Land Due Diligence – the 4 As are Now the 5 As (LA 1355)

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.