’t know, go online and pick one that looks good to me and just call the person, just call the agent? Is that the best way? And they just handle it all. I just write a check.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’ll tell you a hint, and we’re going to obviously cover this all in just a few minutes here. The secret to buying your first piece of land is in our ebook. If you haven’t downloaded our ebook, even if you’re a long time Land Academy member, it’s like 10 or 15 pages, I think. It’s just blow through a read, but it tells you how to get your first land deal done fast. 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. Please don’t forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel and comment on the shows you like.

Jill K DeWit:
Steven wrote, “Hope the holiday preps are going well for everyone.” So this is obviously from a couple weeks ago. “A question I’m curious about. When listing with a flat fee MLS service, do you provide for the buyer’s agent commission?” I have lot to say about this.

Steven Jack Butala:
I know you do. It’s perfect. I’m going to zip it here. You go for it.

Jill K DeWit:
“I have had some horrible experiences with unprofessional realtors. The problems have been with the poor quality of the listings they prepare.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Unprofessional.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. And in parentheses he wrote, “Why don’t you use the pictures I gave you?”

Steven Jack Butala:
Unprofessional realtors is a-

Jill K DeWit:
I know, we could talk for a whole nother month.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a redundant sentence, unprofessional realtors. Go ahead.

Jill K DeWit:
“Use the pictures I gave you, the ignorance of marketing outside the MLS.” I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
And out and out laziness.

Jill K DeWit:
“And the out and out laziness. If you get an offer on my property, forward it the same day, not the next week. I could go on and on. I like the flat fee”-

Steven Jack Butala:
I wish you would.

Jill K DeWit:
“I like the flat fee because I can control the listing details. I’ve been offering buyer’s agents the full 3%. No problem paying that if they bring a buyer. Do you guys think it makes any difference on the sales end to give the realtors their cut on the flat fee listing?” Okay. So here’s what-

Steven Jack Butala:
I like fat fee listing. I like your way better.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. So Steven’s talking about companies like Broker Direct MLS, and we’ve had other local companies that we’ve used. So what the heck are we talking about? Well, there are a number of places, brokers that say, “Hey, look for a flat rate fee, I’ll put it on the MLS for you. You’re doing the work. I’m not getting commission, but you can use my licensure and everything. This is all legal and legit. And through me, by paying me, I don’t have to get a commission. I’ll just take a flat rate. I’ll put it on the MLS for you.”

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s a tech company.

Jill K DeWit:
And some of them, they might help you with the work. I’m sure there are people out there that do that. Most of the ones I work with, and this is the way I like it anyway, they just say, “Here’s the paperwork. Fill it out how you see fit, check all the boxes that I would normally check. We’ll input it for you,” because they’re doing that. “And we’ll get it on the MLS for you. Give me the pictures that you want. Put the order that you want. Write the description that you want.” And that’s part of why it’s a win-win for both of them. They’re like, “I’m not doing any work. I’m getting on the MLS for you.” It’s probably great exposure for them because their names show up on there in some way. But it’s just getting on the MLS is what I want.

Jill K DeWit:
So when I first did this, like Steven’s talking about, I did it wrong too, by the way. I went in thinking, all right, I’m using this flat rate service, nobody’s getting a commission. I just want to get it out there. How I usually buy it without an agent, I also want to sell it without an agent. I’m not paying the listing guy anything other than a couple hundred bucks. Why the heck would I pay somebody bringing somebody to me a commission? Well, I lost sales because of that. I realized, oh, there weren’t brokers that are bringing because it’s now in the broker’s arena, not just places that the public is looking. So by not putting on there that I’m happy to pay a buyer’s agent commission, they were not putting my properties in front of their customers. I went, oh ding, ding. So I did change that, and I do happily pay that.

Jill K DeWit:
And you’re right. So why would I do this? Maybe it’s a property that it doesn’t command a lot of money, but I need more eyes on it. I don’t really need someone running out there. Well, maybe it’s an area like you’re finding, Steven, that you can’t find a good agent, and that happens sometimes. It just may not be a rocking land person working that area. There might be a lot of house people, but not land people. That’s what I’ve found. But I need to get eyes on it. So I will do the flat rate listing, make it look fantastic. Do all my own copy, all my own photos, all my own drone shots. And then when people call, they’re getting me, which is so nice. They’re getting me. I can put my phone number right in there, and I will happily, like I said, pay those agents the commission that they’re due. No problem with that. What do you want to add?

Steven Jack Butala:
So, Jill did a very good job of describing what a flat fee listing is. What you don’t get out of a flat fee listing … By the way, this cost maybe a hundred bucks instead of 3% of the purchase price, which is what you pay typically when you list it with a regular real estate agent. What you don’t get is any service at all, which is okay for us. We’re used to doing this stuff anyway. But consider this, finding a good realtor, it’s very hard, but once you do, you’ve got to stick with that person and you can create a business around them. If they’re responsive, they understand the market, they understand land, they understand you-

Jill K DeWit:
Wear a cowboy hat.

Steven Jack Butala:
… they understand you and how you do business and the fact that they’re going to get a listing a week, or three listings a week in some cases. We have one person where we shove everything to them in one state, and we do great. So you have to ask yourself, is it appropriate to flat fee list and do a lot of work and still pay 3% instead of 6% or in some cases 10? Or is it appropriate eventually to find the right person the way that you would find the right business partner or to find the right mate in life. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of research, but once you do, it pays off great. So I would suggest if you’re down this flat fee listing path, it’s temporary. In the end, you need to find the right person.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s what I’m saying. I would use it when I can’t find somebody good. That’s really it. That’s what makes sense to me.

Steven Jack Butala:
Listen, it’s different. I don’t know, a year ago, this is all we did. This is all we talked about on the show, flat fee listings are the greatest thing ever. So, stuff changes.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, and only use social media, only do this, do Facebook, do all this stuff.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, stuff changes all the time.

Jill K DeWit:
Sell it all those ways. And if you really want to spend some money, do flat fee listing. And now it’s evolved into, well, class two, as a community, we’re all doing bigger and better deals. So, keep that in mind. When you’re selling a property that’s $90,000, you need to get it in front of the right eyes, and it probably is not TikTok.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, here’s the math on it. Buy for 30, sell for 90, which is a lot of what we do right now. Maybe buy for 50, sell for 150. We have a broker that has proven himself over and over and over again to Jill. So we’re happy to pay 10%. In a lot of cases, we pay a flat fee listing to him of 4 or 5,000 bucks just to make sure that we’ve got his attention, because he’s that good. So for $150,000, 10% is $15,000, and we paid 50 grand for it and we don’t have to do anything. We trust that the guy’s got great drone shots and he answers a phone and he’s on time. And just about every time we list something with him, he’s got it under contract in a week or two. That’s worth it.

Jill K DeWit:
I agree.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what you’re after. Today’s topic, how to buy your first piece of land, first parcel of land. This is why you’re listening. In the ebook that anyone can go download on the Land Academy website, I wrote a long time ago, a lot of years ago, the first chapter says something like this. Drop everything you’re doing. If you want to be a land investor, do this. And I say, go into Craigslist, which is still true. I can’t believe Craigslist is still around.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. Isn’t that funny?

Steven Jack Butala:
But it still works.

Jill K DeWit:
In its same basic archaic form. I can’t believe it hasn’t really evolved.

Steven Jack Butala:
I read somewhere like a year ago-

Jill K DeWit:
Is there even an app for it now? I don’t know if there is.

Steven Jack Butala:
I read somewhere a year ago that a couple of guys got together. They were either graduate students or PhD candidates. And they rewrote Craigslist for free and submitted it to get college credit. They submitted it the Craigslist itself and said, “You guys need to get in the 21st century. If you want to do it, here, it’s free, and we’ll support it.” And they’re like, “Nope.”

Jill K DeWit:
No, we’re not doing it.

Steven Jack Butala:
When have you ever heard anyone be successful in the tech industry by digging their heels in-

Jill K DeWit:
By not making changes.

Steven Jack Butala:
… and saying, “The old way’s better”?

Jill K DeWit:
That’s hilarious. Nope.

Steven Jack Butala:
Go to Craigslist, go to wherever you see real estate, either the wanted or where people are selling real estate and type this in, some version of this. Cash waiting for your unwanted rural vacant land, phone number. And it’s shocking. To this day, it’s shocking how many people-

Jill K DeWit:
How many people just pick up the phone and call you.

Steven Jack Butala:
… reach out to us, reach out to me specifically and say, “Well, I did my first land deal. I’m not a Land Academy member, but apparently this works. Tell me where to sign up.” Is that the absolute right way to get into this business? Not at all. But if you’ve got some Jill like moxie and you understand real estate in general, yeah, you can get away with that in certain markets, for sure.

Jill K DeWit:
Here’s the point of that exercise, if I can just jump in for a second.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s not like I was joking in the beginning talking about, well, I can just go find one online and I’ll buy it. So, you’re not necessarily in a lot of situations dealing directly with the seller. That’s the piece that we’re trying to hit home with.

Steven Jack Butala:
She’s exactly right. So in my Craigslist example, as well as the entire Land Academy model, there’s no stuff, we don’t buy for sale property. We buy property directly from an owner that’s off the market, which is why it’s such a great deal. And we generate that transaction. So my Craigslist example is equivalent to walking into a casino, pulling down a handle, and winning the first time, which never happens. It might happen on Craigslist once in a while. It might happen in a casino once in a while, but that’s not the business we’re in. We’re in it to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars a year.

Steven Jack Butala:
So how do you do your first land deal the right way? You do a ton of research about how we buy and sell property, how we orchestrate a blind offer campaign, how we get involved, all of our members, us included, on a daily basis are involved in Land Academy Discord to ask questions. You go through all the education. So starting today, you’re about two months, maybe three months away from your first acquisition.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s what I wrote down.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is not get an E-Trade account, deposit 10 grand and buy Tesla stock.

Jill K DeWit:
In an afternoon.

Steven Jack Butala:
In an hour. That’s not what this is. And for that reason, and I say this with gleaming pride, that’s why the whole world doesn’t get it. If you get it, you’re one of the few and you’re one of the Land Academy group of people that understand this. You’re patient and you’re analytical and you have a little bit of sales in you, or you have enough in you to know that you need a salesperson. Or vice versa, you have enough sales in you to understand you need a tech person.

Jill K DeWit:
You’re a data guy.

Steven Jack Butala:
It takes a few months. What do you have down?

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I was going to say, that was kind of funny, because that was my first point too. Even the Tesla example, I’m not going to go and get an account in an hour because I heard one newscast and dump all my money in it. I’m going to do some research. You should be doing a whole lot of research.

Steven Jack Butala:
Months of research.

Jill K DeWit:
Study the area. And then it’s not even studying the whole process, but it’s studying the areas that you’re thinking of doing this. We have a version of, it’s our red, yellow, green test, where we know how to look at an area and then really dissect it, and then pit regions or zip codes or something within that together to really fine tune and make sure we’re not making a mistake before we ever download any data and ever send out any mail. That’s not how you test an area, by the way. We don’t just let her rip.

Steven Jack Butala:
We don’t leave any of this to chance.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s no dart boards in our office. Jill had a, I’m going to let her describe it, but this week, actually … What is this, Tuesday? Tomorrow, we are launching our third Career Path, which is, if this is your career, then you need to look at joining Career Path. Jill had a conversation with somebody who signed up for it last week, who said, “Hundreds of thousands of dollars I made last year. I just quit my job. I’m scheduled to make one 1,500,000 this year.” So these are real stories that happen. I’m not sitting here trying to sell you anything. This person clearly gets it. Do you want to tell the story or?

Jill K DeWit:
You just did?

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh.

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t what else to add.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know if there’s much more to it. I tend to extrapolate all the numbers out of a story and just say the numbers.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s all you get out of that. I know. I understand. I can tell you where they live. I can tell you about their family. I can tell you what’s going on in their world right now. That’s okay. That’s why you have me.

Steven Jack Butala:
But there’s a methodical A to B to C way of buying real estate, all real estate, not just land, through doing a ton of research about defining your acquisition criteria, finding the properties that fit your acquisition criteria in general, sending everybody an offer with an actual price on it.

Jill K DeWit:
Step two.

Steven Jack Butala:
And then fielding those offers with somebody that-

Jill K DeWit:
Step three.

Steven Jack Butala:
… understands how to talk to people, unlike me, and buying the property and then reselling it for more quickly. That’s how you do this. And it doesn’t happen overnight.

Jill K DeWit:
No. So that’s why I said, so one is study the area, of course. Two, send mail. And three, answer the phone. This is about just buying it. Not selling it, not building a business, not quitting your job. That comes later. All this is about just starting with step one and making sure you buy it right. There’s a lot of research that we do that goes into not only picking areas and sending out the mail and pricing offers, and that’s on Steven’s side of the sheet. And then when it comes into me, there’s still due diligence involved. Let’s make sure we can do what we think we can do with this property. Do we really want it? Does it have the six A’s. Yes, hold onto your hat. There are six now. It used to be four A’s. Now there are six.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s going to be another show, where we’ll cover all that. But doing that. And before you even get to the due diligence part, one of the main steps people miss in how to buy your first parcel of land is answer the phone. People, they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just let it go to voicemail. See if they fill out this form online. I’m going to direct them here.” Don’t make it hard for them. Make it easy for them. That’s my best tip on buying your first parcel of land. You make it so darn easy and they love you, that they want to sell to you. And they’re like, “I just want to get X out of it. It’s yours.” And you go, “I’ll take it from here.”

Steven Jack Butala:
I spent almost 25 years making mistakes doing this. I did failure after failure, not so much failing, failing, but wow, I could have really done that better. I made some money, but we can do it better next time. So if you’re going to spend two or three months of research and some money on education or invest your time, however you look at this, why would you just buy one property? That’s what Land Academy’s all about. We’re not hobbyists here. We’re here to become multi-millionaires in 12 to 24 months. So, my point to writing this title was how to buy your first piece of property, it all starts with your first property, but how do you buy 1000 properties might be a better discussion.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s another show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Because it’s the same process.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s true.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly the same process.

Jill K DeWit:
I haven’t said that in a while, but that was one of our sayings. If you can buy one, you can buy 10. And if you can do 10, you can do 100. Hang on. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, well it’s House Academy. It’s the House Academy Show tomorrow, and we’re going to talk about house deals made as easy as land deals. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
People don’t realize that the same techniques that we use here also carries over to anything you want to buy.

Steven Jack Butala:
Strip malls, trailer parks, ice scrapers.

Jill K DeWit:
Once upon a time, there was going to be a car academy and a airplane academy and a boat academy, which there’s a lot more to those things, and we’re land people. But it’s the same concepts, especially for all ways of real estate. I know we’ll talk about that more tomorrow. Thanks for tuning in. By the way, don’t forget, if you’re a Land Academy member, make sure that you are with us on Discord. We are Steve and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Steve 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:

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.

How to Schedule Your Days Successfully (ReAir LA 1529)

September 13, 2022 / Jack Butala / Podcasts

How to Schedule Your Days Successfully (ReAir LA 1529)

Transcript:

S Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Hello.

S 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 sunny southern California.

S Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how to schedule your days successfully.

Jill DeWit:
All right, brain, go for it.

S Jack Butala:
Full disclosure, this is one of my favorite topics, and here’s why. Not because I love to live in my calendar, but I love to make money. And this is the only way I know how to actually run a crew and make money and sleep at night, quite honestly.

Jill DeWit:
I thought you were going to say, I love to make fun of Jill.

S Jack Butala:
No, I don’t want to … Jill’s amazingly good at this. She doesn’t realize it, but we’ll make fun of her in a minute.

Jill DeWit:
I kind of am. I mean, I do, on the big stuff. Maybe the little stuff, I kind of slack on, but remember I have my reasons why. We’ve talked about that.

S 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 if you’re already a member, please join us on Discord.

Jill DeWit:
Sandy wrote, “I just joined Land Academy a couple months ago. Honestly, I have stuck with my mailing procedure. Oh, I stuck with my mailing procedure instead of starting from scratch with Offers 2 Owners.” I’m curious what her old procedure was. I hope it wasn’t handwriting letters with the family at dining room.

S Jack Butala:
You’ll see. There’s a reason this made it into-

Jill DeWit:
Oh, it’s coming? Okay, good. I’m excited to see what this is. Okay, Sandy. Here we go. “Unfortunately, I received an email today that states I have to send my mailers first class.” Oh, that’s funny.

S Jack Butala:
But it’s hilarious.

Jill DeWit:
Here come the questions. “Number one, is it standard practice to send first class?”

S Jack Butala:
Not at all.

Jill DeWit:
“Number two, does O2O require that offers be sent first class?”

S Jack Butala:
Heck no.

Jill DeWit:
“Number three, how many people send first class versus standard?”

S Jack Butala:
Very, very few, if that.

Jill DeWit:
“Four, other than the obvious price difference, has anyone tested to see if there are any other differences, ie. performance, ease of mailing, et cetera? Thanks so much for any help you can give, Sandy.” Sorry.

S Jack Butala:
If you’re over 80, this matters.

Jill DeWit:
I don’t think it matters.

S Jack Butala:
If you’re over 80 and you’re receiving a letter. I don’t even look at how it’s stamped ever. I mean, none of us do.

Jill DeWit:
No. No, we don’t.

S Jack Butala:
First class is something that happened like in World War II and, I’m not exaggerating. No. And it goes on, everybody had some stuff to say about this, me included actually on … And if you want to see it all-

Jill DeWit:
Was she licking stamps?

S Jack Butala:
… it’s either he or she, we don’t know. And no, they were using click to mail. And so Click2Mail, it’s not even a competitor, but it’s another way you can send mail for twice as much money, and it’s very popular with non-members of Land Academy and everybody changes over. And even Sandy now goes on to say at the bottom of the string. It was too long for me to include in this.

Jill DeWit:
It said, so I get it? I hear ya?

S Jack Butala:
So Click2Mail went into this whole thing about, they sent it to all their people saying, “If you’re sending these, this and this, and here’s the regulations from the Post Office,” and they cited it all.

Jill DeWit:
How sneaky. That’s sneaky, making you think you have to do that.

S Jack Butala:
Our other members just jumped right in and took screenshots of how this is all fiction.

Jill DeWit:
Wow.

S Jack Butala:
So look, I don’t want to blow my own horn here, but I am for a second, our horn. O2O rocks. O2O is set up to do this. If you want a pizza place, use Click2Mail to send out a mailer.

Jill DeWit:
Like postcards or something.

S Jack Butala:
Or whatever, anything, colored stuff, all of that, colored mailers, four color bleed mailers. If you’re sending offers to owners, this is the place to do it. This is what we specialize in. This is all we do.

Jill DeWit:
Thank you.

S Jack Butala:
We’ll leave it at that. It’s ludicrous. There’s so many silly … Jill and I started Offers 2 Owners because of stuff like this, because we got sick of sending … We sent out millions of letters before O2O.

Jill DeWit:
And the expense.

S Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
The ease and the expense and setup fees and rigamarole. And that’s not cool.

S Jack Butala:
It’s you get fee’ed to death. There’s no fees with Offers 2 Owners. I’m not going to make this a commercial, but if you already send mail out, you know.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. So, well let me back up. The only difference I would think that someone would really consider sending first class mail is maybe they want to try to get it there faster. And you know what? I don’t think that matters.

S Jack Butala:
I don’t either.

Jill DeWit:
It’s really going to be days, not weeks, of a difference, number one. And number two, so what? Your first mail goes out, it takes two weeks to hit instead of one. Do I care? No.

S Jack Butala:
I agree, Jill.

Jill DeWit:
Because the cost saving is what’s important here. And that two weeks, if you do it right and you set up yourself in a system, you only have that two week waiting period one time, because now you’re in a system. So you know that every two weeks, this hits and then this hits, and you have it consistent. So you never have a lag. And that first two weeks, big flipping deal. That’s when you make sure your phone works, your spreadsheets are set up. You maybe start doing some recon about, well, if this comes back and it looks great, I’ve already got brokers that I’m to run this by. I’ve already pre asked some questions to the county. So I know how this goes. Whatever it is, you use that time wisely, and then you don’t think about it.

S Jack Butala:
Just about every mistake that a person can make sending mail out, offers to owners to buy real estate, I’ve made it.

Jill DeWit:
Yep. We’ve done that.

S Jack Butala:
And this is the 25 years of mistakes, results of how it works. And every single time or every let’s say monthly slot of people that join Land Academy, there’s two or three that say, “I don’t believe you, and I’m going to do it this way.” And they always come back.

Jill DeWit:
They spend more money.

S Jack Butala:
Come back and say, “Yeah, I guess that’s why they do it.”

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, oops.

S Jack Butala:
Mailer yield, like getting a couple more offers or a couple more signed purchase agreements out of a 3 or 4,000 unit mailer is an obsession with some people.

Jill DeWit:
I understand that.

S Jack Butala:
Which leads me into the topic today. Today’s topic, how to schedule your days successfully. This is the meat of the show. If you want to succeed at this, you’ve got to set goals and you have to set timeframe milestones, and you have to follow through on them. Man, I sound like your father.

Jill DeWit:
That’s true.

S Jack Butala:
And I know I do. And I know this is not the most favorite topic for a lot of people, but I can say this with confidence. All the people, with very, very, very few exceptions in the advanced group, live and die by their calendar. Not only with their land company, but in most cases with their engineering jobs or their other companies that they own. That’s the only way to get anything done. So this is how I do it. Picture a triangle on its nose, an equal triangle on its nose or a funnel like in the kitchen, where you’re funneling something, liquid into a smaller hole, or a motor oil, filling motor oil with a funnel.

S Jack Butala:
At the top is all these big picture goals that you have and what you want to accomplish. And as you move down the funnel, as the liquid moves down the funnel, you want to achieve that singular goal, which for new people should be getting that first deal purchased. That’s the first, the hardest part. Once you get that first deal purchased and then sold, you’re either going to love this or you’re going to hate it, or you’re going to see the light. It happened to me. I purchased and sold my first property quickly and it looked like a big, huge train wreck mess, but it was profitable. And then that was it. For some reason, I knew that I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. So you need to get a calendar. This is all in the education, by the way. But we don’t write these topics anymore. Our customer service people do, so people must be asking about it.

Jill DeWit:
I have some questions to ask you when you get your first point across. I have follow-up stuff.

S Jack Butala:
Okay, good. So, my first point is just about ending. Start with the end. If you really want to purchase a piece of property for less than half of its existing value in its existing condition, if that’s the bottom of your funnel, then work all the way back piece by piece by piece. And don’t rush through this. There’s nothing fast or easy about Land Academy. Our sales team, we have one sales person and he’s like, “Oh, you said stuff again that’s going to make my job harder.” This is not fast or easy. There’s a huge learning curve to it, and it’s very brainy. At least getting that first piece of property purchased is. So without going into all the details of do this, do this, do this, because that’s very personal. It ends with buying a piece of real estate for half, and it starts at the big top of the funnel with education and learning from other people, which if you’re listening to this show, you’re at the top of the funnel.

Jill DeWit:
Our team would like you to please speak on how you get your inbox to zero and then how you use your scheduling system with your emails.

S Jack Butala:
Right. So, this is self-taught. I don’t know why I started doing this. I started doing it about two or three years ago. I see a lot of people, maybe some people on the stage with me, use their inbox and it equals their to-do list. So something will come in or a phone call will come in, they stop what they’re doing, and then they deal with the phone call or they deal with the thing that popped into their inbox, and they do it. And that’s the fastest way to fail at anything.

Jill DeWit:
That’s very true. You can’t do that. We don’t do that. You have to schedule it out.

S Jack Butala:
You have to schedule your … You have to-

Jill DeWit:
Like have dedicated time.

S Jack Butala:
Yeah, exactly. Schedule all the tasks that you need, including hiring people. If you’re too bogged down and you can’t answer your own phone, which I understand, then schedule some time to hire PATLive or whoever you use to answer your phone. And any time that something comes in to that inbox, what I do is I either, in the morning I go through it all. Actually I do this two or three times a day when I have gaps of time.

Jill DeWit:
Perfect. I want to ask the questions about this. So it’s not like 9:00 AM, 1:00 PM, 3:00 PM.

S Jack Butala:
It’s like that.

Jill DeWit:
Okay. But it’s not in the calendar that way. It’s you do first thing in the morning, midday and whatever.

S Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
Okay, cool.

S Jack Butala:
It’s in the calendar.

Jill DeWit:
Okay. That’s why I’m asking. All right.

S Jack Butala:
Clear out your inbox is in my calendar three times a day.

Jill DeWit:
Okay, cool.

S Jack Butala:
Actually it’s rolled into, I do a bunch of stuff before 9:00. One of the things is clean out your inbox. It’s not scheduled in the middle of the day. I just naturally do it. And then at the end of the day, I have a bunch of day end activities that I do, which is clean out my mailbox. So unless something’s on fire, and even then, if something’s in there that I get … Right now, Jill and I are doing all of our estate planning. So if I get an email, for example, from the lawyers that are asking me questions or clarifying stuff, I don’t answer it. What I do is I schedule it to be answered the next day or whenever it’s appropriate.

Jill DeWit:
That’s the tip. I want to touch on that for just a second. And that’s a good tip and that’s how I do it too. You could in an email, schedule it in 365, or depending what email system you have, you could just copy and paste or highlight, whatever, put the meat of that into an invite on your calendar. And then you delete the email. That’s the whole point is get the email down, have it on your calendar, and you don’t stress about it. You don’t have to think about it. You know it’s going to get done. You know when it’s going to get done because it’s scheduled, and you have all the information that you need to do that.

S Jack Butala:
This part of what I was going to talk about today, and I’m glad you brought it up. This takes all the stress out of my life. I was a stressed out mess in college because I didn’t have a system like this. I didn’t know what to study for or when. I was always behind. I was always running around, a running around mess to get to classes or to get to the library or get textbooks or whatever.

Jill DeWit:
It sounds like a normal guy thing at that age.

S Jack Butala:
I failed at it.

Jill DeWit:
It’s a normal guy thing, right? You had to learn.

S Jack Butala:
I didn’t literally fail, I got out of there okay. So no, you learn stuff the hard way. And then when you get a job, here’s the thing that I really want to make this clear, because you get out of school and you get a job and then somebody else has a calendar for you. And if you work for a huge company like Jill did right out of the shoot, they’re telling you where to stand and what to say and how to do it. They’re training you. So, you get real lazy. As an entrepreneur, you need to make a schedule and you need to stick to it harder than you did when you were employed.

Jill DeWit:
You know what’s funny, I have something to share when you’re done.

S Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
So I started out that way and then I ended that way because before I had a job with a time clock basically, I had all the freedom to do what I wanted. And I used to care because my dad taught me the spiral daily calendar things, he carried one, so I started carrying one. I always had a calendar. And then I went to, it was before cell phones. It was a little, like a Sharp flip-up calendar thing. It was a little electronic thing. It wasn’t FranklinCovey.

S Jack Butala:
Oh, I remember that too.

Jill DeWit:
It was Sharp or something like that.

S Jack Butala:
It was called a daily planner or something.

Jill DeWit:
But it was a little thing that you could put in your purse. There was no color involved. It was the one color. It was a really cool thing. It didn’t interact with anything, but it was electronic.

S Jack Butala:
I remember that.

Jill DeWit:
And I could use it to put notes in there. So I started doing that. I’ve always been very minutely calendar focus detailed. I just have relaxed it over the years to a point that it makes you uncomfortable, but it still works for me.

S Jack Butala:
No, I think now you’re Johnny on the spot.

Jill DeWit:
Okay, good.

S Jack Butala:
I think that when Jill got let out of her cage from her W2 job and we joined forces-

Jill DeWit:
I got really comfortable a little bit. For the beginning, that’s true, because you know what, I needed a little downtime.

S Jack Butala:
No, I understand. I completely understand.

Jill DeWit:
It’s like someone, like the people that sell a company and they hole themselves up in Mexico in a hotel penthouse for a year. It was kind of like that, but not like that. Like Brockmire, I can afford to take a little break there and catch my breath.

S Jack Butala:
Well speaking of breaks, this is literally what Jill and I do. We schedule our breaks.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, fun time.

S Jack Butala:
So sometimes we have whole days where we’re not going to do anything, and we, without guilt, go have a rip-roaring blast because I know everything’s going to be scheduled or is scheduled. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do on Monday morning, and I can take Monday afternoon off with no guilt. You have to schedule everything. And in the beginning, I would schedule every single tiny little thing. If you’re going to workout for 20 minutes in the morning, schedule it, and then do it and mark it off and give yourself a reward, some reward.

Jill DeWit:
I know Land Academy members, I love this, that are huge fishermen, for example, and they’re only doing like one deal a month, one big deal a month. And it’s like hunting week or fishing week or every Friday, every Thursday and Friday, whatever it is, they schedule it out.

S Jack Butala:
Drinking week.

Jill DeWit:
And I love it. Okay, that might be you. Do you do that?

S Jack Butala:
No.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

S Jack Butala:
If I do, it’s with you.

Jill DeWit:
Oh, okay. That’s true. That’s awesome.

S Jack Butala:
And this leads me to my final point. So great, Jack, how do you do it? I cannot say enough positive stuff about Microsoft 365. I think that if you’re in the beginning of your career or even in the middle and you’re not using it, I urge you to take a look at it, and here’s why. It will grow with you. There’s different levels and subscriptions. There’s no upfront cost. The initial subscription’s free.

Jill DeWit:
We get nothing, by the way. We’re not paid anything.

S Jack Butala:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
We’re not affiliates or anything. I wish we were.

S Jack Butala:
You can build an empire on Microsoft 365 with limitless employees and all the access levels. You can lock it down. You can launch websites from it. You can take it … I don’t even, we probably use 3% of what it’s capable of.

Jill DeWit:
It’s true.

S Jack Butala:
It ties to everything. So, every employee around the world. And it’s universal. You talk to somebody in the Philippines and ask them to use Microsoft 365, they’re going to say, “Oh yeah, I don’t need any training on that. I know exactly how to do it.” Google Drive is a go-to free tool for kindergartners, and Microsoft 365 is for people who want a career. For instance, I was the administrator and set it all up. At some point, I stopped being the administrator and we hired somebody, and then she became the administrator, Erin in her office. So I didn’t have to any longer, and then she managed it. And there’s nothing really to manage. It’s a file sharing system. It’s everything that you could want to run a land business. And its costs, you pay by employee, so you can completely control it. It’s totally affordable. Jill’s right. There’s no money for this that we get.

Jill DeWit:
It’s cool.

S Jack Butala:
And it loops you into Outlook, which we all have used at one point. People have tried to create a better product and not succeeded.

Jill DeWit:
So we not only talked about everything, our scheduling and our tips, but what we use. So if you’re not set up now, I don’t know what to say.

S Jack Butala:
I will not leave my desk at the end of the day, at the end of a work day with anything in my inbox, in my voicemail or any missed calls that aren’t rescheduled, those three things.

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

S Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called Career Path: What We’ve Learned. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill DeWit:
That was awesome. You covered a lot. You covered way more than was asked of you. So I think that was really beneficial. I’m sure it was beneficial. So, thank you. If you need access to any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers and FEMA flood map overlays, check out NeighborScoop.com or ParcelFact.com, created by investors, that’s us, for investors like you. We are Steve and Jill.

S Jack Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information.

Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.

S 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: