Land Academy Show

Undoing Old Real Estate Habits (LA 1374) 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 sunny southern California. Steven Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about undoing old real estate habits. Yesterday, Jill and I were lucky enough to be the guests on somebody else's show, where they primarily flip houses, and not to our surprise, but maybe to you as a listener your surprise, we were explaining to seasoned real estate professionals why sending out mail is the best way to create deal flow for yourself, and to create the best opportunity to find the cheapest property on the buy side, whether you're going to renovate it or not. There were a lot of jaws just on the desk, on the other side of the camera where people were just saying... These are people that are older than me. Jill DeWit: It was cool. It was flipping America. I don't know if you guys know I'm Roger Blankenship, I think it is. We had a really great conversation. Steven Jack Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: Before and after, and then I got a really nice followup email from him. Steven Jack Butala: Oh, you did? Jill DeWit: Yeah. It's going to tie into this. Got a nice email, after the show going, "Wow, oh my goodness." Literally saying, "I just learned some stuff." I'd love to talk about it more when we get into the show, because this is what happens. Steven Jack Butala: Good. Jill DeWit: We're undoing old real estate habits, and there's just another professional that said, "Oh my gosh, there's a little bit better way I could be doing this part of my business." Steven Jack Butala: Yeah. It made me personally question who our customer is, Land Academy, but we'll talk about that in a second, too. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Jack Butala: I thought I knew, but like everything, I didn't really know. 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. Jill DeWit: Matthew wrote, "My name is Matt. I'm 24 years old, and I'm just finishing graduate school. I have some money saved up and I'm looking to start my land business before jumping into a full-time career. I have always dreamed of being an entrepreneur, and I'm particularly interested in real estate. Combine the two, and now I have a land business. Cheers, and good luck to all." That's super cool. Steven Jack Butala: On land investors, when people join our group, we ask them to just- Jill DeWit: Introduce. Steven Jack Butala: Yeah, and that's what this is. Jill DeWit: Say hi, introduce yourself. Steven Jack Butala: What this question or this comment caused me to think about, personally, and if you don't know already, Jill runs all the real estate part of all of these companies, and I handle the education part of it, and the lines of business, like NeighborScoop and O2O, and things like that. Jill gets to do all the fun stuff. Jill DeWit: Oh, right. Steven Jack Butala: I get to do the administrative stuff. Jill DeWit: Thanks. Last time I checked, you picked. You picked what you want to work on. Steven Jack Butala: This is causing me, lately, especially with the show we did yesterday... We're talking seasoned real estate professionals. It's caused me to question who our customer is, and I've decided I'd love to hear your opinion on this, Jill, because it ties right into Matt's thing here. Who's our customer? Who's the Land Academy customer? And I think there's two. Jill DeWit: Oh, I think there's many. Steven Jack Butala: Oh, really? Jill DeWit: Oh gosh, yes. Steven Jack Butala: You can't profile it? Jill DeWit: Nope. Just like our buyers, I stopped trying to assume I know what people want. The first time I assumed that no one's going to want this property way out here, you got to take a four wheel drive to it, I sold it so fast.

How Much Monthly Income is Right for You (LA 1373) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how much monthly income is right for you. A lot of times, Jill and I have real technical shows like why Black Knights new products are so awesome. And a lot of times we don't have technical shows. This is a non-technical one. These are fun for me. Jill DeWit: Exactly. I'm glad. Steven 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. Jill DeWit: I hate to tell you this. I'm not sure we're recording. Oh, it is. Sorry. You know what's so funny, I can't see from our, we moved our screens around a little bit and I usually see this little ticker going along and I didn't see the ticker going along. I'm like, uh-oh, but we are in good shape. Thank you very much. Hey, it's Friday. Thank you for embracing the casual here. Okay. Joseph wrote, "Hi all. I have sent out a mailer recently and have received several responses. A lot of the interests I received has been for parcels that are completely wooded. The lots have been located inside smaller cities, like less than 5,000 people, just by happenstance, so hunting on them would be out. My question, is this, does anyone have an idea on how to spin a tale that could sell completely forested property or is it even worth pursuing? I have not yet purchased any of them so far, but they're definitely in ideal locations. I would appreciate any advice anyone has on this subject." You know what, this sings to me. Steven Butala: It sings to me too. Jill DeWit: Because it took me a while, Joseph, to get this, not, it didn't take me awhile, but I had to embrace this concept. And I think this is what's going on. Just because it's not your cup of tea doesn't mean it's somebody else's. I, early on, was shocked and amazed by the number of people that want really remote properties. And then I was shocked and amazed by people who want this kind of access. And then I was amazed by people who want this size and this, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Steven Butala: Doesn't matter at all. Jill DeWit: You are perceiving what you think might be a negative thing about a property is a positive thing to the right person. And all you have to do is properly convey whatever it is. Celebrate this whatever attribute and I mean, every property has an attribute. There are properties out there that are so heavily wooded that someone's like, "I love it. I can have a little path and a hidden driveway and nobody knows I'm back there." Steven Butala: That's me. I fall into that group. Jill DeWit: See, there you go. And there's other people like no, I'm spending a million dollars on this house. I want everybody who drives right by to see my million dollar plantation, whatever it is. I have properties that are in every possible part of they've been cleared, they've not been cleared. They have a cliff, they don't have a cliff. Whatever it is. There's a few things that you want to always check the boxes and just make sure you're addressing. Those are the five A's that you know about Joseph, which are also I'll state them just real quickly here. Access, attribute, acreage, affordability, and the new one we've added, which is alive. When you buy a property, make sure they can- Steven Butala: They can sign the deed over. Jill DeWit: Exactly. It's not going to be a nightmare getting it out of their name into your name. Or the person who died 50 years ago into your name. So you want to address those things, but you can't assume, and you can't think that someone's going to want it. There's somebody, there's probably a lot of people who would love this.

Interview with Member Johnny Newsom (LA 1372) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill Dewitt: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill Dewitt: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk with Land Academy member Johnny Newsom from Clarksville, Tennessee. Welcome Johnny. Johnny Newsom: Hey you guys. Nice to see you guys. Jill Dewitt: Yay. Steven Butala: All right. Right before we started, you were just mentioning that you've seen a few of these episodes, so welcome to the co-host of the show. Johnny Newsom: Yeah, yeah. I feel like I made it. Jill Dewitt: Yay, on the other side of the camera. Johnny Newsom: Yeah. Yeah. Jill Dewitt: Awesome. Cool. Did you tell anybody you're doing this today or- Johnny Newsom: Yeah. Yeah. Told my mom, yeah. I told everybody. I was like, "Hey, I'm going to be on that podcast I'm always telling you guys about. Jill Dewitt: And did mom say, "What's a podcast?" Johnny Newsom: No. She listens to you guys too. She's kind of a little bit like my business partner. Jill Dewitt: That's fantastic. Johnny Newsom: Yeah, yeah. Jill Dewitt: Okay, this is super cool. Steven Butala: That's great. Jill Dewitt: Next time, we'll have mom on. Steven Butala: Yeah. Johnny Newsom: Yeah. Steven Butala: Great. Johnny Newsom: Yeah. Steven Butala: It's going to air two weeks from this week. I'm not sure exactly which day. Johnny Newsom: Oh yeah. Two weeks from today? Jill Dewitt: It'll be not this week, but the week after. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill Dewitt: So you can plan for it. We'll let you know. Johnny Newsom: Yeah, okay. Yeah, sounds good. Jill Dewitt: Awesome. So tell us, if you would, what's your background? What you do before you came to Land Academy? Johnny Newsom: Yeah, so I was a little bit of an unusual background. I don't really come from a corporate world, or even a business... I kind of come from more of a... before this, my primary source of income was really just buying and selling furniture online. I would get free furniture off of Craigslist and sell it on marketplace. And then before that, I was flipping iPhones and stuff and working a job and flipping iPhones on the side. And doing furniture, I was able to do that full time and not have to have a job. I did that for about a year and a half, and being in the car a lot, it allowed me to listen to a lot of podcasts. So I was kind of trying to figure out a way how to do the same thing with a bigger object with larger spreads and yeah, that's how I came across this. Jill Dewitt: That's cool. Okay, I got to ask. What were your numbers like? You would just get them for free basically, find some people that just want to get rid of them quick and you you'd just come take them and then- Johnny Newsom: Yeah. Jill Dewitt: [crosstalk 00:02:46] a couple bucks and then did you have to deliver them all? Johnny Newsom: Yeah, I delivered them all. I was typically doing anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 a month. Steven Butala: That's great. Johnny Newsom: Just getting free furniture. Yeah, you'd be surprised. If you find a metro area and you just look on Craigslist, people give away stuff that's like 100, $200 and you pick up a decent amount of that and you just put it on Marketplace. It really was a nice... yeah, it [inaudible 00:03:15] see the intrinsic that people would give stuff away that was actually kind of valuable, you know? So like going into land, it wasn't a large... it wasn't a large leap to be able to see like, "Oh, this is a different object doing a similar thing with [inaudible 00:03:33]" Steven Butala: So what are your numbers like with land? Johnny Newsom: So with land, we're starting... last year, I kind of did... I was just getting into it, so I did smaller deals. And also, a lot of options and whole selling type deals. So last year, my bills were kind of $3,

This Amazing American Real Estate Market 2020 (LA 1371) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about this amazing American real estate investment market in 2020. Who would have thought? I never would have thought. Jill DeWit: I know. Steven Butala: It all comes down to one thing, one word, migration. I've been studying this now since March. Jill DeWit: Yep. I just talked to a guy the other day, as a matter of fact, who's in Texas. And I said ... We were talking about next places to mail. We were talking about this is what you do and what's great about you. I said, "Just do it like Steven. You need to spend a weekend, go into a dark room and figure out what's happening. Look at where people are going. Look at what people are doing. Look at what people are buying." We all know they're leaving New York. We all know they're leaving Chicago. We all know they're leaving LA. It's obvious. So where are they going? And that's, you just need to be ahead of. Steven Butala: Here's some staggering statistics on this. In a regular year, just in a normal ... This is not normal, obviously, but in a normal ... This shocked me when I first read it a few years ago. 20% of the people in this country move every year. Well, that's double and they're expecting maybe triple now. So what does that do to the real estate market? Everybody's just, you might as well throw a ticker tape parade because especially if you're a real estate agent, all the fees that are associated with moving. I read somewhere that U-Haul, the company where you rent the trucks to move, I think you were telling me, it's like, if you want to know where to send mail and where people are moving, find out what U-Haul rates are. Because if you're moving from someplace to California, that U-Haul costs $3,000 to rent, but if you're moving out of Los Angeles to somewhere else, it costs $200. The numbers are staggering when it comes to, when you really think about 40% of the population in this country is going to move this year and next year. I mean, that's like 115 million- Jill DeWit: More than ... Oh, yeah. There was that- Steven Butala: What are there? 300, 400 million people in the country? Jill DeWit: It was all the remote workers. That was that article that I had the other day, I sent you. Steven Butala: Do you have the numbers on that? Jill DeWit: No, I don't, but it was staggering, the billion people. Steven Butala: There's like 200 million people in this country are working remotely. Jill DeWit: Yeah, and they're moving. Steven Butala: And they're tired of the smaller houses. Jill DeWit: Yeah. And they don't have to anymore. Steven Butala: There's a run on refrigerators and large appliances right now because people are staying home. Probably many of them, maybe us included, permanently. So everybody's rushing. And it's not affecting their paycheck. If they do anything online, it's not affecting anything. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steven Butala: So it's really affecting people that, like restaurant. Stuff that, where your revenue stream's in the public. So all of that adds up to positive stuff for people like us from a real estate investment standpoint. Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Is that Walder? Steven Butala: Yeah, Walder. Jill DeWit: Okay. Walder wrote, "Hi. So a few months ago around April, I was thinking to stay away from infill lots due to COVID and builders won't be building. But fast forward to today. Is it safe to say infill lots are good to market to again, since the housing market is hot? And if not, which land type would you recommend going to 2021?" Great question. Steven Butala: Yeah,

Self Study Discipline Sets You Apart from Everyone Else (LA 1370) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land, investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how self study discipline sets you apart from everybody else. We talked about this a little bit at the end of the show yesterday. Self study is not for everybody. Jill DeWit: No, I think it's not for most. Steven Butala: That's what I think. Jill DeWit: Yeah, and I think we're all experiencing that right now. If you have children right now at home going to school- Steven Butala: Jill, I didn't think of that. Jill DeWit: I think you really see it also. There are kids, I'm not kidding, I know I would have been that... You got to tape them to their chair. Steven Butala: I was that kid like that. Were you? Jill DeWit: Yeah. As a kid, I would've sucked at this. I did like going to school, though, I have to say. When I was growing up, going to school, sitting in the classroom, I enjoyed it. I did well at school. I was kind of geeky. I got good grades, kind of boring. I never ditched until my senior year, but this would have really been hard for me. Steven Butala: My whole take on school then and now was I really could be out making money right now, instead I'm sitting here listening to this old person. I say that now knowing full well that there's people listening to this saying, "I could be making money sitting here and listening to this old person." Jill DeWit: Yeah. Like us. Yep. Steven Butala: So my whole plan, we'll talk about it in a second here about this whole topic, is there's 10 massive barriers to success. Not even ironically, there's 10 massive barriers to success buying and selling land. One of them is this self study part of this. We'll get into what the barriers are and how to overcome them or how to determine whether or not this might not be the thing for you. Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Carly wrote, "Where do I go for Facebook help with ads and marketing? I've been posting ads for months without great results. I'd like to hire someone to just look at my account and ads and make sure I'm maximizing my marketing. I have received emails about my Facebook Pixel not being active, and I just need some overall guidance on the variables. Thank you." Steven Butala: All right. So before I answer the actual Facebook question, there's a much, much bigger issue here and it actually is very pertinent to the topic that we're going to discuss here in a second. The answers to every single question that you have, with the exception of what's the purpose of life, or is God real, is in your pocket or in your purse right now. Every single one. And so I get these kinds of questions from our kids. Remember when you're a kid and it's like, "Hey, why don't you go look at..." You ask a question it's like, "Why don't you go look it up?" Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steven Butala: Didn't you hate that? Jill DeWit: I did. Steven Butala: I don't hate that. Jill DeWit: You know what I think that was? It was an answer for, "I don't know and I'm embarrassed to tell you." Seriously. "Jill, this is a learning experience. I think you should go look it up," which is code for, "Hell, I do not know." Steven Butala: And I hated that. I hated going to look stuff up. Well, I don't hate pulling up my phone and looking up something now because it takes it's immediate gratification on all of this. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Butala: So as far as Facebook goes, yeah, there's two types of Facebook. Ninety-eight percent of the planet knows about how they use Facebook, which is pop open your phone, oh it's my friend's birthday, there's an ad, there's an ad,

State of Land Investment Education Online (LA 1369) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining real estate investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: I'm Jill DeWit broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about the state of land, investment education out there online. Jill's like, what the heck is this about? It's shocking to see how many experts about buying and selling land there are out there lately. Jill DeWit: I know. I bet we've created about 99.9% of them. Steven Butala: I'm sure of it. Jill DeWit: Maybe 100% of them. Steven Butala: It's not just land its everything. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Butala: It's just amazing how the internet obviously, is still super new. Facebook started in what? 2009? Not started, but became a thing? Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Steven Butala: Eight or nine-ish, I think. So it's not 10 years old, and it's just amazing that- Jill DeWit: YouTube. Steven Butala: ... it taps into like [crosstalk 00:01:00]. It just taps into some kind of some certain personality types, just their need to not only express their opinion, but be an expert on something when they're not. I'm not complaining, I think it's funny, I really do. Jill DeWit: The only thing that's kind of frustrating, it's kind of like, we've been watching the news a lot the last... For the last several weeks, we've all been watching a lot of news, right? Because of the obvious things going on. It's funny how many there looks like seemingly 19 year olds talking about elections and history. I'm like, "What do you mean the last election when you were in middle school?" I have a real hard time swallowing that one, but it's [crosstalk 00:01:47] funny. Steven Butala: I understand that. You know what? Let's take a question and then we'll talk about it. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Butala: I understand the issue is we have a niche company. A bunch of niche companies, actually, but it's just funny when... I understand a new station being niche for people under 25. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steven Butala: I have no issues with that, but when it starts to really seriously creep into the mainstream and it's just funny. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of the members, our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Lucas wrote, "I want to share with everyone my thoughts on my current state with my land business, mostly just to get stuff off my chest. I love it. I haven't posted in a while because it's been a roll in of activity." Okay, usually that's a good thing. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: It's cool. "First the Land Academy support emails have been perfectly timed. I just got the week five email Sellers Calling Back, which covers handling inbound calls and hate. I've been amazed at the timing of these emails." Thank you very much. I would like to take some credit for that. "They come into my inbox almost to the day, that is relevant for me. This has a huge boost because it tells me that I'm on the right track with where I should be. Moving along quickly, but not too quickly. My first week of inbound calls has resulted in numerous emails and roughly two dozen calls. About half of those have been hate, which has been awful to deal with." Steven Butala: Yep. Jill DeWit: "Between email and phone, probably 12 sellers interested in accepted offers. I'm finding that my offers made sense from comp to comp standpoint, but I really didn't factor in the rate of sales in that area. So I may not be able to sell as quickly as hoped. Also, learning a lot about the variance that can be seen between zip codes within a given county. In future mailers that will be definitely a big part of my pricing process. Simply overwhelmed with all these calls coming in over the last week, I just can't process them fast enough." Steven Butala: Good for you.

How to Win in Life (LA 1368) Transcript: Steven J Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill K DeWit: Howdy. Steven J 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 sunny Southern California. Steven J Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how to win at life. What does that have to do with real estate? Jill K DeWit: How are we going to cover this 10 minutes or whatever? How funny. Yep, this is it. 10 minutes, we got this. Steven J Butala: This is going to be fun. It's Friday. Jill K DeWit: Okay. Steven J Butala: It's Friday, and at the time of Jill and I are recording this, which is the 29th of October, it's pre... Jill K DeWit: Election day. Steven J Butala: It's pre-Halloween, and the elections are done by the time this airs. Jill K DeWit: Oh yeah, that's true. Steven J Butala: So- Jill K DeWit: Hasn't happened yet. Steven J Butala: Maybe the whole world's on fire right now, we don't know. Jill K DeWit: We don't know. Steven J Butala: We're happily sitting here on October 29th telling you how to win at life, but we could all be dead right now. Jill K DeWit: Oh my gosh, thanks. Steven J 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. Jill K DeWit: Okay, so Colin put a clip, is that what this is? Steven J Butala: This is an excerpt from the newsletter that I wrote and I'll read it, because I wrote it. But you can read the headline. Jill K DeWit: So, Colin wrote, a clip below from the Land Academy Newsletter. I'd like to understand the strategy a little bit better. Can anyone unpack it a little more? Thank you. Steven J Butala: Yes, I will unpack it, happily. In quotes, this is what I wrote. "I'd like to see properties with no improvement value, which is land, in ZIP Codes where the spread between the average completed sale value and the for sale values is the largest." Let me paraphrase. I go to ZIP Code 85258, which is Central Scottsdale, and I take all the properties out of the dataset. This is all free and I can do it in seconds on DataTree. Take all the properties out that have structures on it, so now I just have vacant land that's theoretically buildable in 85258. I look at the for sale values of those properties. So, there's going to be a bunch of properties that are for sale, and I look at the ones that have sold. Here's all the values of those that have been sold, and you can do this on Zillow in seconds. Then I divide by the square footage and say, all right, the stuff that's for sale is $42 a foot, and the stuff that's been sold is $82 a foot. Oh my gosh. I can pay retail and still make money. Well, wait a minute. I'm going to pit 85258 against 85251, which is an adjacent ZIP Code, and on and on and on. Why stop there? Why don't I just do every single ZIP Code simultaneously in the country and the first top five that have the widest variance where there's an accurate dataset, that's where I send mail. Then I go on to say, this tells me where to send blind offers. This is what I just said. Then I'd like to see within those geographic parameters what acreage range is the widest. So, if I just look at five acre properties, is that gap that I just described wider than 10 acres or less? This tells me which owners or to whom to send the blind offers, the owners of the larger or smaller acreage property, however the data comes out. After scrubbing down the dataset, I'd like to know what the actual prices are. This tells me how much to send each offer and how to price it. Jill K DeWit: You know what this tells me? Steven J Butala: Jill, partner in life, I was just going to ask you, does this make sense to you? Jill K DeWit: Yes, but you know what this tells me? There's not an Easy Button for this. You got to think about some of this. Steven J Butala: If this is what I had to do today,

Simplify Your Acquisition Process (LA 1367) Transcript: Steven J Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill K DeWit: Hello. Steven J 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 sunny Southern California Steven J Butala: Today jill and I talk about simplifying your acquisition process. You know, Jill, this is one of those topics where it's like you just have to follow this kind of real simple process. I think it's simple. It's not simple. It's 10 steps. It's not like... I think that real estate investment is got this... It's almost like fishing in this. I just don't see it that way. I see it as just you do X, you're going to get results. Jill K DeWit: How do you see it as fishing? Some people set it up like that? Steven J Butala: Well, I think that if you look at it like... I think most people look at it like raising a child, there's so many variables and so much stuff you have to do and you have to give it constant attention. And if it's not going the way that you want it to go, you got to get back on track. And it's this big, huge thing. And I don't see real estate investment like that at all. I think before data, before the prevalence of data, it was a lot like that. Jill K DeWit: Maybe. Steven J Butala: It was sort of like let's see what happens. Jill K DeWit: Maybe because before data, it was harder to... You know what? Even before data though, there were ways to find out properties that are coming available, like read the obituaries. I hate to say it. There's things like that you could do back then. Didn't necessarily have to be word of mouth. Steven J Butala: Well, that was using data. Jill K DeWit: That's what I'm saying. Steven J Butala: It was a crude way of data. Jill K DeWit: Yup. What's so funny? Steven J Butala: I don't know. Obituaries got into it, but I like it. Jill K DeWit: Just came to my head. How would I, if I had no way of knowing what's going to come available on our block, not kidding, I'd get out the paper, I'd... Like 1972, let's just say it is 1972. I'd be reading the obituaries and I'd be figuring out, "Oh, it looks like Mrs. Smith is probably going to move." Steven J Butala: Oh my God, let's talk about this. If there was no data. I can give you a personal story. When my sister and I left the house and went to college, my mom had her sights set on moving out of the big house, that house that we were raised in, and buying a small house for cash. And she had three blocks in the town that I grew up in picked out. And she went with a sticky note on all the houses that she wanted. Do you know... Did I ever tell you this story? Jill K DeWit: I do know this story. Yup. Steven J Butala: And she wrote a sticky note, stuck it on the door and bought a house. And so in the first live event that we did a few years ago, I ran a video with this guy. This is again, before huge amounts of data was available. This guy was a licensed real estate agent and he took the time to fill out- Jill K DeWit: Full on purchased the contracts. Steven J Butala: To fill out the real estate agent licensed contract, filled it all out with a price in there and everything. And I identified a one square mile of properties that he believed were you could buy for cheaper and sell for more. And dropped in everybody's mail slot. Jill K DeWit: Yep. I remember that. Steven J Butala: And bought a ton of properties and retired and resold them. Some of them he kept for... So yeah, there's always a way to do this. Jill K DeWit: Correct. Steven J Butala: I don't even think that's speculation. Jill K DeWit: Right. Steven J Butala: So I guess I wonder where the disconnect is for anyone who wants to buy undervalued property. That's my big picture question. Jill K DeWit: Do you know what I think some of it is? It's maybe not being ready for it. Like you have to give an offer and be ready for it.

How to Execute an Offer Campaign for Commercial Property (LA 1366) Transcript: Steven J Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill K DeWit: Hello. Steven J 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 sunny Southern California. Steven J Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how to execute an offer campaign for commercial property. This came from a very robust and detailed request from one of our members. They asked Jill actually, and she shared it with me about, Hey, there's a commercial real estate crisis out there right now. How can we make some money off that? How do we send offers to, let's say, office building owners who haven't been paying their mortgage [inaudible 00:00:38] or not? To which I will explain. Jill K DeWit: This is for you, Dan. Steven J Butala: There's a dataset for all of this stuff. And the data just keeps getting better and better and better, and the opportunities are getting better and better. It's funny when you're reading the headlines, all this tragedy, my first reaction is, where there's tragedy, there's a lot of opportunity in real estate. Jill K DeWit: That's true. Steven J 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. Jill K DeWit: I was going to say, I just paused to think about that. It's probably stock market, too. Steven J Butala: Yeah. Jill K DeWit: People don't realize you can make money on the way down and the way up. Sometimes more money on the way down than you can make on the way up. Steven J Butala: Yeah. Jill K DeWit: It's very interesting. So yep. Okay. Larry wrote, "Good afternoon, all. What tool or tools do you use for looking at days on market? Any insights and tips for someone new to this would be greatly appreciated." Steven J Butala: You know, Jill, I saw that you actually personally responded to this question on land investors. Jill K DeWit: I did. Steven J Butala: So, tell us where you get DOM. Jill K DeWit: I copied you. Steven J Butala: No. No, you didn't. Jill K DeWit: From the Redfin, Redfin data center. And I think I put the link in there for him, so he can go look. And I did say spend some time in here. You could pick large MSA. You can drill down by zip code. There's many ways you can do it. You can track it. I know that. that's the thing too. You want to know the days on market are good in an area, but you also want to see that they're getting better in that area. You want to see them going lower and lower and lower, not higher and higher and higher kind of thing so ... Steven J Butala: For years and years and centuries and centuries and decades, we've all been working, or I have at least, under the guise of real estate speculation, which just cracked me up because about 10 years ago, let's say 2009, 2010-ish, all this data started coming out, these websites like realtor.com and redfin.com. And then about 10 years earlier, not necessarily for the real estate industry, but for oil and gas and insurance and stuff, companies like CoreLogic started popping up, where they were aggregating all this data that was out there that was public. CoreLogic started as a way to aggregate the assessor's tax rolls, the treasurer and assessor's tax rules for each County. And it was real valuable for insurance companies. And eventually, it found its way to people like us, who are real estate investors. And it took the speculation out of this. Well, because it's been around for so long, there are many, many people. And because of channels like HGTV, speculation is still out there as, yeah, well, yeah, if you're going to buy and sell real estate, you're going to have to go take this big risk and take this chance. Let's go buy this house, see if we can renovate it, see what's behind those walls. Let's break into the walls and find the mold and solve it. And, Oh,

New Weekly Live Informational Webinar (LA 1365) Transcript: Steven J Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill K DeWit: Hello. Steven J Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill K DeWit: And Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny, southern California. Steven J Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about Jill's new weekly live informational webinar. I described it a little bit yesterday, a week or so ago. Jill did kind of a live free Facebook, YouTube, hour-long talk about one specific topic. In that case, it was how to adjust your purchase price, adjust it down after you send an offer out based on looking at the property saying hey, it doesn't have access or there's some issue with it. How to successfully deal with that and accomplish it with a seller without having the seller's mind blown. And so it got a massive positive response. And so everybody was kind of typing in what else Jill could provide, what other types of little, maybe 30 minute, free, little tiny components of buying and selling land successfully. And it caught on. It caught on because Jill responded to it. Jill K DeWit: Yeah. The month before, it was due diligence. I'm trying to think what I did before that too. I've been doing it every month. And then we realized that there's just such a demand that people are saying can we do more? And so I was already thinking about it. And we'll talk more at some other time. Steven J Butala: You notice when people... People say thank you to us all the time, but when they say, "Hey, you know, that was awesome, but I would love to know about acts." And they start giving us topic ideas. As crazy as it sounds, it's hard to come up... It's time-consuming to come up with topic ideas that people respond to well. There's all kinds of stuff I'd love to talk about, but no one's going to listen to it all. But when they tell you what they want to hear, when you tell us what you want to hear, we'll produce it. So please tell us. 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. Jill K DeWit: Carly wrote, "Hi, other than looking at lot lines. How do I find out if a piece of land can be parceled out? Is this a hard process? Does it depend on the state/county? I'm looking in blank county, blank state, 50 acres." You're welcome. Steven J Butala: Subdividing, or she says parcel out, is complicated as hell. And it's so intriguing, I'll tell ya. You know, all of us, at some point in the land business, me included, take a look at a 50 or 40 acre property. And you say, you know what, I can buy this 40 acre property for 25,000 bucks. I can create 40 one acre properties, selling for $10,000 each, and retire. Jill K DeWit: Sounds great. Steven J Butala: Let me tell ya. Jill K DeWit: Sounds easy. No problem. Steven J Butala: I'll tell ya, that happened in the forties and fifties and sixties out west a lot. But there were no regulations at all. And it was very, in some cases, very irresponsibly completed or executed. And so a lot of laws were created and rules were created to stop people with good intentions... Two of them are in front of you right now, from parceling out... We're going to call it parceling out property. The correct way to describe... There's two ways to split property; parcel split and subdivision. And subdivisions are probably where most of you are listening or watching right now, where it's a subdivided property. You can sort of see it from a top-down. It's tiny little properties made out of... And there's a big, huge two year process that goes on with that. Parcel split is a different story, where you've got properties that are way, way, very rural, and you can take one property and maybe cut it in half. Those are all based on old farm or agricultural rules where your daughter gets married and you ice out 40 acres in the back for your daughter and her new husband to farm it.

Jills All Female Land Investment Group (LA 1364) Transcript: Steven J Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill K DeWit: Hi. Steven J Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill K DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt. We're back broadcasting in sunny, southern California. Steven J Butala: Today Jill and I talk about Jill's all female land investment group. It's something that I've been hearing a lot about for the last month in every square inch of my house and office. Jill K DeWit: Oh, really? You think so? Steven J Butala: It's time the public needs to hear about it, I guess. Jill K DeWit: Really? Okay. Steven J 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. Jill K DeWit: Raye wrote, "I'm new to Land Academy, but definitely a fan of Jill and Steve. I started out listening to several in this space, but Jill and Steve's." I like to point out, I like how my name comes first here. So thank you Ray. "Jill and Steve's methodologies just made sense to me. I'm currently working on my first mailer. Excited to share and grow with all of you. Question, if you could go back to when you first started out and give yourself one simple piece of advice, what would it be?" Raye B. I love this and you have some answers. Can I are these for me to read or? Steven J Butala: Yeah. Because some people piped in on the forum just to help out. Jill K DeWit: They already wrote some answers. So Daniel wrote patience. That was it. Steven J Butala: One word. Patience. Jill K DeWit: Exactly. Austin wrote, "Ray, I added in some bonus tidbits. Number one, perform actionable steps that move things forward. Two, don't get bogged down by perfection, such as having the perfect logo, perfect website, et cetera. Three, mistakes or crises will happen. Resolve the problems. Move on, learn from experience." Steven J Butala: What's the plural of crisis? Jill K DeWit: I thought it was crises, I don't know. Steven J Butala: I don't know either. Jill K DeWit: I may have just made up a word. Steven J Butala: No, I think you're probably right. I know there's been multiple crisis in my life. That can't be right. There has to be some plural. Jill K DeWit: Yeah. Fortunately it doesn't happen often. So that's good that we don't know the multiple- Steven J Butala: I've had four of them says the camera turned on just now. Jill K DeWit: Oh did you? Steven J Butala: Yeah. Jill K DeWit: I'm sorry. Steven J Butala: They're all inside me. Jill K DeWit: Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I don't have that. Steven J Butala: I know you don't. It's a little Disneyland inside the Jill's head all the time. Jill K DeWit: Thank you. "Four, have an acquisition criteria and stick to it. Avoid shot." This so good I love Austin. You're been listening. You catch on quickly. I'm glad. "Avoid shiny objects in buying property that doesn't check all your boxes. Five, utilize land investors, aka this forum for questions. If you're feeling really lost at do a consultation with Kevin or Jack or Jill." Steven J Butala: Thank you, Kevin. Can't thank you enough. Our moderator on the site here. Yep. Jill K DeWit: Consultation is much cheaper than sending a bust mailer or buying bad property. Austin, that's really good. Are there any more? Steven J Butala: Nope. So how about you answer the question? If you had to go back right from the beginning, what advice would you tell yourself? What would you do differently? Jill K DeWit: Oh differently? Steven J Butala: What he's asking or I think it's she, R-A-Y-E, she's asking, what would you change if you had to go back to the start? Jill K DeWit: You know the main thing, honestly, what I see people do all the time, and it's easy to go down that rabbit hole, is get distracted by other properties than really sticking to your thing. So the best advice I could give is whatever you're setting out to buy,

Why Municipalities' Rules are Preventative (LA 1363) Transcript: Steven Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven Jack Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, Entertaining Land Investment Talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I am Jill DeWit, broadcasting from pretty Park City, Utah. Had to think about that for a... I almost said Park Lake City, I don't know where I got that. Park City. Steven Jack Butala: Salt Lake City and Park City. Jill DeWit: I know. Steven Jack Butala: It's like a combined. Jill DeWit: Well, that true. I'm all confused. Steven Jack Butala: Today Jill and I talk about why municipalities rules, their rules, are preventative. I've never talked to anyone in my life that said, "You know, that municipality, the city of Park City or the county of Summit County, they're doing a good job." Jill DeWit: They are. They're helpful. Steven Jack Butala: Yeah. They help us. Jill DeWit: They want me to prosper. Steven Jack Butala: I wanted to split that property. They let me split it. Jill DeWit: Yeah, no problem. I just had to do these forms. What the heck? Steven Jack Butala: It's not just... We'll get to it in a second. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Jack Butala: Before we get into it, let's just take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Eric wrote... Is that the title? Steven Jack Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: Okay. It says, "impulse bought data." Steven Jack Butala: "I impulse bought data from Leelanau County, Michigan." How's the water? Just joking. Jill DeWit: Okay. And it goes on to say, "I usually let the data tell me where to mail. But after a recent trip to Leelanau County, Michigan, I found myself poking around the data on RealQuest. Next thing you know, at the accept button, I started looking a lot like a Snickers bar at the grocery checkout. Hello everyone. I'm now the proud owner of a 1000 ownership records. The County indicators looked reasonable when plugged into Steve's red, green, yellow test for rural vacant land, slightly high, active, two total properties at 1.23%, but still within reason. I don't have any experience in that area. It's surprisingly expensive at 10 to $20,000 an acre for low acreage property, low acreage properties, lots of beautiful lakes around there. Ideally I'd find a funding partner, but I don't want to scare them off with the high dollar, low acreage properties in a lesser known market. Also anyone else who has impulse bought data? I blame Steve and Jill for making it so easy." Steven Jack Butala: If I had a nickel for every time I impulse bought data. Some people buy impulse jewelry, some people have gambling issues, drinking issues, I have data issues. And I have bought, impulse bought data in this state. Leelanau County is Traverse City. And if you're a data person or a Michigan person or you're into this at all, there's a lot of cities, municipalities, a lot like Traverse City, where the county split. Traverse City is made up of two counties, Leelanau is to the North that runs just a ton of waterfront property everywhere, which is why it's so expensive. And then there's a different county. I think it's Grand Traverse County to the South. So, if you drove through there and didn't buy data, this isn't for you. I bought all kinds of data on this trip. We've been in Park City for almost two weeks. There's lots of data that I purchased and we will send mail out just based on driving around. So don't worry about it. Jill DeWit: I would argue though, it's still better. Buying data at 10 cents is better than sending it out at 55, or whatever it is. Steven Jack Butala: Oh, gosh, yeah. Jill DeWit: So you're okay. Steven Jack Butala: The real tragedy would be if you- Jill DeWit: Mailed them all. Steven Jack Butala: if you impulsively did a mailer and price it wrong. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Jack Butala: You bought the dress in the window instead of walking in,

Fear of Success Defined by Jill (LA 1362) Transcript: Steven Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steven Jack Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy show, Entertaining Land Investment Talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala, Jill: And I'm Jill Dewitt broadcasting from pretty Park City, Utah. Steven Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about fear of success as defined by Jill. And I mentioned it yesterday. We were on a show, a podcast as a guest yesterday. Jill: It was Before the Millions with DeRay... I can never pronounce his last name correctly, but it was really interesting. Steven Jack Butala: It's all kinds of questions about what was it like before you guys made a go of it, buying and selling land separately and collectively, and I learned a bunch of stuff about Jill. One of the things I learned is that that's how this topic came up. He said, Well, why don't people do this? And Jill said, "Media said fear of success." And then she went on to explain herself and I'm like, "Wow," because we know we never talked about this and it actually makes a lot of sense. So 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. Jill: John wrote, "Hi guys. I sent out my first mailer to my first county about a week and a half ago, 1800 units. Currently waiting for that to start hitting mailboxes so I can see what the response is. I've got another mailer for another county queued up for another 1800 units. Should I send it out this week? Or am I setting myself up to be completely overwhelmed by the responses?" Awesome. Do you want to go on? Steven Jack Butala: I can tell you what I think. What you're going to find out when these people start calling back is that the process that you put in place like that intake process for analyzing deals and accepting the ones that are good and rejecting the ones that aren't is flawed because everybody does it differently including myself in all this stuff. First time you try this stuff, it's just a disaster. So I would not send out another mailer. I would wait on this 1800. You're going to hone your skills on buying some property and do the whole thing. And then once you've got like maybe one acquisition or two acquisitions under contract, and you're getting set up to sell them or post them on the internet, that's when I would send the mailer out. Jill: There comes a few times a year, we are not exactly on the same page and this might be one of them. I would actually- Steven Jack Butala: A few times a week actually. A day sometimes. Jill: I was being really nice. Try to be nice. But this is one where I don't know if I would do it. I think if you're brand new, I think 1800 units a week out of the gate, if you're a one man show and you have a full-time job might be a little bit heavy, but if you don't have full-time job and you have all the time in the world, this is not nuts. I would say really I would do every other week because once you start the process going, you're going to get into a groove. That's just me though. So again, this is all personal preference. Steven's theory is get it all the way through and there's nothing wrong with that concept. Figure out all these little mistakes. You're going to make a lot of mistakes and figure them all out, and then you can dive in at a different way. I'm kind of a, "Let's figure it out as I go," because I don't want you to be in the habit of stopping and starting because that's where some people drop the ball. Steven Jack Butala: If you're in the process of trying to find a permanent female, I would highly recommend finding one with Jill's attitude where you're not just fixing stuff as you go because stuff's going to go sideways. If you are looking for a spouse, male or female, who needs to preplan everything out and then all they're going to do is end up being disappointed no matter what happens. You got to find a go with the flow spouse. Jill:

Zoom Cities are the Present and Future (LA 1361) Transcript: Steve Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWitt: Hello. Steve Jack Butala: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land, investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWitt: And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from awesome Park City, Utah. Steve Jack Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how Zoom Cities are the present and the future. We'll define what they are, which should be pretty self-explanatory. And why after talking to a lot of people on other people's podcasts, and other real estate professionals, and credible sources, I think it's one of the positive things that's going to come out of this COVID thing. Jill DeWitt: I would argue that we're sitting in a Zoom City. Steve Jack Butala: I would- that's what this show's about, or to talk about Park City, Utah, and why this might be one of the ultimate Zoom Cities. Jill DeWitt: But don't come, you won't like it. Steve Jack Butala: You know I haven't gotten that from bartenders and stuff. I even- there's a- you know, in Phoenix, everybody used to say, it's terrible. You know, I got to Phoenix in 1994, in Scottsdale. Jill DeWitt: That's like Seattle. Seattle used to be that way. They used to say, everybody used to worry about the weather and they'd- everybody would say, oh, it's not that bad. And then you go, maybe we'll look at this for our retirement location. And then they follow up with, oh, you wouldn't like it. Steve Jack Butala: It's exact opposite here. Jill DeWitt: Yeah? Steve Jack Butala: I haven't heard anyone say [crosstalk 00:01:17] You're from Los Angeles? You should never please don't move here. Jill DeWitt: Yeah, right. Steve Jack Butala: Not a single person has said that. Have you heard that? Jill DeWitt: No, that's true. Steve 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. Jill DeWitt: Joseph wrote, "Hi all, I'm looking at purchasing two properties in a state that starts with an M." Steve Jack Butala: I think you can say the name. I think you can say it, yeah. Jill DeWitt: I wasn't sure. Okay. Here's what's happened. I've gotten- a couple of times of like I've shared some stuff I'm like, huh? I wish I hadn't shared that. So I'm kind of- Steve Jack Butala: Oh really? Jill DeWitt: Yeah yeah, seriously. So I was just being cautious. All right, so we'll just say Maine. Steve Jack Butala: Well now you got to tell what you shared and regret [crosstalk 00:02:04] What are your regrets? Share with the show. Jill DeWitt: Oh and some counties. So, [inaudible 00:02:09] counties. Aw shucks. Anyway, the issue I'm having- but it's like to the planet, I'll share it with our people all day long. Steve Jack Butala: I agree. Jill DeWitt: That's why we have such a small community. Steve Jack Butala: I understand. Jill DeWitt: I mean, and that's timeout, truth time. In our community, I'm going to share everything. And I still share like big picture stuff, but some special stuff I'm going to keep for our people. Anyway, okay, so Joseph wrote on to say, "the issue I'm having is both properties have separate addresses, but are listed on the same deed. The two properties were purchased separately at a tax auction in 2009, with separate deeds and then sold to the current owner on one deed." All legit, this is nothing wrong here. Steve Jack Butala: So far, so good. Jill DeWitt: "I want to split the properties up and sell them separately on two different purchase agreements and deeds. I've heard of this being done before, but I'm unfamiliar with the process. Is this more of a hassle than it's worth or is it simply recording two properties instead of one with the County Recorder? Any advice or guidance given would be greatly appreciated." Would you like to go? Would you like me to go? Steve Jack Butala: I mean, I can really simplify this in one or two sentences. What you are purchasing,

Where to Get Days on Market and other Decision Making Data (LA 1360) 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 sunny still Park City, Utah. Yes, we are still here. Steven Jack Butala: We decided to stay another week. Jill DeWit: Yep. And if you could see us, if you're watching on YouTube and you can see us, or if you're not watching on YouTube, you should zip over to YouTube and check this out, because you might hear popping and crackling in the background, because that really is a legitimate fire behind us. It is a cool day. And I just have to say, it's so funny, the way we're sitting, the way we're set up, I feel like I'm announcing at the Rose Parade. And the float coming along, now I want to say that all of the yellow were hand-picked sunflowers, and ... Just kidding. Steven Jack Butala: I got up early today and rearranged the entire place that we're staying in, this condo. Jill DeWit: Yeah, you did. Steven Jack Butala: And I'll put it back when we're done, I guess. Jill DeWit: We have a week to put it back. It looks great. Steven Jack Butala: Today's topic, today Jill and I actually talk about where to go to get days on market and other decision-making data. And here's a hint, this is where not to go, your local real estate agent. Jill and I recorded a few podcasts since we've been here, and I keep saying Salt Lake, Park City. And we were the guests on other people's shows. One guy informed us that that's where he gets his information from, his real estate agent. Jill DeWit: It's amazing. Steven Jack Butala: He's got a show. Jill DeWit: It's amazing. Steven Jack Butala: And he's out there telling everybody bad information. Jill DeWit: Some people just don't know that there's reliable sources of data, not just what you hear and talk about. Steven Jack Butala: We'll clear it up today about where to get data, if you don't already know. But before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Okay. Paula wrote, "Hi there, I hope everyone is doing well. I'm here to gain as much education as I can about land investing. Currently, I'm watching all of Steven and Jill's YouTube videos and have almost finished reading the Stevenson System, a unit which we [inaudible 00:02:16] that book. Wish me luck. Take care. See you around." Steven Jack Butala: My point here is twofold. Jill's going to tell us, if you're brand new or thinking about being brand new, Jill's going to tell us what she thinks about that. But I want to talk about- Jill DeWit: About being brand new? Steven Jack Butala: The Stevenson System is a book that this guy, I think his name's James Stevenson or Jim Stevenson, he and his wife wrote, I think in the early '70s or mid-70s'. And he gets this cockamamie idea to send his wife to the assessor's office and asks her to look up with a pad and pencil the people who own all the pieces of land in a certain area that he thought was a good place to buy land, so he could resell it. And so she did. She went and got the names and the mailing addresses of all these people in the property, and some details about the property, wrote it all down. And he sent them offers, or he sent the notes in the mail, I think. And my point is, if you can get a copy of the Stevenson System... We have a copy. A member let me know about this a couple years ago. Jill DeWit: A lender sent it to us, on my birthday said, "I'm going to send you this book." Steven Jack Butala: So if you can find an old copy, it's out of print, I've contacted the publisher, it's actually the son of the author, multiple times to try to buy the rights entirely, because I think it's something really good that we could teach and republish.

Interview with Land Academy Million Dollar Member Christine McManus (LA 1359) 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: I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk with Land Academy member Christine McManus. Christine, how are you? Christine McManus: Hi, there. I'm doing well. Steven Jack Butala: We were having our Thursday webinar last week, and Christine casually and quietly reported in the chat that she's about to make a million and a half bucks on a deal. Christine McManus: Unheard of. Steven Jack Butala: A week later, you're on the show. Christine McManus: Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm really delighted to be visiting with you today. Jill DeWit: She just lobbed that in there at the end. It was like, "Oh, yeah, by the way." I'm sure people at the end of the call were like, "What, what, what? What just happened? What are you talking about?" We do want to hear more about that. Christine McManus: Very exciting times for us. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steven Jack Butala: That's great. Jill DeWit: Are you house shopping yet? Christine McManus: No. In fact, it's funny because we were talking just yesterday, even before this deal, which doesn't close until December. We've made decent money buying and selling land, believe me. Steven Jack Butala: This isn't new to you. It's not. You just added a couple of zeros. Christine McManus: Right, right. Yeah, we have not purchased anything. Part of it is because I want to maintain a big chunk of money so we can buy more land. The other part is ... I don't know how to say this without sounding a little arrogant, and I hope it doesn't come across that way ... I've never had this much money. I mean, we've had successful careers and made very decent incomes, but yeah, this is unfathomable to us. It really is. It's crazy exciting. Steven Jack Butala: Boy, I hope you times-10 it next year. Christine McManus: Right, right. Jill DeWit: "Is this my bank balance? Am I looking at this right? I've got to call. There's something wrong." Christine McManus: Right, right. My business partner actually quit her job three months ago. We did not anticipate that happening until this time next year, but we blew our goals out of the water and here we are. Steven Jack Butala: Barring this large transaction, what were your goals, if you don't mind me asking, for 2020? You obviously exceeded them. Can you share some numbers? Christine McManus: Sure, absolutely. If you don't mind, I'll back up just a little bit. I was a Land Academy lawyer for about a year before we sent the first mailer. I'm very diligent about my own research on the internet, followed you guys diligently, followed another land person, and finally just bit the bullet, one month before I was laid off from my job. Steven Jack Butala: Oh, man. Christine McManus: Yeah. You guys literally saved our lives, with respect to roof over the head, food on the table. I did get a decent severance pay, which increased our acquisition funds a little bit, so it became really fun in 2018. From August 2018 to August 2019, our goal was to make $20,000 a month, and we've surpassed that. Very exciting. Steven Jack Butala: I always say, if you can't live on 20 grand a month, something's wrong. Your priorities are wrong in life. Christine McManus: Indeed. Jill DeWit: If you can't live on five grand a month, I would say. Christine McManus: Right, right, and we were, and quite comfortably. Yeah, we just have not had any big purchase or splurge. We are enjoying writing larger checks to folks we want to donate to, so that's fun. Steven Jack Butala: Oh, that's great. Excellent. Jill DeWit: I love it. Now, coming into this, did you have any prior real estate experience at all? Christine McManus: I did not, Jill.

Real Estate Data Dash Board for Land Investment (LA 1358) Transcript: Steven Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. 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 extraordinary, beautiful Park City, Utah. Steven Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about the real estate dashboard for land investment that I'm developing. 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. Jill DeWit: You're just excited to get right to the show. Steven Jack Butala: Yeah. I am, actually. Jill DeWit: You just jumped right in. You're like, we're just going to get to it. Okay. I'll get there. All right. So it looks like I have a question. And then I have, one response? Or do I have more than one response? Steven Jack Butala: Just one response, and then- Jill DeWit: Okay, cool. Steven Jack Butala: I wouldn't put it in there if it wasn't super pertinent. Jill DeWit: All right. I trust you with everything. Steven Jack Butala: Wow. That's good to know. Jill DeWit: And Jesse wrote- Steven Jack Butala: I don't believe you, but it's good to know. It's good to hear, at least in front of the camera. Jill DeWit: That's good. I was kind of being sarcastic. You took it seriously. I'm going to let you run with it. All right. Jesse wrote, in Land Academy. 1.0, video number three, thank you, Jesse. This is so cool. There's an explanation of equity planner. Love it. However, there are holes in explaining the spreadsheet and where to find the data in Redfin. The columns do not match up with realtor.com either. Has there been an update to this video? Because I'm a beginner, I'm trying to get my first mailer out and I'm stuck in a major way. Well, Dear Joseph wrote, Hello, Jesse. Not sure if you've already figured this out. I was having the same issue recently. The video was filmed in January, 2019. I found that there were several additional columns in that data, in realtor data in its current form. If you erase the medium listing per square foot, total, YY/MM columns and the median square foot total, year over year, month over month. Those are those. What that is. It will match up with a spreadsheet. Also, there are two additional columns in the equity spreadsheet that are not on the realtor.com spreadsheet, the Nielsen rank, and footnote that you will need to erase before the numbers match up. Thank you, Joseph. This is kind of like our question the other day too. Could you imagine, I'm trying to think, I mean, think of college and high school, any textbook, you can't, you couldn't think of a textbook written about the earth and all of the global warming changes that are happening, right? I'm sorry. Am I stepping on your toes? Steven Jack Butala: We live in this world right now, this YouTube like world where if you do not know how to change a light bulb and you go onto YouTube, there will be videos for you to choose from on how to change the light bulb, how to change the 30 watt light bulb, 60 watt light bulb, how to change a incandescent lamp, how to change a headlamp on a Lexus, and the year of the Lexus. And it gives you step-by-step instructions. And so we, but that's not learning anything. That's just repeating what somebody else has did, and getting it done. If you ever went to high school or college and you learned math back then, or anything else it's changed since you've learned it. Jill DeWit: That's what I was trying to say. Steven Jack Butala: So this has become a real topic for my staff. And I'm trying to drive this point home. This is not, this business that we're in is incredibly profitable. Jill and I live in a mansion on the beach in California because of this because of buying and selling land. And it didn't happen because I looked up a few of YouTube videos or signed up for a place that something like this,

Land Academy Continuing Education Explained (LA 1357) 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 gorgeous Park City, Utah. Steven Jack Butala: Today Jill and I talk about The Land Academy Continuing Education Program Explained. Jill DeWit: What? What did you say? Steven Jack Butala: We spent six months asking Land Academy members, and just everybody, what more they want. How can they be more successful? We know a substantial number of you are doing great, what can we do better? Do you need to be more educated? Do you need another program? What do you need? They all said, or the vast majority of people said, "We need some form of continuing education in the form of we need to stay motivated." Jill DeWit: Keeping us on track. Steven Jack Butala: "We need to know how to utilize the MLS better," and on and on and on. Jill DeWit: Where I should be right now today. Steven Jack Butala: Yeah, we need a consistent, long-term module after module. "Hey Steve, you're always talking about these new ways to look at data. Can we have a class on it? Or can we get together in a small group, ask questions and get your attention. Maybe six or eight of us or 10 of us?" So, Jill and I will talk about that in a second. I can't wait, because I didn't realize it, but I'd like to teach. Jill DeWit: I know you do. 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. Jill DeWit: And you're great at it. Steven Jack Butala: Thank you, Jill. Jill DeWit: Kathy wrote- Steven Jack Butala: Jill's in vacation mode. Jill DeWit: I am. Steven Jack Butala: She's happy. Jill DeWit: This is fun. Kathy wrote, "Hi. We are considering buying a nine acre property that has a narrow frontage on a curve. Because of the curve, there's a guardrail." I hope that's not right in front of the property, this is interesting. "Not sure how this would be addressed for road access." That answers my question. "Will the County take down some of the guardrail or would we have to request access from a neighbor? The County office is hard to get ahold of, but wondering if anyone else has had this issue. Thanks, Kathy." Steven Jack Butala: May I? Jill DeWit: Go right ahead. Steven Jack Butala: What? Jill DeWit: I'm sorry. Guardrail, curve, slope. Uh oh, that's my train of thought there. Steven Jack Butala: Jill and I late last year purchased a commercial piece of property in Ohio for 10% of what it was listed. It was listed for a while. It came off the market, we gave them an outrageous offer. It was a [inaudible 00:02:38] deal that came in from another member. They accepted our offer because of life circumstances, it had every single thing you're talking about. We made $250,000 on it, here's why. We checked with, and it was a commercial piece of real estate that was zoned for- Jill DeWit: Hotel. Steven Jack Butala: Hotel. Hotel, motel hospitality. So it had all these things and I had the same exact concerns, almost in this order that you have. We found out through talking to the right people and talking to the person who eventually bought it from us that that's how they've gotten over it in the past. So none of this scares me, none of it. Jill DeWit: Can I share? Steven Jack Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: One of the things that we did that was really perfect for you, Kathy, right now, you do want to find out for sure from the County what the end result is. Then call number two and three and four are to three different brokers getting opinions, because that's what helped us in that transaction too. Once we figured out what was possible, then we had to talk to a couple of brokers and go, "Do you have people for this type of a thing?" We all know now what they need to do while they do...

Relationship Between Real Estate and Paper (LA 1356) Transcript: Steven Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. 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, coming to you from dreamy Park City, Utah. Steven Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about the relationship between real estate and paper. Really, I talk about it. Jill said, "I don't know what this is. Can you please do it?" And I said yes. Jill DeWit: And just for all y'all who are a little concerned, we're not moving. We haven't moved, by the way. We're taking a little break from the beach, and a little change of scenery, which is always good. Steven Jack Butala: Take a break from California and all this silly stuff that's going on there. All the stuff you've heard about California in the news is true. Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh. Steven Jack Butala: We haven't been here a day and the people that we've talked to, we say, "Yeah, we're here from California." They say some version of, "Oh, I'm sorry." Jill DeWit: "We read." Steven Jack Butala: "I read this thing in the news. Is this really happening?" Oh yeah, it's happening. Jill DeWit: Yeah. It's real. The struggle is real. 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. Jill DeWit: Luke wrote, "Hey guys, newbie here, so bear with me. I've been brainstorming, and I just want to run this by folks who may have been in the same boat. I'm fortunate enough to be working with a financial partner to set on this journey so we can get out of the rat race into retirement." He has set aside some funds. "Let's just say, for the sake of this thread, about $15,000. My question is, given the excellent access to deals on landstay.com, which is our site, should we go buy a few deals around $2000 to $4,000?" I have a lot to say about this. Steven Jack Butala: I knew you would do it. I picked this question for you. I'm serious. Jill DeWit: All right, "And then resell it for quite a bit more for an instant return and create more cash to work with, or should we hyper-focus on mailing several counties after some due diligence that is laid out in the course, or focus on one solitary county with a more ramped up mailer?" I'm going to get part A, you're going to get part B on this one. "I'm sure this scenario has been discussed before, but I want to get a fresh perspective. My temptation is to go buy a couple of deals with the cash and get great returns right out of the gate. Thanks for the advice in advance." Okay. First of all, your plan A is not nuts. I know a lot of people, a lot of members that did that, especially in the beginning, bought cheap stuff from us because they knew how we buy and sell. Because I'm interested in just wholesale billing and wholesale selling. So you could mark it up, still make some money, and learn the process. So I like that. I really do like that. That's not crazy. Please read them all. Read everything, because I sometimes have things that I forget about that I throw back in there. So I want you to read all, make sure you're aware of all the situations and the taxes. If it looks really, really, really cheap I may have discounted it because of the tax situation. So it's still... Steven Jack Butala: Check the back taxes on all those properties. Jill DeWit: Check the back taxes, right. But I put it in there, so you'll know that it's not really this much money, it's this plus this. But it's still way below what you know you can do, and then sell it. And whoever buys it from you is going to be happy. So I guess my whole point of that is, though, that's not nuts. Especially if you're really worried about learning to sell, I like that. Getting to learn, how do I sell? How do I post a property, get the photographers? How do I make them look good, write the descriptions?

Land Due Diligence - the 4 As are Now the 5 As (LA 1355) Transcript: Steven Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven Jack Butala: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from sunny Park City, Utah. Steven Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about land due diligence and how the four As have now become the five As. Jill DeWit: This is funny. Steven Jack Butala: It's an interesting story. You want to let everybody in on it. Jill DeWit: No, I'm going to drag it out. We talked about it last week. If you listened last week, you know what I'm going to talk about. But I'm going to explain a little more about it. Four wasn't enough. This number five almost getting overlooked a little too much, and so now, it's one of the official As and I'll go into more detail here in a moment. Steven Jack Butala: Due diligence is a checklist, a really simple checklist. When you're thinking about buying a property, it's like, well, does it have this? Does it have this? While there used to be four simple checklists to make sure you want to buy it. Jill added a fifth, and she was right. You know what? I was thinking about it. It's long overdue. Jill DeWit: It is. Steven Jack Butala: It was something we've been doing anyway. It just needs to be done every single time now. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steven Jack Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on landinvestors.com online community, it's free. Jill DeWit: Chuck wrote, I was listening to old Land Academy podcast today and on the subject of building a buyers list. Steven curves listeners to go to the Land Academy YouTube page and check out his video on scraping email addresses from LandWatch. I forgot about that, that was really smart. I've been all over that YouTube channel, and there are lots of interesting and valuable lessons here, but not this one. That was as real as it gets. That's awesome. Hate to call you out, Steve, just kidding. Steven Jack Butala: It's like a conversation with your wife. Jill DeWit: It's hilarious. Steven Jack Butala: You're good at these things, but not this one. Jill DeWit: You suck here. Steven Jack Butala: Not so much. Jill DeWit: You know what? You're cooking, we need to talk. So there's a reason why we got out to eat a lot. Just kidding. I think this is a great idea, but I do not know how to do it. The mini scraping technologies offered do not seem to apply to a site like LandWatch, because it's different. I know you'll explain this. I have three properties under contract and would like to add this to my marketing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Steven Jack Butala: There's two things going on here. By the way, Chuck's a 100% correct. I used to be at LandWatch, it was owned by a small independent startup company, that is in the business of starting up companies and selling them to larger tech companies. In this case, they started the company up and sold it to- Jill DeWit: CoStar. Steven Jack Butala: ... to CoStar, which owns LoopNet- Jill DeWit: Learning Farm. Steven Jack Butala: ... Learning Farm. CoStar, they have- Jill DeWit: Lands of America. Steven Jack Butala: ... almost all the ticket over... They're a good company. I like CoStar. They're expensive to sell to advertise on, which is my only gripe, but their exposure numbers are great. So they tightened up their security and tightened up a lot of things. And they used to have what's called a signature level membership in LandWatch, which was like... And we were signature members for years. We still might be, I'm not sure. In each state there's four or five people that are land specialists, whether they're brokers or owners like us, or investors. That section was, you didn't even have to scrape it. You could just hire your VA to go in there and copy and paste it for you. That's really what I was talking about.

Amazing Back Tax Property Opportunities with Forbearance (LA 1354) Transcript: Steve Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steve 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 Park City, Utah. Steve Butala: Yeah. Jill and I are at Park City all week doing, guess what? Jill DeWit: Work. Steve Butala: Looking at real estate. Jill DeWit: And fun. And fun. So far, we've had some fun. I think it's a good ... Steve Butala: When do we not have fun? Jill DeWit: I know. And we're going to have even more fun. Steve Butala: I wonder if there's an IRS rule on that. Jill DeWit: Can't have too much fun? Steve Butala: Yeah. If you're going to go take a business trip, we expect you to not have any fun at all. Jill DeWit: Right. Steve Butala: Like I really wonder what the rules are like. You have to work eight hours a day. Jill DeWit: Well we kind of do that anyway. Steve Butala: It's got to be ordinary and necessary. I mean, I think this falls into all of that. Jill DeWit: Hey, if I'm closing a deal at breakfast, I think that counts. Steve Butala: You just closed a deal. Jill DeWit: I know. Steve Butala: I just watched you. Jill DeWit: That's what I'm saying. Steve Butala: And now we're doing this? Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Steve Butala: So it's ordinary and necessary to be here, to look at this property that we're going to buy. Jill DeWit: There we go. Steve Butala: Today's topic. Jill DeWit: before we get into it. Steve Butala: Oh. 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. Jill DeWit: John wrote, hi guys, I'm working on a mailer and we're very interested in some states that are nondisclosure. Typically, when I do my county research I pop on to Zillow and review the areas for sale listings, and recently sold listings, to see if it's a hot market with lots of land moving. But for some non-disclosure states, the sold data seems pretty unreliable. How are you guys getting around this and identifying whether an area in a non-disclosure state, it has enough demand? I like that. I have two points. Steve Butala: Of course. Jill DeWit: Okay. Number one, be nosy in these listings. If you look, you'll see, like, if you really want to get into some of these listings, say you find them and it doesn't have an accurate sale price. Steve Butala: So there's a core issue in land investors about what non-disclosure is. And it turns out that there's two types of nondisclosure. Jill DeWit: Correct. Steve Butala: What Jill's talking about- Jill DeWit: Prices, sales prices. Steve Butala: Yeah. So there's some states that don't encourage, or require, this transaction sale amount to be disclosed to the public. Texas is a great example. Jill DeWit: But you can find them in there, it's not everywhere. I've found them in Texas. Steve Butala: It's voluntary. So some people do it, some people don't. So it's harder to get comps in those States. The second type of non-disclosure is do not mail. Jill DeWit: Right. Steve Butala: I think there's probably 4% of the states that they have do not mail laws. And they're like we can't send offers in. Jill DeWit: Right. You can still get the information they just don't want you to hit them. Steve Butala: So there's some confusion about what those were, and the way John asked this question, it's like ... I don't know which one he's talking about exactly. Jill DeWit: I know he's talking about A. Steve Butala: So go ahead. Jill DeWit: Because he's going to Zillow obviously. Steve Butala: Right. Jill DeWit: And he's looking for sold comps. Steve Butala: So go ahead. Jill DeWit: Totally get it. Dig in there. This is what's so funny about Steven and I. So he digs deep on the front end of data, when you're pricing your mailers, and then I dig deep when I'm doing my due diligen...

Land Investment Buddha Style (LA 1353) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Butala: Today. Jill and I talk about land investment, Buddhist style. Jill DeWit: This is going to be funny. This came as a result of me sharing a little bit with Steven the other day about what I was listening to on my walk, so let me back up. Right behind us is the strand. So a lot of mornings I'm out there. Before I start my day, I get up, throw on my running shoes and I speed walk a good distance and back, and I'm always listening to podcasts. That's my thing. Steven Butala: Do you listen to other people's podcasts? Jill DeWit: I do. I do. And I just stumbled across this one and she was getting all into Buddha stuff and it was just a healthy reminder of things to not get hung up on and why. So I want to share this, the other funny thing that I was going to bring something funny about this. As you could see, people walking behind us now. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see it. It's comical what goes on. I'm really proud of myself. I am learning to eye read. I can now eye read. Steven Butala: Oh, because of the mask? Jill DeWit: I did. There was a gentleman just now walking by and his eyes were so big and he had his blue mask on. I could see his mouth was wide open. I could tell because I'm getting good at this. It's so funny. Anyway, thank you. Steven 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. Jill DeWit: Martha wrote, Hello. This is a perfect use of this form, by the way, I can already tell. Hello. I have possible deal. 4.5 acres in X County that I posted last Thursday in the meeting that both Steven and Jill said it was a good deal. My issue now is this, oh, we got new information, the seller accepted the verbal offer for $20,000 and will sign the purchase agreement if we pay the closing costs. Can that be done? Doesn't the seller usually pay closing? I don't want to lose this deal, but I also want to do it right. What would you advise? Steven Butala: Jill, right. This is an absolute perfect use of land investors. She's in the group. She's seems like she's pretty new, based on this question, which is fine. That's why you join a group like this. What should I do? What happens with closing costs, typically, Jill? Jill DeWit: It's all whatever you want. Escrow companies work for you, not you work for them. You can say we're splitting closing costs. You can say he's paying all the closing costs. You can say I'm paying all the closing costs. Whatever you want, you just tell them. My best advice is, do whatever you agreed with the seller. Just follow through with what you said. You guys really had a conversation. I'm trying to see here. The seller said, I'll do it, but we have to pay the closing costs. So that's on you now. All right. So let's say it's $1500, so really, you're buying the property for $20,750. For me, I would do that, and I would be happy because I'm assuming this is the scenario. I'm assuming you're buying a property for 20,000. It's probably worth 70. I'm just kind of guessing. So do I have a problem with that? That's the one last thing he asked for? I pay all the closing costs? Nope. Done. And all you need to do, Martha, is just convey it to your title agent and they'll say, okay. And by the way, don't worry about it. There's a real strong likelihood, when the closing statement comes out on the HUD one, and they forget it, you just remind them, Hey, don't forget, that's on me. Okay, I'll move it over. That's all I do. Steven Butala: Netflix and Amazon are packed full of shows about bartering and bickering and picking. And it's fun to watch some of these shows where somebody reads a newspaper ad that ...

Future of Real Estate Data is Now in Real Time (LA 1352) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about the future, how the future of real estate data is now and it's in real time. One of the roles that I've assigned my myself in life and in this partnership that Jill and I have is to be ahead of the game when it comes to technology and real estate. So I always kind of know what's coming up before it actually is released so we can take advantage of it and I obviously can share it with the Land Academy group and on the show and the whole thing. So I've been taking a lot of, during these COVID times, a lot of webinars, both paid and free, continuing education type webinars about real estate data. And so we're fortunate enough to have companies like CoreLogic, Black Knight and a couple other companies out there like ATTOM Data. There's about five of them that consistently hold webinars that explain their products. And so I've been listening and watching these webinars and they're always held by these young geniuses. These kids are just amazingly intelligent and they explain their new products. So that's what this whole show is about. I can see how this is going to go and how it's going to go for us as land investors, which we will obviously share as it comes up with the Land Academy community. That's what it's all about. Jill DeWit: It's funny how much we both consume of webinars. I love them. So, and it's funny, my webinars, there's a lot that we do together. And then there's webinars that we each go off on our own separate way and get to be really proficient in. And that's what this is all about. I love it. It's good. There's a lot of good content out there. Steven 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. Jill DeWit: Ian wrote, I want to buy a primary residence in San Antonio. I usually buy homes, retail through a realtor, but I figured I would get the direct mail route a shot. What's the best way to send out a mailer to neighborhoods I'm interested in? I have ParcelFact, but I know Jill has talked about how NeighborScoop has a polygon function that I believe she said, we'll put the ownership data into an Excel file. Should I use that method? I love it. Steven Butala: So I'm going to pose this question to you because I just want to see what the answer is. I know what the answer is, but if you want to buy a primary residence, let's just use that example. I think Ian's a house flipper. I know he is, but if you want to buy a primary residence and you want to send a mailer out, how would you do it, aside from just asking me to do it? Jill DeWit: You know what? It depends on if I really have my heart set on a geographic area. Steven Butala: Keep going, this is what I want. This is a great thought process. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Butala: Go ahead. Jill DeWit: Or if I have my heart set on a school district kind of thing. So is it really the block and I like the subdivision? If it's that detailed, I want waterfront in this subdivision, I want to be near the tennis courts. Who knows what it is that the community provides? Steven Butala: Maybe it's on the water. You only want waterfront property? Jill DeWit: I'm going to use the polygon thing because I don't want to send offers to any homes outside the geographic area. And then I could easily draw a polygon, like Ian says, download all the data. It gives me, the beautiful thing about NeighborScoop, it gives me every last thing, all the property details plus the phone number. I mean, that's just priceless. Steven Butala: The owner's phone number? Jill DeWit: The owner's phone number. I love it. So that's what I do.

Changing Your Offer Price After Purchase Agreement is Signed with Confidence (LA 1351) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about changing your offer price after the purchase agreement's been signed, but doing it with confidence. This is an issue that, again, this is all driven by questions that people have asked us more than once, separate people. They're just way out of their comfort zone, sending out a purchase agreement for 20,000 bucks, the offer comes back. The five days don't check out or for whatever reason the price needs to be adjusted because that's what we do here. I mean, property, all the property that comes back at the price that you sent it out, some of it needs to get reduced because of the quality of the property, there's no way you can sell that by sending out... When you send out 5,000 offers. You can't check every property out. It doesn't make sense time-wise. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Butala: Some people, it's very much out of their... And Jill is not one of these people, way out of their comfort zone to change the price. Jill DeWit: I do this every day. I actually live for this. Steven Butala: Before we get into it, this is another one of those Jill shows. So I'm going to enjoy it with you. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. Jill DeWit: Gina wrote- Steven Butala: It's free. Sorry. [crosstalk 00:01:27] I threw you off, sorry. Jill DeWit: I'm like, "I don't know when to start." I don't know. Okay. Gina wrote, "Hey, y'all my name is Gina. I've been doing land investing for a few years now, and I guess I'm here to try to see if I can improve my workflow. I currently send about 2000 letters a month, but I'd like to make that close to 5,000. Any tips, tools, tricks you use to scale. I currently work a full-time job and simply don't have time to sort through all of the sites and piece together that many records. Two thousand seems to be my max without going crazy. Any help from an experienced member, such as yourself, would be greatly appreciated." I want to know where she's going and getting her data because we don't have that. I think she's... Is she buying all data? What do you think? Steven Butala: It's very clear to me, Gina, that you're not a member. And so that's what... And you're a perfect member for us and I'm not selling you anything. You're going to decide that on your own, but I'll tell you, and I say this to you and everybody listening. There's a right way and a wrong way to do this. And for years and years and years long before I ever met Jill, I perfected the right way to do it. I was doing it wrong. I perfected it. I was doing it wrong. And by no means, is it perfect now. There's always room for improvement. But what Gina's doing is going to the county. This is the old, old school way that I used to do, in the '90s I used to do it this way because the data didn't exist yet. You could go to the county, and as a matter of state statute, they had to provide the tax roll for that county. So if you go to a county in Texas, you walk in and you say, "Hey, I'd like to... I know you provide the whole tax roll, all the people that own all the properties in the county. I'd like it, please." And they would say some version of this. "That's great, Mr. Butala, we'll compile it for you. Come back next month. We'll print it all out for you on a green bar piece of paper from an IBM printer that we have- Jill DeWit: Dot matrix. Steven Butala: Come back with the U-Haul, because it's..." And I used to do that. And then input it, and send letters out. Or, and then a few years went by, I'll use Maricopa County, the county that Phoenix is in as an example there,

Going Broke Land Investing or Not (LA 1350) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about going broke land investing or not, hopefully not. This came up because somebody directly emailed me and asked me, "Am I going to go broke doing this?" And I said, "I don't know. Are you?" I mean, I can tell you... That's what this episode is about. I can tell you exactly how to go broke or how not to go broke, hopefully. And what it takes like in your soul, and in your skillset, and in your attitude, and everything. Jill has got a lot of notes too, because I think a lot of it... Jill talks to a lot more, "I'm thinking about joining, but I'm not sure yet," people. Jill DeWit: And this is one of their big concerns. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: And I tell them, here's exactly what you do then, and you won't go broke. Steven Butala: Excellent. I'm going to enjoy the show, just like you are, listener. 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. Jill DeWit: Mike wrote, "I've seen a lot of talk and varying opinions on this. When would you remail the same acreage," and he put in bold, "Same acreage in a county you've mailed before. Would it depend on days on market and activity in the county, since some places will have a quicker turnover and change of ownership. Remailing after two months, I guess you'd piss off a lot of people, and it would be too soon to get a significantly different response or change of ownership. There must be a sweet spot. Any thoughts?" Steven Butala: So this question is not addressed in our formal education program, so it comes up. In fact, it comes up every single live event. It just comes up a lot. And it's a great question. And God, I hate when people answer questions like this, but I'm going to answer it like this. It's up to you. But I can tell you what we do, and I can tell you what other people do, and both are successful. We never ever remail the same acreage county, maybe in our lifetime. What we do is, if we mail a county in, let's say, it doesn't matter, Minnesota, some specific county in Minnesota, I usually mail between five and 10 acres to begin with, or some number like that, depending on how the number check comes out. There's 5,000 properties in one county in Minnesota that are between one and five acres that don't have any improvements on them. Okay, bang. I'm going to mail it. If we have success, then we'd mail five to 10 acres. If we have success with that, then we mail 10 to 20 acres or whatever. I cannot think of a single time in my entire career where I went back two months later because I had a bunch of success and remailed the same thing. So every time I get questions like this, this is what I ask myself. Why would you do that? And I bet you a dollar the answer is this. Because I don't want to buy any more data. I don't want to spend any more money. Jill DeWit: That's what you think is going on? Oh, that's interesting. Got it. Steven Butala: I already scrubbed all this data. It's already all in place. I'm happy with it. I got a good response on it. I'm just going to do it again. I want to skip that whole part of my life and just send it back to O2O, or maybe just call O2O and say, "Hey, can you just mail the same thing again?" Jill DeWit: I've heard people doing this when they thought they priced it so wrong, and they want to come back with a new price, and they want to hit the same area. I can kind of wrap my head around that one. Maybe you came in and you offered too little, you offered $100 an acre, and you realize, "Oops, I should have been offering $500 an acre." Something like that. And you're like, "And this is such a good area.

Every Real Estate Deal has Flaws (LA 1349) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from the sunny, Southern California. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how every real estate deal has flaws, but hopefully not fatal flaws. And we'll talk about how we sometimes search for the flaws. Jill DeWit: Right. And people accidentally kill deals. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: You know what's funny about this? I started to take some notes. I'm like, I usually sit and put some bullet points down about every show and have topics I want to cover, but I'm like, you know what? This is going to be more fun. It's just a total open, free flowing conversation, so I'm excited. Steven Butala: I promise this will be interesting because this is one of those things where, after 25 years of looking at deals, daily. Deals pop in daily. It's like, all right, what's wrong with it? All right, it's cheap. I get it. We understand the mail works. We know how many deals are going to come in that day or that week even, within reason. What's wrong with it today? Oh wait, that's not wrong with it. Oh wait, that's not wrong with it. Oh my God. We're going to do this deal. 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. Jill DeWit: Ian wrote, how do you look for the liens on a land parcel before you enter into title? Are there any due diligence standards which people check before entering into escrow? I don't want to pay for the escrow if there's something that's really easy to look up, which would make me walk. I've already looked at the county website for back taxes. This is a very good question. Steven Butala: This is a fantastic question. It was super popular on land investors. There's a lot of people that piped in, obviously Kevin, the moderator. I even, I think, answered this. Liens, there's no easy button for liens. And Jill knows how to do this with TitlePro, and we'll ask her in a second. But here's the back picture. Every real estate, every piece of real estate, theoretically, could have liens attached to it. They come in the form of... There are liens that are attached to that piece of real estate itself, separate from the owner, and there's liens attached to the owner that could affect that asset that they own, that piece of real estate. I don't want to make this too complicated. And one of each, is an example, is property taxes. If you let your property taxes go, they're attached to that piece of real estate, they're not attached to you. And you can sell that piece of... I could sell a piece of dirt to Jill, that's got a ton of back taxes on it and she inherits them all. They stay with the property. So that's a big one for me. How do you find back tax liens if they're that old? Another one is, IRS liens. Well, IRS liens, if you don't pay your income taxes, if it gets that bad, you have a lien attached to you and then they name that real estate as an asset, as something you own, that they could potentially go after. So there's all kinds of crazy liens. There's mechanical liens that are tied to contractors, if a contractor did some work and didn't get paid. There's child support liens, if you have child support and you don't pay. So there's all these liens and it can be a gobbly, gooped mess. There's no easy button. The answer is, there's a few sources you can go to, to find these things, but nothing's for sure, and that's where people get hung up, even me. There's no for sure way to look up, go to a website, look up this person's name, look up this APN for this property. Oh, we're good, there's no leins. It just doesn't work that way. Jill DeWit: So that's the point I'm going to make too, real quick, is that, don't kill yourself over this.

Problems We Solve for Certain Seller Types (LA 1348) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today. Jill and I are here to talk about the problems we solve for certain seller types. If you've been listening to our show all week, we had an interview, a great interview, with one of our members, [Tiffany Carter 00:00:25]. She shared her why she's successful and we made four or five shows out of it. Real important topics, I got out of the interview. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about her, her success, and I think she speaks for, in a lot of ways, our membership group. Jill DeWit: A lot of people. Mm-hmm (affirmative). I really do- Steven Butala: Yeah. And maybe not just our membership group, but a lot of people who are out there buying and selling land or real estate or whatever. Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's true. Steven Butala: Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members, on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Don't worry, I have a lot more to say. I was just saving it for the show. Steven Butala: Oh, I'm not worried. Jill DeWit: Okay. Good. All right. Matthew wrote, "So I got a mailer response last week, and a couple in X County agreed to sell me their four parcels of land... Steven Butala: Awesome. Jill DeWit: ... 15 acres total for $35000. Anticipated sale price is $80000. During due diligence, everything checked out except for the land use. Under land use, one of them is marked down as residential waste." That's kind of funny. "Then further down it says the zoning is RR2- Steven Butala: Rural residential, two acres. Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative), minimum lot. And then the others are marked down as land using agricultural livestock raising- Steven Butala: Excellent. Jill DeWit: ... which is also zone RR2. Steven Butala: Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Jill DeWit: So here's what the county database says." Want me keep going here? Steven Butala: You don't need to read this. Jill DeWit: Okay. "So basically wondering if this type of land is marketable. I spoke with the assessor. She told me basically, when they planned out the subdivision, these were given these designations, because they didn't know what to mark it as. I will send specifics to other members if you're interested. Thanks ahead of time, is really hoping to get this first deal going." Steven Butala: And I actually answered this in Land Investors, which I don't usually do. And here's my answer. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Butala: You need to price this deal. There's a lot of money in here. And I really appreciate him giving the economics, buy for 35, sell for 80. You've got to price this transaction as if that residential waste property is going to give you zero. Do I think you're going to sell the residential waste property for probably really some good amount of money? Yeah, I do. I think that it was old civic planning, let's just call it. And unless it's underwater, which you can really tell on Neighbor Scoop, or there a lot of different resources, you can see what's going on. Then I think you're going to be in great shape. The other thing you can do is whatever property it's adjacent to, sell it with it. So you have extra land to do stuff on, but maybe it necessarily can't be built on. The planning and zoning person was very helpful. Jill DeWit: That was really nice, to share that. And I believe that to be true. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: There's all kinds of stuff. Some times that I've talked to the County and everybody's scratching their heads. I'm like, how does that make sense? They're like, yeah, I know I just work here though. I didn't get to pick it. Steven Butala: So I'd go back to the dataset for that County.

Why Smart People Understand the Land Investment Business Model (LA 1347) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about why smart people understand the land and business model, and maybe why some un-smart people don't. Jill DeWit: Un-smart... Smart-less. Steven Butala: Like all these topics, there's something going on below the surface. I know what it is. 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. Jill DeWit: Greg wrote, "I'm buying blocks of lots out West, but the acres and the dimensions on the plat map don't seem to match up with ParcelFact, and Parlay 2.0 specifically. One dimension of lots is 165 feet on the plat, while as best I can measure, is 145 feet, according to both ParcelFact and Parlay 2.0. The total acres the County references seems to match the online data, shorter domain dimension, lower acreage, but not on the original plat. Which is more likely to be correct? That's a you, all day long. Steven Butala: You ever see the Rain Man? Jill DeWit: I have. Dustin Hoffman? Tom Cruise? Steven Butala: And how chronic his OCD was? We love Greg, and I don't know Greg, but I love Greg's question here, but I'll tell you, these are satellite images that are lined up with manual GPS coordinates that are coming from a database. Imagine GPS coordinates and a corner point of a piece of property that's not a square, it's all kind of a polygon with 22 points. That data set's literally got 22 data points for each of the, not the corners, but the edges, even. Multiply that, times 150 million properties in the country, then, technically think about the image, this is 10 feet off for Greg, the image is coming from space. Jill DeWit: Can I add, throw in there the curvature of the earth. Steven Butala: Yes. Jill DeWit: Which is reality. Thank you. Steven Butala: The image is coming from space, and not just one satellite. Very often the satellite images are overlapping each other and they're not perfect. So, what's going on with this question is, it's not perfect, and it's never going to be perfect. If you want a perfect survey, you have to order one, and the guys come out with the orange coats on and devices, and they tell you exactly what your lot dimensions are. And even then, there's a plus or minus margin of error. You can't overlay. I'm extremely confident that the ParcelFact dataset from which you see the data on your screen, and the Parlay dataset are identical. How it's getting presented, we use S-Ray. Jill and I own ParcelFact. Parlay is another, I know those guys and they're great guys, and they have a great product. They're also the makers of LandGlide. The products are all coming from the same dataset, and while our presentations are different, the data behind them are the same. Here's my big picture point. Who cares? It's a few feet off. You understand the boundaries. If you're going to build a road, you need a survey. If you're going to build a house, you need a survey. If you're going to get financing, you're going to need an in-person survey. I'm not knocking you, Greg, at all. In fact, I bet you a dollar you're either an engineer or an accountant. I'm an accountant, so I can say this stuff. Accountants and engineers are in a different planet. It's like the Rain Man. If the light says, "Don't walk," and you're in the middle of the street, you stop walking. But in the real world, that's a great way to die. Is this 20 feet to stop you from buying this property? Jill DeWit: That's hilarious. Do you know what's funny though?You brought up a good point that even the guys that go out there, they're doing the best that they can. Everybody's doing the best that they can.

Filling in the Land Acquisition Education Gaps with Land Academy (LA 1346) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Good day. Steven Butala: Welcome to the LandAcademy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about filling in the land acquisition education gaps with LandAcademy. This is all about understanding that you can buy and sell land. A lot of it's unwanted land for a pretty substantial profit with not a tremendous of cash outlay. But what are the tiny little nuances, or the things that tell us exactly how to do it? What's the trick? What are the key things that I missed in all this other education that I see out there? Great. I know you can make money. What's the real deal? Jill DeWit: You know what's funny? I didn't know this until it happened that so many people over the years, since LandAcademy, have said, "Oh, my gosh, you guys. I didn't know this. You filled in this piece. This was all of the questions that I had, that the little things, you covered them all." I think a lot of them... What's interesting, too? A lot of those people have said, "I did it with the podcast." They have said that they've learned a lot and filled in a lot of missing information free right here on the podcast. Steven Butala: And here's a great real-world example. There are other people that are pretty loud out on the internet about... First of all, all the people that are in this teaching land space, every single one, without exception, except Jack Bosch, were LandAcademy members at one point. So, they've taken our concept and made it into some funky little niche. In a lot of cases, they copied exactly what we're doing and put their own face on it. But there's several things that I think everybody's missing, and they are tiny little nuances. For example, the vast majority of people still don't send out offers. They send out letters of interest. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Butala: Or they just send letters to people who are in a back tech situation. Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Or I think they're not effectively pricing as well as they could. Steven Butala: Or they don't have the integrity that you should have as a acquisition or an investor and the compassion when you're talking to a seller and finding out why they're doing this, and what's going on. Jill DeWit: This is good stuff to talk about. Steven Butala: Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Chris wrote, "I'm new to the land business and looking for others to join an accountability group. Whether you just joined LandAcademy as I did a few days ago, or are otherwise somewhat new to the business, it's all good. I anticipate we'll be running into a lot of the same questions and hurdles around the same time as we do our research, get out our first mailers. Mine will go out next week, field our first phone calls, et cetera. More answers and knowledge than we could ever ask for are here in the forums, education, podcasts, weekly calls, et cetera." Right, it's a lot. "So, we are covered there, but what we can provide each other some accountability and encouragement as we rack up our first success stories. Not to mention learning from whatever unique talents/experience we each bring to the table, and that landed us in this business. I, myself," it says, "experienced software developer/business owner. Perhaps a biweekly networking call over Zoom, and a free Slack channel to stay in touch in the meantime? Anyone interested, please reply to this thread or send me a private message. Thanks." Steven Butala: This is all you. Jill DeWit: This is something that we are actually working on. I'm so happy. Steven Butala: Me, too. Jill DeWit: This started just in the last... I don't even think in the last year.

Direct Mail Campaign Efficiency is Not a Goal (LA 1345) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how direct mail campaign efficiency is not a goal. Jill DeWit: What? I would think that is. Steven Butala: You send out- Jill DeWit: I'm kidding, of course. Steven Butala: ... 1,000 mailers. You buy a property, you make 10,000 bucks, your mailer costs us $500. You do everything wrong, you send out 3,000 mailers instead because you made some mistakes, it costs $1500 now to make $10,000. That's the whole show. Jill DeWit: And you will explain more, I am sure. Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on LandInvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: I imagine people are scratching their heads right now. I thought more was better. I'm so confused. Steven Butala: No. You know what it is? And this begs the ... there's always a bigger ... what's really underneath the whole thing. Number one, people don't like to outlay money to make money. That's just human nature, unless you're on Wall Street, then you love doing it. And, number two, I don't understand what it is about ... there's this whole culture, and Jill and I have been talking about this for years on this show, this culture of negotiation and getting stuff cheap. Jill DeWit: Right. I understand. Thank you. All right. Greg wrote in our online community, "Hi, fellas. I've got a slick deal out East on 10 acres, but I was checking the deed and it's in an HOA. I searched and searched, but it sounds like the subdivision was divided 15 years ago, but few of the lots were sold and the HOA never started collecting fees. They were $300 annually in the HOA declaration. Most of the lots seem to be owned by a bank and are not for sale. I want to call the HOA and ask if the fees are active, what the future looks like for access, etc., there's a private road leading to the property, but I can't find any contact information for the association, if there is one. My concerns are, number one, are there back fees that the seller hasn't paid, I can't seem to verify, two, can they put up a gate across the private road and further restrict access either now or in the future-" Steven Butala: Yes. Jill DeWit: "... three, hold me hostage for other fees, etc.?" Steven Butala: Yes. Jill DeWit: "Should I be concerned? Is this just a good old junk property now, the kind I like, and how can I find out more about the HOA? Thanks," and then we have a little follow-up here. Steven Butala: Yeah. A lot of people answered in Land Investors and then he finally said this. Jill DeWit: This is the result of his digging? Steven Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jill DeWit: All right. Then he said, "I called the county and they indicated the HOA is still valid on record, but the subdivision went bankrupt. I called the bank and they told me that the rest of the properties in the subdivision are under contract to buy. It looks like someone beat me to this pile of properties, but I might still buy one from the private party after I discuss with the current owner about the HOA fees. The question is what is the new owner of the rest of the subdivision going to do with the parcels, sell them cheap or make something more valuable out of them?" This is a really good question. Steven Butala: That's what I thought too. Jill DeWit: For me, I have to take a step back and think about ... what is his name, Vic, Vic or- Steven Butala: Greg. Jill DeWit: ... Greg, okay. Greg, I got to take a step back. I'm wondering do I want to get involved in this mess, potential mess? And I love that you're thinking about, "If this guy bought them all up, yeah, and he sells them really cheap, great,

Land Light Bulb Moment with Land Academy Member Tiffany Carter (LA 1344) ---------------------------------------- If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at [email protected]. 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.

Send More Mail with Land Academy Members Tom Debicki and Patrycja Zak (LA 1343) ---------------------------------------- If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at [email protected]. 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.

Correlation Between the Housing and Land Market (LA 1342) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Good day. Steven 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 gorgeous sunny, Southern California. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about the correlation between housing data and housing information that we're getting right now from every angle, in a land market. There's all this stuff about housing. Everywhere you turn. Unemployment's this, forbearance here. Housing market's on fire and mortgage rates are almost zero, and on and on and on. How does that affect the land market? Believe it or not, it's almost a one-to-one, I believe, a one-to-one correlation. I'll get into the details, but here's a couple of real simple examples. A tremendous amount of potential development, farmland, agricultural land, in Maricopa County, Arizona, is getting acquired right now. I micro watch that market. Because of the price can command it. And because the financing is available. The institutional-type financing from big home builders. So what does that mean to us from a land perspective? All these little infill lots that nobody cares about are still the same price. You think that a person who owns a home thinks that their little infill lot, or the two infill lots, that, for whatever reason they inherited, is worth any more this year than it was last year? No. And they couldn't be happier to sell them. So, when you follow these markets and you say this market's on fire ... Placer County, California, is another one, that's where Lake Tahoe and Truckee are. Are essentially because of technology, a commutable subdivision of San Francisco, on fire. Fantastic place to buy land and infill lots and everything else. Jill DeWit: Do you know what I believe? I've been waiting to say that. Steven Butala: Why is that? Jill DeWit: Because you just say, " I believe", and I'm like, well, I got something I believe too. Steven Butala: I don't even know what I'm saying. I mean, I know exactly what I'm saying. Have no idea how I'm really coming off presenting it. It's Jill's job to say, dude, you're just, you got to stop that. Jill DeWit: Yeah, that was embarrassing. Just kidding. No, no. I was going to give you a compliment. I believe you, because I don't know anybody that knows land like you. Steven Butala: Oh, that's nice. Jill DeWit: You're welcome. Steven Butala: Well, let's just end on that. Jill DeWit: There you go. Steven 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. Jill DeWit: Irwin wrote, "What is the best way to buy property tax foreclosed land?" Thanks. Take it away Steven. Steven Butala: Well, that's an interesting question. Where do I start? I could write an entire book on that, like a book series. There's a lot of ways to buy tax foreclosed land. It could be he or she. What they're talking about is this. People die and they don't pay their property taxes. That's usually because they die. Or in some cases, a very, very few small percentage, less than 5%, 95% of the reason property taxes get foreclosed on, property taxes now, are because people pass away and their heirs never knew, or they don't have any heirs, or things like that. And a few other cases, it's just because they don't want the property anymore, which is actually good for us. So what's the best way to get a smoking deal on this? First thing you need to do is go do a tremendous amount of research online and you'll be shocked and amazed at what you can buy in your little area, wherever you are. If you're in Indiana, that state and those counties have a way to divert this property comes up every year. In some cases, in Texas, every week. The first Tuesday of every week in Texas, from a statute standpoint, each County is supposed to hold a gavel auction on ...

Buying Land with Emotion is a Fast Track to Failure (LA 1341) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today, jill and I talk about buying land with emotion and how it's a fast track to failure. Jill and I talked about this a little bit on Monday, but we're going to bring it home now. If you can't, cannot be emotional about this. So, you can't see something in these deals, that's not there, just because you want to be successful financially. Jill DeWit: Or because the seller tells you there's something great there. Steven Butala: You've got to look at the facts, just the cold facts. And then, even when you doubt it, you need to reprice it so that it... We'll get into the details in a minute here, but if you have any doubts, you need to reprice it so all your doubts are gone. And if you're finding that you're not looking at enough deals, you're choosing these deals that you're questioning, you just got to send out more mail. There's a real easy fix for all this stuff. Jill DeWit: That's true. Steven Butala: In a minute here, I'll tell you. I would say, the reason we're doing this show. We've done this topic a few times. I'll tell you, I was a victim of this in the beginning. I hated where I worked so much, and wanted a side gig to become a permanent... I wanted to be a permanent real estate investor that I funded. That was my childhood dream, honestly. And it worked. And so I was seeing things that weren't there. I wanted to do these deals and get the thing launched so bad, that I made some mistakes. Jill DeWit: I didn't know that. Thank you for sharing that. Steven Butala: So I'll talk about it. Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Do you know what just happened there for a second, I was going to say, though? It sounds like truth time. Remember? Steven Butala: Yeah, it was truth time. Jill DeWit: It was cute. About a week and a half ago, I did a Live on Facebook. It was a good one too. It was a case study about a couple of deals and doing level one due diligence. Anyway, it was cute. Somebody put in the remarks, whatever I said, she was like, "Truth time." I was like, "Yep. That's what that was." So we'll cover truth time again in a minute here. All right, so a different... This isn't you, is it? Steven Butala: No. Jill DeWit: Okay. A different Steven wrote this question. "I have one phone number- Steven Butala: If I wrote a faux question, the name would be like- Jill DeWit: Burt? Steven Butala: Yeah. Earnest. Jill DeWit: Okay. Terminator. Let's see. "I have one phone number that I use for my offer letters for all areas that I mail. And the area code is obviously not local to people receiving the letter. What is your opinion on having a local phone number for each area you mail, that all ring to one main number one called? My only concern with that strategy is the phone number will not match my mailing address, which I like to keep the same forever. Thanks." Okay, wait. I have to think about this. So it's not... I have one phone number and it's not local, but he... Steven Butala: You live in California, you're mailing Missouri. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Butala: You got to have a California address. You're going to go get a Missouri phone number. They don't match. Jill DeWit: He's going to keep the same Missouri phone number and the California address forever? T. Steven Butala: hat's what he's asking. Jill DeWit: Oh, I don't necessarily like that. Steven Butala: Well, what do you do? Jill DeWit: Okay, here's what I do. Forever, we had an Arizona address and a Scottsdale address and a Scottsdale phone number and we still have them. That's still the main stuff/however,

What Would You Do with Limitless Capital (LA 1340) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today jill and I talk about what would you do with limitless capital? Just thinking about that just makes me all warm inside. Jill DeWit: Makes you all warm and fuzzy. It's like your version of hot cocoa. Steven Butala: Something. Something like that. Jill DeWit: What is it? Let's see. Steven Butala: There's a lot of people who are addicted to raising capital and that's what they do in life. We have people in our group like that. There are some people that grossly mismanage it, to the point of insanity, like Bernie Madoff. And there's a lot of laws and regulations surrounded by raising capital, depending on how you structure it, like debt or equity or how long you've had a relationship with somebody that you're raising the capital with. So I'm going to go through all that stuff at let's say a 20,000 foot view on it and how we do it and how it works for us and how I see us doing it actually next year. Because next year I believe that the real estate markets are going to somewhat implode because of forbearance and you're going to see a lot of good deals out there. And when you see a lot of good deals, you run out of money fast. You don't want to be raising capital when all of that stuff starts to happen. You want to raise it way before. So we'll talk about it. Jill DeWit: No, it's true. It's like we joke about starting your company. You're opening your office, get your office, get your stationary, get all your furniture in and get all the pretty... Everybody's just kind of sitting there and you open the doors like, "Okay, now we're ready. Customer, number one, please come in." You know what I mean? Could you imagine? Steven Butala: It's crickets. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Yeah, totally. Steven Butala: No. Yeah, I grew up... Gee, you got to Rocky Balboa that. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steven Butala: you need to- Jill DeWit: Do it all wrong. Steven Butala: You need to see- Jill DeWit: You taught me that. You're the pro at that. Steven Butala: Really? Jill DeWit: Well, I mean, I knew it. I didn't know the level that you do it, which is actually the best level. You come in and then there's so much with the customers. We're figuring this out. It's a little bit chaotic. Steven Butala: It's a mess. Jill DeWit: Yes. Steven Butala: It's a mess. Let's just call it a mess. Jill DeWit: Yes. But it's great and then everybody kind of understands. We're like, "Ah, we didn't know this would work. Hold on, everybody. We're going to fix this." Steven Butala: Now it's worth working on. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steven Butala: If you do it the other way, it's like, I don't know if this is even worth working on. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steven Butala: I've never understood that whole... It's way out of my comfort zone to do like a Palo Alto startup. Jill DeWit: Oh yeah. That too. Steven Butala: A .com startup, where you raise a ton of money. You raise a ton of money, you get a CFO. Jill DeWit: Based on an idea. Steven Butala: Yeah. Based on... There's not even a- Jill DeWit: A working model. Steven Butala: ... customer. You haven't tested the concept yet and you don't have a customer. Jill DeWit: Right. Steven Butala: It's just like, "You know, this app could work. It really could." The app to manage X could really actually work. Nail salons or even Uber or Lyft. It's like, you know what? I would have bet money those didn't work. I don't even think they work, actually. It was just a money raising mechanism and that's it. Jill DeWit: It's crazy right? Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on The Land Investors.com online community. It's free. This is not a misprint.

How to Manage Seller Drama (LA 1339) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how to manage seller drama. And I heard that there's a story here. Jill DeWit: Yeah. It just makes me giggle. When we just sat down for a minute and I looked up which topic this was, I remember the other day when I was dealing with this and it's just comical. It's so funny. These sellers, sometimes it's just drama around the situation. And like trying to sell something out from under somebody, which is really funny. That's the last place you want to be involved. And then there's the other kind of seller drama where they just paint the story of you should love and appreciate this land the same way my grandfather did and here's why. And I'm like, "Look, lady, I really don't care." It's so funny. Anyway, we'll talk about it more. Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a topic or the question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Gary asks, I've never had this situation before or come up so far. One of the direct mail purchase offers was accepted, signed, and returned via mail. The seller apparently is very eager to sell. The seller began calling a couple of times a day and wanted a status report of when the purchase of his land would take place. I decided I did not wish to purchase this parcel because, not because of the seller drama. Steven Butala: This is seller drama. Jill DeWit: Kind of. But because the area was not as desirable as some other parcels and therefore the offer price was much more than I should have offered. His area was not nearly as valuable as a parcels I had based my price per acre on with my comps. I contacted the seller, made him aware that I had decided not to move forward with the purchase parcel. Now he says, if I do not purchase this parcel of land by the date written on my offer, is so funny, he will hire an attorney and sue me. I use the same offer letter been using from offers to owners template. Any thoughts about the legal circumstances and me not moving forward with a purchase and the seller threatening legal action? I now feel I need to add another clause to the offers to owners template contract for right to cancel within a period of due diligence. So darn funny. Do you want to go first? Steven Butala: Never in the history of ever, in all the times that Jill and I have been, let's just call it threatened or scolded. Scolded is more accurate. That's never come to anything. It's never actually even come to a discussion with the lawyer because I'm sure whatever lawyer looks at that says, yeah, I mean, there's all kinds. There's three ways. There's a clause in there that says we're going to review the property and if we don't want to buy it, we're not going to buy it. For any reason, right up to the day of closing, I think. And everybody in this string is really vocal about that. Jill DeWit: Oh yeah. Stuff happens. Steven Butala: Don't worry about it at all. Jill DeWit: And I've had it happen in the past, the other way around. I've been in escrow and ready to close and the guy changes his mind last minute. You know what? There's nothing you can do. Am I going to go after him? Steven Butala: No. Jill DeWit: It's fine. It's just funny. Steven Butala: Today's topic, how to manage seller drama. This is the meat of the show. I'll tell you, we could have spent a lot of time on that question, but it's such a simple answer. A lot of times the answers aren't that simple. Like it's well, yeah, if you do this over here and you've got to make sure this is signed over here and there's this like six moving parts, nobody's suing anybody over this contract. Jill DeWit: Exactly. It's just so funny.

Planning Your Land Business for Post Election (LA 1338) Transcript: Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Jack Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show Entertaining Land Investment Talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, podcasting from sunny Southern California. Jack Butala: Today Jill and I talk about planning your land business for the post election in November. Jill DeWit: I want to talk about what we're doing in preparation for that and what you should be doing in preparation for that. Jack Butala: Right. Excellent. Jill DeWit: And I'll tell you my answer is really short. Jack Butala: Good. Yeah actually, mine is too. Jill DeWit: Okay. 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. Jill DeWit: Brian wrote: In California I have a vacant land buyer who just finished paying off the seller financing and now I want to make sure I get the next step right. A land contract was recorded with the county at the start of the sale, and now as I understand I need to record a deed of reconveyance or a full reconveyance. I believe also the grant deed needs to be recorded and the preliminary transfer of ownership with the county. Is that right? All at once or is it in some sequence? Anything else? Jack Butala: So there's a lot of words in this question, and they're very specific proper nouns, like conveyance, reconveyance, granteed, preliminary transfer of ownership to the county. So the answer to Brian's question really lies in why he set it up in the first place. I've never seen it set up like this. I've never actually recorded a land contract with the county, so I would start with that. I'm not saying- Jill DeWit: Or have we had people pay them off? Jack Butala: I'm not saying he's did it wrong, I'm just saying. Yeah. I mean, this is so far as a percentage in the minority of deals that happen. I mean- Jill DeWit: How long was this contract, because often they're a long time? Jack Butala: In all the years that we've had Land Investors, which is the website, no one's ever asked this question. And here's why, because people don't pay these things off. If they do, it's way early. So the right answer, and then there's a lot of answers to this from other members, the right answer is to get a lawyer to either do, redo, or undo this. I know what I would do. I would not get a lawyer. Jill and I would sit down and I would say, "The guy paid it off. I recorded the land contract. I would somehow undo that." I'm not exactly sure. And I would probably send this to title so he can get ... Here's the thing. If Brian did this correctly, he's made just tons of money on this deal. When you sell property on terms and it gets paid off over a bunch of years, the interest in all of it, I mean, it's very, very, very profitable, so there's a lot of profit in this deal. You want to get it done right. Jill DeWit: Correct. Jack Butala: And the chances are the person who paid this thing off, they're going to use it. They might build on it. Who knows? So I would ... You know what? Call a lawyer. Jill DeWit: That's the easiest way. Let's just leave it at that. I know that someone else in our group who is very experienced and very smart also chimed in and said, "Make it easy on yourself, call a lawyer." And I agree with her. Jack Butala: Today's topic, planning your land business for this election that's about to happen here in November. Jill DeWit: Oh yeah. I have a followup thing to that real quick. Jack Butala: This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: Sorry. My followup thing is once you have one of these done with a lawyer and you know the steps what the lawyer did, now you can do it by yourself. Jack Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: So that's it. Lawyer's going to go, "We're doing this form and then we're doing this form and then we're doing this." Okay, now I know the steps. I don't have to use you again.

How Much Data We Actually Consume in Our Land Business (LA 1337) Transcript: Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Good day. 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. Jack Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how much data we actually consume in our land business. Jill DeWit: How about our lives? Jack Butala: Yeah, here's a hint. It's like every decision single decision that we make is data-driven. Every single one. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Jack Butala: Seasoned professionals in real estate that I talked to are actually pretty amazed. Jill DeWit: I know you do too, I just want to share how much data nuts we are, I look at data to help me to make a decision buying a car. I look at data help my decision, I know you do with schools and education for the kids. Jack Butala: That's all I do. Jill DeWit: I know. It's like, I can't think of things, anything that we do even, honestly, I even think of data and resell value on jewelry. Not kidding. It's like everything's data-driven. Jack Butala: The next time you're in Best Buy or Costco or any of that and someone's standing, looking at something with the phone in front of themselves, look at what that person looks like. Jill DeWit: Why, do they look like us? Jack Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: Oh because they're on there checking the rating. Yeah. Jack Butala: They look like a bunch of geeks. They're looking at the ratings. They're looking at the price. They're doing research. Jill DeWit: Can I get it better on Amazon? Jack Butala: They're looking at data. They're looking at data, yeah, looking at data to make a decision. And often in Costco, specifically with electronic, Costco has very high quality electronics for very good price, some of the time, not all the time. Jill DeWit: You know what it is, I believe that to be true. The other thing about Costco it's sometime limiting. They're only have so much. That's the thing. Jack Butala: Selection is very limited. Jill DeWit: You can't always go there and get the video camera that you want or need. Jack Butala: And so, but the vast majority of everybody else, they're all kind of squandering through there, going up and down every aisle, checking to see what the product in front of them and how it makes them feel. Jill DeWit: Do you know what I think is really going on? Jack Butala: I'm serious. It's data versus feelings. Jill DeWit: I think they're going up and down every aisle missing the days when there was a sample at the end of every aisle. Jack Butala: Oh, because of the COVID. That didn't even cross my mind. I guess you can't hand people food like that. Jill DeWit: Not right now you can't. Jack Butala: Which is kind of silly because they do it at McDonald's. So I don't know what the difference is. Jill DeWit: It's very interesting. I guess it's open food. Remember the old days, go pick up the, throw a cracker in your mouth. Jack Butala: That's my question of the day. What's the difference between handing, making some samples in Costco at the end of the aisle and the person who's handing you stuff at McDonald's? Jill DeWit: It's true because it has been proven that you can't catch it from food. Anyway. Jack Butala: Watch the comments blow up at the end of the YouTube. Jill DeWit: Sorry. I'm confused too. 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. Jill DeWit: Austin wrote, hello, I recently fielded a call from an owner that yielded three small contiguous lots, possibly one acre per parcel. The lots weren't part of my original mailer, but it's property that the owner also owned. Unfortunately, this county stumped parcel fact and neighbor scoop him. And I couldn't find much info about the area, not even a GIS. That says something too. Okay.

How to Structure Your Land Business (LA 1336) Transcript: Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how to structure your land business because it's business week this week. Jill DeWit: It is. I'm thinking of like people and roles and management. I'm sinking. You're probably thinking numbers and I'm thinking people. Jack Butala: I am. Well, I'm thinking of LLC structure. Jill DeWit: Exactly. So we all both have some different things to share. Jack Butala: Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Greg wrote not a joke this was quick, "Two lots in a county side-by-side, lots 125 and 126, but both are assessed together and have a single tax bill from the county. Any reason to think I could not sell these as separate lots without an issue? Thank you." I'm curious if it's one APN. Jack Butala: Jill just nailed it. What we're in the business of is buying and reselling APNs, the way that a car dealer is in the business of buying and reselling VIN numbers. There's all kinds of ways to title property with legal descriptions and there's a million ways to buy and sell. Well, actually, you know what? There's only one way to title and license a car. They have a form, in Arizona it's green. What color is it here? Yellow? Jill DeWit: Which form? Jack Butala: Like the car title in California. It doesn't matter. Jill DeWit: I thought it was always called a pink slip, but I don't know if it's pink anymore, but yeah. Jack Butala: And you can only put one car in the form. The DMV's got it. And this confusion comes from the DMV because we've all titled cars. There's one form. One way to do it. One VIN number on that form. There's place to sign. There's a place to notarize in some states and that's it. And there's a process to submit it and you either do it right or wrong and it's over. With land, it's completely the opposite. There's a ton of different ways to do it and it's up to the recorder to make sure that it's correct. So you can take a thousand properties and in one case, Jill and I had a deed with 10,000 properties on it, one document with 10,000 properties and a signature page at the bottom. So what Greg is saying here is I've got a deed or I have a deal. The legal description says lots 125 and 126 in Garden Estates, Pinel County, Arizona, Maricopa County, APN 1234567. That's one piece of property period. If it's one APN, it's one piece of property. Jill DeWit: Then it's one piece of property. So to divide them up is a process. You have to go back to the county and there's a process to split them up. And then you're going to get assigned a separate APN to each property if they can be split as two. There might be reasons why. Sometimes they have building restrictions that you can only build on and this could be one reason that they combined them. I've seen this where it's a 0.1 acre and a 0.34 or something like that, and you have to have a minimum of point whatever to build on it. So they'll lump them together, it just makes life easier and to build on because the 0.1's too small. So that's why it worked out this way. And it's probably somebody along the way did this on purpose and combine them into one. I'm restating it in a general way, which is you can't just willy nilly go in and do it because if you saw 125 with the same APN and you resell 126 of the same APN, now you got a problem. You sold the first guy, not the second guy. The second guy's got nothing. Jack Butala: Secondly, you would never ever be able to send it through title. Jill DeWit: They would catch it and that's good. Jack Butala: We have people in our group who have done this, sold properties just like this, parcels taken out,

Math on Rental Property vs Buying and Reselling Land (LA 1335) Transcript: Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Jack Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I took take a look at or talk about math on a rental property, versus buying and reselling land. Jill DeWit: I would like to take a moment and explain to everyone, this is business week. So if it sounds a little dry, it's really some important business topics that we're covering. Jack Butala: I love talking about this stuff, that's the truth of it. Jill DeWit: That's good. So, it's exciting for you. Jack Butala: The whole premise of this topic is, we get some version of this all the time, "Hey, I've got a couple of hundred thousand bucks. What should I do? How can I really maximize," the question is, how can I maximize it for my personality type? Because we have friends who have made single family, residential, rental empires, not joking. And we have friends who have apartment building empires. And everybody's real happy and comfortable, and it all makes sense to them. And they look at us after a couple of drinks and they say, "What the hell do you guys mean you buy and sell land? To which I say, "What the hell do you guys mean? You 22 four-room apartments in Los Angeles, or four-unit apartments. That's my nightmare." And their nightmare is to buy rural vacant land. So, it ends up being a pretty funny conversation, almost always. But that's what this show's about. Jill DeWit: Thank you. 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. Jill DeWit: Greg wrote, "I'm so sorry for not being a good rule follower without understanding the reasons behind things." Jack Butala: Okay, stop right there. Greg, I love this. I love it. I love that you're not a rule follower, and I love that you question everything. I think that those elements of a personality make you massively successful at whatever you're going to try. Jill DeWit: I don't usually get the same response out of you. Jack Butala: You people all need to start wearing a mask. Jill DeWit: That's funny. Jack Butala: What do you mean? Why do I have to wear a mask? I'm just telling you, you have to. That's a rule follower. Jill DeWit: I was with the kids in Costco the other day. Totally this. I'm like, all right. We're weren't sure if we were allowed to walk around and eat. They had a food cart right there. And I was actually with kid one and a friend, so I had two guys with me, and they're starving. I'm like, "All right, we're going to go over to Costco to hit the little food area and get some hot dogs and some drinks." But they took all the tables out, right, because it's all indoors in this Costco, because it's in Seattle. I'm like, oh, okay. So, I'm not sure if we're allowed to walk around the store eating like this. I think we are; it's Costco. But anyway, I just turned to both of them real quick and I said, "Are we going to ask for forgiveness or permission?" They said, "Forgiveness" in unison. I said, "Nice. Let's go get you guys some food." Jack Butala: You're a good mom. Jill DeWit: I am a good mom. Thank you. It's really funny. Jack Butala: Can you repeat this? Jill DeWit: Okay, let's go back. Jack Butala: Because I just love this. Jill DeWit: But this is how I roll anyway. Jack Butala: Me too. Jill DeWit: I'm always ask for forgiveness before permission. Jack Butala: Me too. Jill DeWit: So Greg says, "I'm so sorry for not being a good rule follower without understanding the reasons behind. Of course, I've heard if the owners are deceased, move on. Well, I don't think that applies, but okay, we'll keep going. "If doing a self-close, agree to move on. But if going through title,

Taxes and Your Land Business (LA 1334) Transcript: Jack Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Jack Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy show entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Jack Butala: Today, jill and I talk about the fantastically interesting topic called taxes in your land business. Jill DeWit: I'm excited. Jack Butala: Me too. I can't wait to talk about taxes. No, here- Jill DeWit: We talk about this often, all the time. Gosh, it's a topic that warms my heart. Jack Butala: The truth of it is it's pretty necessary because if you do everything right, this is maybe the second or third or fourth most expensive line item in your expenses for your company. And with ours, it's probably number two or three. Jill DeWit: True or false. If you do everything right, you're a little bit teary eyed when tax time comes/however, that means you did well. Jack Butala: That's right. Jill DeWit: Okay. Jack Butala: It's a bittersweet situation. Jill DeWit: Oh, okay. 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. Jill DeWit: This is a long one, I will warn you. Chris asks, "I'm new to the land business and looking for others to join an accountability group. Whether you just joined land Academy as I did a few days ago, or are otherwise somewhat new to the business, it's all good. I anticipate we'll be running into a lot of the same questions and hurdles around the same time as we do our research, get out our first mailers. Mine will go out next week. Field our first phone calls, et cetera. More answers and knowledge than we could ever ask for are here in the forums, education/podcast/ [inaudible 00:01:50] calls, et cetera. So, we're covered there, but what we can do is provide each other some accountability and encouragement as we rack up our first success stories, not to mention learning from whatever unique talents/experience we each bring to the table. And that landed us in this business." And in parentheses, Chris says he's an experienced software developer and business owner himself. Jack Butala: Excellent. Jill DeWit: That's great. Jack Butala: Excellent. Jill DeWit: "Perhaps a biweekly networking call over Zoom and a free Slack channel to stay in touch in the meantime. Anyone interested? Please reply to this thread or send me a PM. Private message. Thanks." Jack Butala: And there were about 20 people in there that replied to this almost immediately. Jill DeWit: I bet. This is a hot topic. Jack Butala: Right. So what do you think? Jill DeWit: I think it's great. I think it's something we should do and I think it's something we are doing. Jack Butala: Go ahead. Jill DeWit: We are going to put together something for you. So in the meantime, Chris, I'm so happy. And for those of you who have created your own groups, because you know that that's the one thing that you uniquely need. Some people do, some people don't. It doesn't ... Nobody's right or wrong. It's just some people need it, and those I'm so impressed and proud about everybody that have taken this on themselves and just said, "I know I need someone making me check in and keeping me on track." And I think this is awesome. Jack Butala: So do I. Jill DeWit: And our group has grown to the level where you have enough people, obviously, that this has become more of a thing. And so, we're going to take it. We're going to provide tools and resources to help you. Jack Butala: This falls under the category for me of what could possibly be bad about this? What's bad about exercising? Nothing. What's bad about more education? Nothing. So this, I think, accountability is just one of the cornerstones of succeeding at anything. And so, since we started Land Academy, I'd love to know your opinion on this too, and we've been doing this for five or six years now.

Land Business 501: Planning for Exit (LA 1333) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about land business 501, planning for your exit. Jill DeWit: Yes. This is the best part, right? Steven Butala: Does it mean it's over? Heck no. Jill DeWit: Right. Will we ever retire? Steven Butala: No. Jill DeWit: Let's be honest. I know. I was talking to somebody about that the other day. I'm like, "It's never going to end," like end, end. I might not be as involved. I might be working a lot less time a week, a month, but it'll never end. Steven Butala: There's three or four ways companies exit or owners of companies exit the company. Almost in all cases, all good cases, the company goes on just without you, or you're compensated in some way for your expertise, but we'll cover the four ... There are some people in life, this is all they do is they exit companies, like private equity groups. So we'll compare what we do. I get this question at the live event every single year. What's the exit on this, man, because it doesn't make any sense? If I start buying and selling land, then the company just dies. Jill DeWit: Yep. Steven 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. Jill DeWit: Thebon, hope I said that okay, wrote, "Hi there. I'm new and recently went through all of the Land Academy materials, 1.0, 2.0 and the cast-off from the land program. And I was wondering if someone could provide more detail on how to choose a county to invest in. There's quite a bit in there." I'm a little confused. "I feel there was a gap which kept that topic at a very high level. Curious if you all followed a particular method in choosing your county, especially since it seems that once you choose a county, you're pretty much committed to it for several months, if not longer. Thanks." I don't have any missing pieces there. What do you think this is about? Or what do the comments say? Steven Butala: You know, I didn't see the comments. Jill DeWit: Oh. Steven Butala: Well I know that our two moderators jumped on this really quickly. Jill DeWit: And they said go back to chapter two? Steven Butala: Number one ... Probably. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Butala: But I mean, I'll clarify very easy. This is a huge leap. How to choose a county and how to price a mailer are the number one and two questions that we get. That's why I included it in here, Jill, because ... and then we just did this Tuesday webinar. This is a big topic for everyone. Jill DeWit: Right. It's like it's not that there's not enough information in there, but for some reason I think it's confidence. Steven Butala: It's confidence, and they need confidence. Jill DeWit: They want a little bit of a, am I doing it right? That's it. It's like, I give you 10 steps and you go through the 10 steps and you still want to know, am I doing it right? You probably are. Did the cookies come out? Well, it's true. Steven Butala: Did the cookies come out? Jill DeWit: Well, I gave you a recipe. You know what it is? I gave you a recipe and you bake them. This is a good example. I think this is what we're doing. We gave you a recipe. You bake the cookies and you're asking me, does it taste right? How's that? Steven Butala: I think that's perfect. Jill DeWit: Thank you. And my answer is, do you like them then? Then yes. Steven Butala: Like every single thing in buying and selling land and Land Academy and House Academy, like everything, there's no guessing. And that's where the disconnect is. We have this thing called the red, green, yellow test that we are extremely loud and clear about on buying houses and buying infill lots.

Land Business 401: Staff in Place and Partners Fund Acquisitions (LA 1332) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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 hazy Southern California. Steven Butala: On fire Southern California. Jill DeWit: Yeah. I was going to say sunny. I'm like, shucks. I can't really say sunny because I can't see the sun right now. It's crazy. Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about your land business 401. Your staff's in place and your partners are now funding acquisitions. Why? Because you don't have any money left if you're doing everything right at this point in your career. You're spending half of your time looking for new people, which is way more hard, to work for you. Way harder than it. You're a recruiter. And number two, finding partners or using the partners that you have so that you can do more real estate deals. Jill DeWit: Because all your money is allocated. Steven Butala: How ironic is that? You do everything right, you don't have any money. Jill DeWit: Right. So this is the 400 level, so all week you've been doing like freshmen, sophomore, junior. Congratulation, 400 level. You're now a senior. Tomorrow's masters level. We'll get to that. So right now you're taking your final classes. You're kind of just, I look at it like I'm just learning the last little bits of information. Maybe some tweaks. Because I'm going out into the world. Steven 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. Jill DeWit: Mike wrote, "I have an accepted offer on a rural property and I'm trying to confirm access. If the county GIS parcel report shows a street address, can I assume there is legal access, even though the satellite view on Google maps does not show a road? I have some buyers that don't care how difficult it is to get to the property. They just want to know they can legally get there." Steven Butala: There's a 98% chance that what you're saying is true. Can you absolutely assume that there's legal access if it has an address? No, but that's a huge step in the right direction. What you want to do is take a look at a plat map that you can hopefully get from either it's either been scanned in online or ask the county to send you one, and you'll see on the plat map the property's either got straight lines. Straight, single lines. Think of it like lines in a road, or it's got dotted lines. If it has a dotted lines, those are the easements or that property that's the real estate, actual real estate that's been allocated. Maybe there's no road there at all. It's just raw land, but a road's supposed to be there. That is the definition of legal access. In my career, I don't want you to just take my word for it. In my career, I want you to go check. In my career I've never seen a property without a US post office address, if everything's correct on that, who doesn't have legal access. Jill DeWit: And for those of you who are members and you want to know, "Where can I get that quickly?" I jump into TitlePro, so just so everybody knows, as a Land Academy member, you have access to TitlePro 24/7, which is AgentPro 24/7, but expanded for title agents so it has everything you could possibly want in there, and I can go in and I can pull. I just did one today, a property report, and I get all kinds of information. More than what I want, but there's usually plat maps in there too. Steven Butala: It's a great question. Jill DeWit: Thank you. Steven Butala: That's a, I know you're going to be successful, probably already successful question. Jill DeWit: Thinking ahead about it. It's important, and I like that. Those are some of the ... Isn't that funny? That brings up a good topic too. You think that, who would want a property that I can't get there?

Land Business 301: You are a Specialized Pro (LA 1331) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steven and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven Butala: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. Jill DeWit: Why are we talking like that? Steven Butala: Just being a hippie for a second. Jill DeWit: Oh. Steven Butala: I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: Oh, I didn't know where [inaudible 00:00:13] What are we doing here? And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from sunny smooth jazz, Southern California. Steven Butala: There's nothing sunny about California today. Jill DeWit: No, it's not. Steven Butala: In fact it's... It's almost literally on fire. I've just read, worst on record. [crosstalk 00:00:33] Jill DeWit: Well, did you see the- Steven Butala: As a state. Worst fires. Jill DeWit: Not just us. It's the whole West coast. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: I was looking all the way up to- [crosstalk 00:00:39]. Steven Butala: Oregon. Jill DeWit: Washington, parts of Oregon, parts of Idaho. It's- Steven Butala: It's like the world's ending. Jill DeWit: I know. Steven Butala: I half expect to see zombies around the corner. Jill DeWit: It's really weird. Oh my gosh. And by the way, to make it even worse, our humidity here. I think I've never seen it, it's 96%. So if you're watching this on YouTube and you could probably literally see my hair getting frizzier by the moment... Steven Butala: You know what Jill? I've been meaning to talk to you about that. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steven Butala: Men don't even know any of this stuff. Jill DeWit: Can you imagine? I'm going to put a baseball hat on and I'm going to put my hair in a ponytail in about five minutes. It's like, "What the heck?" Steven Butala: When I was younger, I used to think a hundred percent humidity was water. It's not. Jill DeWit: Rain. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steven Butala: It's nothing to do with that. Jill DeWit: It's hilarious. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about land business 301. You're a specialized pro. This is where I start to have a lot of fun. At any company, at any.. and stage. When you've left stage two, these land business things that came up are not... Came up with this week, the 301, 401. This is not specific to the land business at all. It's all businesses have cycles. Every single one. Jill DeWit: This is also the point where he gets interested in children. Babies not so much, toddlers no way. Steven Butala: That's true. Jill DeWit: Uh-huh (affirmative), It's not until the third phase, before they're ding-dongs and they're on their way out the door. Steven Butala: Before they're teenage ding-dongs? Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steven Butala: Oh yeah, this is when they [crosstalk 00:02:19]. Jill DeWit: And they can't get out, they can't wake up. Steven Butala: They don't eat anything. They tell you, "Yeah. I'd rather have chicken today." Jill DeWit: You're like, "This one's fun for you. You'd like this." Like, "Yeah, dad. I do want to go on the boat. Yeah, dad, I do want to do this with you." This part. Steven Butala: Or let's light something on fire. Jill DeWit: "Yeah, dad, that's so great... Yeah, dad said this is a good idea." No. Steven Butala: Between seven and 15/14. Jill DeWit: Uh-huh (affirmative). Exactly. This is your favorite age [crosstalk 00:02:46]. Steven Butala: It's an absolute blast. Jill DeWit: And you are Superman in their eyes. Steven Butala: Well, yeah. I mean, for probably two of those years. Until sixth grade. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Butala: It's just fun. It's fun to do stupid stuff. The reason we have children is to see their reactions to doing stuff the first time. When they're little they eat a French fry the first... I remember. [crosstalk 00:03:08]. Jill DeWit: Is that why we have children? Steven Butala: The kid's bite on the French fry for the first time, it's like their world is just the greatest. For those few minutes it's like,

Land Business 201: Where You Should be in 2 years (LA 1330) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steven and Hill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California Steven Butala: Today, jill and I talk about land business 201, where you should be in two years. If you were with us yesterday, it was land business 101, a list of stuff you should do in the beginning. Tomorrow, it'll be 301 and 401 and so forth. So, today, Jill is going to describe to us where we all should be in two years, what should happen between that first deal, we talked about getting to that first deal yesterday, and then from two years from that point, she's going to lead us and tell us exactly how that's supposed to go. Jill DeWit: Great. Steven Butala: I bet you a dollar there won't be a lot of math and budgets in it. It'll just be like, "Well, you should feel this and then do this deal." Jill DeWit: We're going to do it together. All good. Steven 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. Jill DeWit: David wrote, "In the training videos and equity planner, Steve says to offer 35%. In the video tonight, I thought I heard him say offer 20%, and now I am confused. What do you offer?" Steven Butala: So, I chose to include this question among tons of questions and comments on land investors for a couple of reasons. Number one, what David's referring to is when you go into a county or a zip code, you're going to establish a baseline average price for a property, what properties sell for in that geographic area. So, in a county, it might be a $1,200 an acre, and so we would offer either 20% or 35% of that, and a zip code, same thing. In a zip code, it would be, for a house, $180,000, so we offer a certain percentage of that or a certain dollar amount below that so we can buy it for cheaper and sell it for more. That's my point, number one. I will forever say this statement. There is no percentage. There's no locked-in percentage. This is your business. This is a business that you're going to start, and 20% might be incredibly appropriate in some county on the West coast where they've never seen an offer ever. This country's packed, packed, full of counties where they've never, ever seen anyone... No one's ever sent them an offer ever. The vast majority of the counties in this country are that way. If that's the case... And you can determine very quickly if that's the case or not by what's for sale there. If there's nothing for sale there, they probably never seen an offer. I would go in lower. If for whatever, and I'm not sure why you would ever do this, you're choosing a county like San Bernardino County or Mojave County, Arizona, or Costilla County, Colorado, where nine million people have sent letters because other people out there have said they're secret counties, or for whatever reason, probably 35 to 40% might get you a better response rate. But I'll say this, and here's my big picture point and really why I included this, I say all kinds of stuff. Common sense applies here. Jill DeWit: He also says, "I can't be responsible for what I say." That's one of the things he says. Steven Butala: If you were looking for a hard- Jill DeWit: I have something to add on this, too. Steven Butala: ... you're looking for a hard and fast way to print money out of an ATM machine in your basement, you are in the wrong place. Jill DeWit: I know some people that have sent out offers, say it was 20%, 25%, whatever, and they got a few great properties and they realize what the... They maybe they get into it, and they realize, "Wow, this is a great area. Things are worth more than I thought. I want more properties." I know people that have done, like say 20%, and they've gone back and remailed at 30% because everything t...

Land Business Startup 101: List of Things to Do (LA 1329) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny, Southern California. Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about The Land Business Startup 101, a list of things to do. These topics all this week, they're 101, 201, 301, 401, by huge requests. Jill and I, last week, had a closed webinar for all of our members, tons of people showed up. Thank you by the way. And we asked everybody what they want and they said, "We want lists. We want to know how the rest of my career is going to go in this thing according to you guys." Jill DeWit: One of many topics, right? There was a lot that we talked about, I'm really happy about. But this week is going to be fun because we structured it like you're a freshman, you're a sophomore, you're a junior, you're a senior, that's the hundred, 200, 300, 400 level classes. And then we have Fridays like your masters level. We have a 500 series class. Steven Butala: Exactly. Jill DeWit: So. And then next week... I can't even, what is next week? It's probably going to be like philanthropist talk? Steven Butala: Yeah. Yeah. Jill DeWit: What's going to be after that? Steven Butala: That's what Land Academy is, philanthropy. Jill DeWit: There we go. Steven Butala: No. That's a great philosophical question. I'm sure we'll talk about it, some version of it this week. Yet at some point, you get ... If you've ever taken a master's degree ... I've only taken the first couple classes of a master's degree and it's like, "I learned all this stuff in undergrad. So, what's the deal like?" Jill DeWit: That's the same as college though, isn't it? Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: I feel like your freshman and sophomore, we're prepping our number three kid right now with this whole thing. I'm like, "Get college credit at the same time silly because if it counts for high school and it counts for college, you'd be nuts not to." Steven Butala: He just finished his first college class. Jill DeWit: Because I know your first two years of college, we all know, it feels like I'm in high school still. Like I just did this. Steven Butala: I mean, he just finished his first summer college class online and his exact comments were, "This is it? This is easier than high school. I don't really even have to show up. All I have to do is, they gave us all the curriculum, I can work ahead. I got the whole thing done in two weeks and it was a two month class." So, yeah. Jill DeWit: Yeah. That's right. Steven Butala: So, I think that. I really think that in the end a master's degree, and then eventually a PhD is all about the professors that you have. All I remember about as college is not the content at all. Not a single bit. Jill DeWit: That's interesting. Steven Butala: I just remember about the maybe five or six instructors that were great and some incidents. Jill DeWit: What was it about them? Is it because they wanted to be there? Is it because they shared real world experience? Steven Butala: I'll answer you. Here's a couple of- Jill DeWit: I'm really curious now. Steven Butala: Here's a couple of examples of things that instructors that really left a lifelong impression on me. I had a finance instructor and the first day of class on a blackboard ... This is Michigan State now so it's an auditorium of five million people. It's not Harvard where I would envision six or seven people sitting around in big leather chairs, or something like that. It was an auditorium full of people. And we walked in on the first day and on the board he had written, cash kills companies. Did we ever talk about this? Jill DeWit: Nope. Steven Butala: I'm sure I brought it up on the show maybe four years ago. Jill DeWit: Oh. Oh, yeah. Wait. I do remember. What do you think? Come on.

Interview with Advanced Land Academy Member Bei Zhang (LA 1328) ---------------------------------------- If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at [email protected]. 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.

4 Types of Land Business Specializations (LA 1327) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today we talk about the four types of land business specializations that you can choose from and make money on. And hint, we do all four. Jill DeWit: Yes we do. Steven Butala: Should you? Jill DeWit: Got 'em. Steven Butala: Should you do all four? Eventually. Jill DeWit: I think so. Steven Butala: You know what? I'm going to list them, then we'll take the question, and we'll get into the details. Jill DeWit: You're not going to save it? Steven Butala: Nah, here's the list. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Butala: Extremely rural, extremely inexpensive property, that really the middle of nowhere property, incredibly inexpensive. Number two, recreational/homestead type property, that's two hours to three, maybe four hours drive from a major city. 20 acres, it could be a homestead, you could build a cabin on it. There's lots of stuff that you can do. This is our favorite type. Number three, infill lots. Property that's in a very urban setting that is incredibly attractive to people who build houses, home builders. Super easy properties to find, difficult to negotiate price, really easy to sell because you know who your buyer is going to be. It's just a finite group of builders. And number four, specialization property. Property that's pre-zoned, for let's say a nursing home, a Walmart type property that's zoned for big box along with freeway, or heavy industrial property or industrial park type property. Jill and I, some of the most successful deals that we've done have been those types of properties. High risk, long term deals. 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. Jill DeWit: Matt wrote, I'm going to preface that this is a little bit longer here, just so you know. "I have two acquisitions people fielding my incoming seller calls. My first person ran out of bandwidth and I feel like we streamlined the process efficiently that it makes sense to bring on a second person." Bandwidth- Steven Butala: Bandwidth meaning he ran out of gas. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Butala: Just ran out of interest. Jill DeWit: So they're going to bring in another person to replace that one. "Also it's nice to have some redundancy, and my first acquisition person does other roles in the business." Steven Butala: One second, so I'm going to stop you there. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven Butala: There's a reason airplanes have two engines, there's a reason that boats have two engines, long-haul boats. Jill DeWit: There's a reason why kids have two parents hopefully. Steven Butala: Yeah. Jill DeWit: Because one of them is going to run out of bandwidth. Steven Butala: Redundancy is always a good idea. Redundancy is always a good idea. This is the definition of a split test by the way. Go ahead. Jill DeWit: Okay. "Does anyone have more than one person as an acquisitions person?" Steven Butala: We do. Jill DeWit: "I'm trying to find a way to streamline the business while still being personal. For example, my mail piece says, [email protected], not [email protected], or [email protected] kind of thing. I like that it has a name there, a real name of a person. However, as the years go by and acquisitions people inevitably leave the company, I suppose my direct mail letters will become out of date and people will be getting different people when they call in. Not to mention, I'll have to track down those emails and make sure they always forward so I don't lose leads from old mailers. Does anyone feel like they've found a good way to people-proof and time-proof?" Steven Butala: I'm going to use this. Jill DeWit: This is good.

How Professional Land Investors Weigh Price vs Attributes (LA 1326) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how professional land investors weigh price versus attributes. Jill DeWit: Wait, that's us. Steven Butala: Oh, professional land investors? Yeah. Jill DeWit: That's us. Steven Butala: The real question is spoken in just plain English. Deals come in, they have a price and they have attributes. They have a mountain view. They have two sided public paved road access. So how do you weigh that? At what point does a property have no value from a price standpoint where you just say, "You know what? I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it for $100"? Or the other side is at what point do ... It's so expensive, I can't buy it. And that happens more often. The attributes are great, everything passes my test. It's absolutely a property I want to buy, but it's too expensive. Jill DeWit: Because they know it and they're not hurting and are not going to sell. Steven Butala: You know that scale, that Wall Street scale- Jill DeWit: That's it. Steven Butala: ... where it's like, you put your money on here and the old school, you put a bag of silver or whatever. And then on the other side you put- Jill DeWit: Dollars. Steven Butala: ... like whatever material you were buying, like flour. Jill DeWit: There you go. Steven Butala: That's what this is. Jill DeWit: Diamonds. Mine would be diamonds. Steven Butala: Yeah, diamonds is a good one. 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. Jill DeWit: Lucas wrote, "Hi everyone. I'm in talks with a seller, working on getting a purchase agreement signed from my first mailer. They have five contiguous parcels, but I only made offers on three. They are interested in selling all five. At this time, I want to buy all five. Can I simply instruct the seller to add the two of the parcels in handwriting to the purchase agreement they already have?" Steven Butala: Yes. Jill DeWit: "Or do I need to send them a new agreement for these other two parcels?" Steven Butala: May I step in here? This is a topic that comes up all the time, and I thought it was obviously worthy to put in the show. You can hand write anything on these PAs and sign it and have it initialed and just send it in, and it's going to be fine. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Even if you're going to open escrow, you should be set. Steven Butala: Here's what you never want to do. Redo the purchase agreement. It's going to take you a day. Send it in the mail. Now they have all kinds of time to think about it. You don't want to do that. And the people that do this, they aren't new and unrehearsed. It's never that. They just have OCD. They have to have stuff all perfect. And, "Oh my God, there can't be any handwriting on it." And those people aren't going to survive in this business anyway. So don't be one of those people. Jill DeWit: Touche. So yeah, we're covering that. Can you add it on there? Yep. Do we need to do a send one? No. Obviously, no. "I think they can add the new information to the existing offer and send it back to me and be done." Awesome. Lucas is already on the right path here. Steven Butala: Yeah, he answered his own question. Yep. Jill DeWit: "So I'm looking for deal funding on this one. If all goes as planned, I'm offering $1,200 an acre while comps in the area are $9,000 an acre. If anyone is interested in more details, I'm hoping to have a package ready to share with you by this time tomorrow. I'll probably take it to Land Academy first," as you should, Lucas, "then to Land Tank and then do the rest of the community, unless someone is eager to partner right away. Thanks, all.

Does Deal Review Happen Before or After Seller Commits (LA 1325) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven 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. Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about, does deal review happen before or after the seller commits? You send out a bunch of offers. The seller gets an offer. They sign it. They send it back. You look it up on the internet. And this property pops up in either NeighborScoop, ParcelFact, or whatever you're using, maybe Google Earth or a combination of all of those. Is that deal review? Or does it have to go deeper? Do you make a decision at that moment? This is what the show is about. Jill DeWit: I'm going to even throw one more thing in there. Sometimes they don't send it back. They call you. That, for me, is what I really want to talk about today. Steven Butala: Good. Before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill DeWit: Right. David wrote, "I'm very close to sending out mailers and just about wrapping everything up. But I'm having problems pricing these mailers right." Join the club, by the way. "I've watched the Land Academy 1.0 videos over and over, but still not quite clicking yet. What can I do?" What do you think David should do? Steven Butala: So here's the thing. Pricing, pricing, pricing. We live or die by mailer pricing, and David you're not alone. In fact, I struggle with pricing. And I will struggle with pricing until the last mailer I do when I'm 98 years old. Jill DeWit: Heaven forbid. Steven Butala: There's a few theories- Jill DeWit: Could you imagine? Steven Butala: There's the shotgun- Jill DeWit: Hang on a moment team. Wait, he's got to take his high blood pressure medication. But it's just coffee and egg whites, and then we're going to get a mailer out. Steven Butala: I tell you what. If all I have to take is high blood pressure medicine when I'm 98, I'm doing just fine. Jill DeWit: He's going to be... Oh my gosh. There's going to be... You know what's going to happen, I can just... I'm sorry, I've got to go on this because this is funny. Steven Butala: No, go ahead. Jill DeWit: I can just imagine. Here you are, 98 years old, and you are still hell bent on Excel. Steven Butala: Can you imagine what Excel is going to look like? Jill DeWit: Because here's the thing, if it worked for me when I was this age, it's going to darn work for me now. And here, I have a funny thing to share with this. We have an attorney right now that... There's this title company that we're dealing with. And this title company has been around for a long time. And one of the things about this particular title company is they have an attorney who oversees every single darn thing. It has to go through his desk, no matter what, before anything is done. And he gives it his blessing, right? And we have got into it on things, like it was things that were unnecessary. Steven Butala: Are you going to use this title company ever again? Jill DeWit: I only did this time because I needed to because it was fast. I really don't think so. Because they keep screwing things... Steven Butala: Good answer. Jill DeWit: Oh, it's funny. Steven Butala: Good answer. Jill DeWit: No, because they're screwing stuff up. But I'll tell you what, we found out, we got to the bottom of it. I knew it. And I was right. So here's the scoop. One time too, we finally got into it. He wouldn't release my money until I signed some form. I'm like, "I'm exempt from the form, here's the reason why." And he said, "Look, Jill, Ms. Stupid," that's probably what he said, "I've been doing it this way for years." Steven Butala: That is not an answer. Jill DeWit: "And I'm not about to change it. So if you want your money,