How to Go From Land Hobby Enthusiast to Business Owner (LA 1278)

How to Go From Land Hobby Enthusiast to Business Owner (LA 1278) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Happy Friday. 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 go from land hobby enthusiast to business owner. This topic came from a conversation that Jill had recently, very, very recently, with one of our members. One of our long, long time members. Jill DeWit: Four years. Steven Butala: Yeah. So... Jill DeWit: Cool. 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: John asked, "Does anyone know where the land use and property indicator fields come from and what they mean in personalfact.com or neighborscoop.com?" By the way, it's the same for both. "I contacted the county and they don't know anything about them." Steven Butala: Yeah. There's 330 columns of data in the dataset for Parcel Fact and Land Academy and Neighbor Scoop. Neighbor Scoop is Parcel Fact on steroids, so really this question is about Neighbor Scoop, not Parcel Fact. Parcel Fact is just real estate, Neighbor Scoop's got so many more features. And some of those columns are useless. Jill DeWit: Like phone numbers, by the way. Steven Butala: Yeah. Phone numbers and flood plain data and all kinds of stuff. So, some of these columns are very, very helpful and some of them are not helpful. And the county, because they're all exactly the same, there's 3200 counties in the country, approximately, 3144, and the assessors look at things differently. What that is is the assessor role for the county. So a rural county in Texas where the assessor is also the sheriff, and she's also the diner owner doesn't spend a lot of time on a lot of these [crosstalk 00:01:56]. Jill DeWit: And the only notary. Steven Butala: Yeah, doesn't spend a lot of time versus the County of New York or Manhattan, where they do utilize all that data pretty dramatically. So urban counties and rural counties and everything in between, are very highly different. Land use, if it's used at all, I'm telling you, it is meaningless, and so is property indicator. What you see all the time, I don't know why, is land use 400, which means vacant land. Do I rely on that in any way, significantly, to make any decisions? Absolutely not. So John, forget about it. Jill DeWit: Yeah, skip it. Steven Butala: That's why they don't know anything about it. In fact, the aggregator in this case, Real Quest Pro, may even just fill that in for no reason. It may be a post data collection from the assessor or data manipulation. Jill DeWit: Everything that falls in this category, they just call it that. Steven Butala: So to wrap this up in a little package, you'll know if it makes sense to you immediately. Jill DeWit: I was going to say, land use and property indicator is not zoning. Steven Butala: Right. Jill DeWit: That's different. Steven Butala: So in a County like LA and zoning's awesome. Jill DeWit: Then I care. Steven Butala: We do zoning based mailers. Jill DeWit: I care about that. Steven Butala: But in a rural county, like most counties in Arkansas, if you call and say, "Hey, what's the zoning of this property," what they'll tell you, literally, quite literally is, "Anything you want it to be. Please don't call again." Jill DeWit: That's hilarious. Steven Butala: Please don't call again, you Yankee. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Jill DeWit: You yuppie from Scottsdale. Steven Butala: How do you stop it? How did it go from a land hobby enthusiast to business owner? This- Jill DeWit: Or... go ahead. Steven Butala: This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: Or you liberal nut from California. Steven Butala: Yep. Jill DeWit: I don't know. Steven Butala: