Transcripts:

Steven Butala:

Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:

Hello.

Jill DeWit:

Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land, investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:

And I'm Jill DeWitt coming to you from sunny Scottsdale, Arizona.

Jill DeWit:

Where am I, where am I, where am I? Nevermind, I'm looking straight out a window staring at a big cactus, but every now and then you forget, and these old habits, you just-

Steven Butala:

Well, we've been saying sunny Southern California for about-

Jill DeWit:

A long time.

Steven Butala:

...two, at least two years.

Jill DeWit:

Wait a minute. You know what's funny? We started this in Arizona.

Steven Butala:

I think so, too.

Jill DeWit:

I wonder what I used to say back then. But now we're here, that's funny. Went to Southern California and now we're back.

Steven Butala:

Today, Jill and I talk about boondocking on your land. What the heck is boondocking? It's when somebody that you don't know at all is driving their RV around because their employer lets them use their laptop to work anywhere they'd like now. Not lets them, but he's forced to because of the COVID or whatever "de jour" problem there is.

Jill DeWit:

That's cool.

Steven Butala:

And he's on your land. Is that good or bad? And can you do it if you have an RV on other people's land? We'll talk about that in a second. 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 if you're a member of Land Academy, by the way, you can also catch up with the [inaudible 00:01:24]. James wrote, "Hello in Texas, a real," excuse me. "In Texas, realtor.com does not have data on rural counties. Steve mentioned that this should not exclude you from going after rural land. Anyone have a manual way to pull data in the red, yellow, green test and figure out which rural county is best? Assuming that days on market is the most important indicator, pulls data on all property types, including housing, which may skew results for land. Also, Texas land seems more expensive, like $9,000 an acre retail, than most of the two to $3,000 retail deals that you have here around in Land Academy. Does it matter as long as the land is retail for the price on the various websites, such as Redfin, Zillow, realtor, et cetera?" Take it away.

Steven Butala:

Well, this is the third or fourth time I've answered this. And I think at least two times, maybe three times from the same person. This is not, there's no equation. And if you think like in math, in high school or college, where you figure it out and you've got it and that's it. Every single county is different. The states are different. You have to feel your way through this and figure it out. And data is readily available for certain product types like houses in certain areas like urban areas. When you get out into rural areas and you start changing product types, like land, like we all buy and sell, you're going to get a different result. Especially in Texas, Texas is famous for not reporting the completed sale and everything that surrounds it, including and most importantly price. So yeah, you're going to have a tough time completing an OCD complete, I'm going to write this down. Red, yellow, green test. This topic comes up a lot for new people and I'm trying to drive this point home.

Jill DeWit:

There's no secret. We're not holding you back. We're not holding back.

Steven Butala:

Yeah.

Jill DeWit:

There's a special way.

Steven Butala:

The reason that some people do extremely well with this, us included, is because we have an open mind when we go into a dataset and we say, "It's not complete. I'm going to have to fill in some gaps here. I'm going to have to guess over here, I'm going to have to take the data that I have," which could be 50% incomplete. Look around surrounding counties. Look at housing data, call the 7-Eleven clerk. I'm not sure what you need to do,