Holiday Sales Slumps - Do They Exist? (LA 1114)

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 California.

Steven Butala:                   Today, Jill and I talk about holiday sales slumps. Do they exist or not?

Jill DeWit:                            It's funny. I love this one. Every year we get these questions that come in a lot. Everybody gets concerned. It comes up on our weekly member calls. So I talked to my team and we'd thought we'd make a whole show about it. And I'm going to fill everyone in and I have some good ideas too.

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:                            Okay. Buzz asks, "Has anyone ever bought land through Government Auction and resold? Is it a good idea or a bad idea?" Go.

Steven Butala:                   Oh man, I'm qualified to answer this.

Jill DeWit:                            Yep.

Steven Butala:                   So here's the thing. There's this website called governmentauction.com. It's owned by, or it used to be owned by, I'm not sure now who owns it, a guy named Paul Sebasky. And so he calls it government auction but it has nothing to do with the government. That's just the name of his company. And he's been around since longer than I have. So he actually, before the internet would do live auction sales. So he would spend a tremendous amount of money on advertising, get a bunch of people in a room, and again, because there was no internet way to do this, auction off property with terms and the whole thing. It's very, very successful. He was only like one or two or three or four people in the whole country that was doing it. And he'd travel around doing it, buying property the same way we do.

Steven Butala:                   So just be careful about that. That's a piece of old school information. You may not be buying property from the government, you may be buying it from him or somebody else that is using that word. I think the real question that you're asking is, "Is it okay to buy back tax property?" And the answer is we've made a career out of that. It doesn't hold a candle to buying property the way that we do with sending out direct mail. In fact, as a percentage, I bet 95% of the property we buy is through direct mail. Land and houses. The other 5% is either back tax deeds or foreclosing on tax liens.

Steven Butala:                   And that's all land. In all of my experience it's near impossible, contrary to the late night infomercial, buying houses for back tax. There's just too much competition and it's too laborious to get through these tens of thousands of units of lists to find that one little gold nugget. You know, there's just a better way. So I could do a whole podcast, not an episode on this topic. I'm pretty well versed in buying back tax property all over the country, actually. So yeah, if that interests you for whatever reason, there's a lot to it. It's very brainy and very time consuming. And really when I say this, seriously, please take me seriously back. Buying back tax property is a great compliment to sending out mail. It's not the other way.

Jill DeWit:                            I was going to add too, because we've talked about this often, some people worry that, "Well gosh, if I do this, I've got this treasurer's deed, I go to sell it, now can they get title insurance on it?" And there are companies out there that specialize in this so the answer's yes. They can help you do that. So people can use it and love it and build on it, whatever they want to do in the normal way.