Jack Thursday – The Drama of Scrapping the Internet for Accurate Pricing (LA 1552)

Jack Thursday - The Drama of Scrapping the Internet for Accurate Pricing (LA 1552) Transcript: Steven J Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven J Butala: welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: Is it entertaining? Steven J Butala: Maybe. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven J Butala: For certain people it might be. Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven J Butala: I'm entertained. Jill DeWit: Oh good. I'm glad. That's what matters. And I'm Jill DeWit. We are broadcasting from awesome Phoenix, Arizona. I'll come up with a good name. Steven J Butala: Today is Jack Thursday and the topic is the drama of scraping the internet for accurate pricing. Jill DeWit: There's so much drama. Why is there so much drama? Steven J Butala: I'll explain it all. Because you know why? Because it's probably not ethical. In some cases, it might not be legal. Now, there's all kinds of potential lawsuits. There's a huge multi-billion dollar, not just a lawsuit, but it's almost now a criminal thing. So I'm not sure if it's a civil lawsuit or a criminal. Nobody knows the rules. That's why. It's brand new. Jill DeWit: It's not real clear. Steven J Butala: Nobody knows who exactly owns what data. So we'll talk all about that. Jill DeWit: Yeah, because it's MLS data. I can look at it freely on Zillow. Why can't I look at it this way and not that way? Steven J Butala: That's one of the seriously compelling arguments, in my opinion. I have access to all the data anyway. Jill DeWit: I could be writing it all down. Steven J Butala: Right. That's right. I could be screenshotting it. Is that okay? There's a lot of questions and not a lot of answers yet. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And if you're a Land Academy member, please join us on the discord. Jill DeWit: Kyler wrote, "Data tree question. I just pulled some data and set my parameters on all the improvement fields to zero and zero, to weed out the properties with structures. I even tried setting the living area and other fields to zero and zero, but those took my search results down to zero. Once I'd pull the data, I had almost 900 lines with some type of Homer structure on them. Is there something I'm missing to weed out the properties with structures? I tried everything I thought would work, but either they don't weed them out or it takes my search results down to zero. Or do you think it varies by county? Thanks for any help." Steven J Butala: This is a very common question. And it's a very good question. And I have trouble with this. Everyone does. The fact is this will never go away. And here's why, here's a short answer. And then I'll give a longer one. The fields that matter to you in DataTree, don't matter to that assessor. Jill DeWit: Good point. Steven J Butala: But some fields do matter to that assessor. So, here's the long answer and it's very workable. I'll get you there. DataTree is a data aggregator. They have an agreement with 3,144 counties to access their assessor data. And as you can imagine, some are very urban counties. Let's use San Francisco as an example, because that's where Silicon Valley is, extremely sophisticated computerized assessor in tax role. What your accessing is this tax roll. So if you did this in San Francisco, it would probably be a breeze, but we don't buy property in San Francisco. And probably nobody in our group does because we're rural vacant land people. Steven J Butala: So let's just pick an Arkansas. Arkansas probably doesn't use half the fields that are in DataTree. They just don't care. They might check a box. Does it have a house on it? Check. They don't care about how many bedrooms it is or whatever their methodology is. And I'm not judging anybody, whatever makes sense to them, it's their county. And so you have to manipulate the heck out of getting those structures off out of you...