Cloudy Title Drama (LA 1421)

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 Arizona.

Steven Butala:

Today Jill and I talk about cloudy title drama.

Jill DeWit:

What the heck? All right. This, like yesterday's topic, came from our staff.

Steven Butala:

From our customer service staff.

Jill DeWit:

Our customers, actually. Because this comes up a lot. And I want to say, to quote you, Jack, "Everyone, everyone, everyone." There's things to get worked up about and things not to get worked up about, and this is not a thing to get worked up about, and a lot of people do. So that's the whole point here, it's like, "Oh my gosh, how do I uncover this?" It manifests into this big problem and it doesn't have to be that big of a problem. So we're going to talk a minute about the drama. Are you a drama person? Because that could be part of the problem there, number one, but we'll tackle that.

Steven Butala:

Oh, that was right in my whole talk today.

Jill DeWit:

What other drama is in your life?

Steven Butala:

The cloud on the title is not really the problem.

Jill DeWit:

That's not the problem, exactly. It's the problem right now, but it's not the problem. Number two, we're going to talk to you about, okay, what's really important here? And then number three, I have solutions for you.

Steven Butala:

Before we get into it, let's take a ... I was going to start down the path of defining a chain of title, but we'll do it in a minute. 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 additionally, if you're a member, join us on Discord as a Land Academy member.

Jill DeWit:

For a lot of more exciting chat. All right, Dave wrote, "Two times now I've downloaded a bunch of what was supposed to be vacant land data from DataTree only to find out that 25 to 35% of records are actually the owners' residence and are not in fact vacant. What the heck am I doing wrong? This is super frustrating. Anyone else having this problem, or better yet, know what I need to do to avoid this?

Steven Butala:

Sure, I'm happy to help. 25 to 35% of a data download that you end up not using the data is not that bad. If you would download 10,000 records and you end up using eight or 7,500 of them, you're going to scrub that stuff out because ... And there's, that I know of, no way to really avoid it. In this case specifically, if you're getting data records that are residences with vertical construction on it, it's happening because ... And this is all in education. So Dave, I hope you remember. I'm not sure if you are, but if you go through all the education, Land Academy 1.0 and 2.0, it's in all in there about how to do this. And again, that's what Discord is for. And I think I actually pulled this question off of Discord.

Anyway, there's two or three or four or five ways to make sure you don't get property that have vertical structures on it and that's through ... Every single property should have two types of assessments so that the assessor can tell the treasurer how much taxes, real estate taxes, to charge every year. The land value and the vertical value, or the improvement value is what it's called. If the improvement value is zero, then you know it's a piece of land. The problem is that not every ... There's no universal way to book data from assessor to assess her. You can imagine, an assessor in Arkansas that hasn't yet computerized their operation in 2021 versus an assessor in let's say Silicon Valley where computers were actually created. There's going to be a pretty substantial difference between how they contribute that data.

So the answer is to be redundant. There's vertical assessment percentages that need to be zero. There's vertical or improvement assessed values that ...