Land Academy Show Archives

Real Estate Investment 202 Few Deals Complete (LA 767)

Transcript:

Steven Butala:                   Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:                            Hi.

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

Jill DeWit:                            I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from gorgeous southern California.

Steven Butala:                   Today Jill and I talk about real estate investment 202. You've got a few deals done, and you like it.

Jill DeWit:                            You're a sophomore now. You made it through your freshman year.

Steven Butala:                   This week, yesterday was 101. Today's 202. Guess what tomorrow is?

Jill DeWit:                            I don't know.

Steven Butala:                   What is tomorrow, junior for you?

Jill DeWit:                            That's a junior.

Steven Butala:                   For-

Jill DeWit:                            I did junior, senior and masters. That's how I see it.

Steven Butala:                   There's no PhD here?

Jill DeWit:                            No.

Steven Butala:                   You just stop at masters because you don't think-

Jill DeWit:                            We didn't keep going.

Steven Butala:                   Because education's no longer important to you, because you really actually want to do stuff? In the real world?

Jill DeWit:                            I think that at your master, you know what? I'm glad we're having this discussion.

Steven Butala:                   Me too.

Jill DeWit:                            I don't think you need a PhD in this. I think you can get by with a masters. Sometimes, you don't need to go that far unless you want to be a perpetual student.

Steven Butala:                   I'm gonna quote Danny Elfman.

Jill DeWit:                            Ready.

Steven Butala:                   He's from the school of hard knocks, and that's-

Jill DeWit:                            And he's from Orange County. Had to point that out.

Steven Butala:                   Once you get the basic information down, you've got a few big deals under your belts, which is the 202 here-

Jill DeWit:                            Yeah.

Steven Butala:                   At that point, the needle's either in your arm-

Jill DeWit:                            Yeah.

Steven Butala:                   And you've got the bug and you've got to take it to the end-

Jill DeWit:                            Right.

Steven Butala:                   Or you're just gonna kind of say, "You know what? This is not for me."

Jill DeWit:                            What was the, was there a quote? Does he have a certain saying about that?

Steven Butala:                   No.

Jill DeWit:                            Oh.

Steven Butala:                   Either get the needle in your arm or take it out.

Jill DeWit:                            That's Danny Elfman saying that?

Steven Butala:                   No.

Jill DeWit:                            Oh.

Steven Butala:                   Danny Elfman said, I read an interview years ago in Rolling Stone, and they were all asking him, "What is it with this multi-level success?" He had a successful band, successful independent career, and then he became one of the greatest-

Jill DeWit:                            The movies,

Cash in and Out of First Deal in 45 Days

Recording Location: 33.840103, – 118.391379

Jack Butala:                       Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.

Jill DeWit:                           Hello, happy Friday.

Jack Butala:                       Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about how you cash in and cash out of a full real estate transaction if you’re brand new.

Jill DeWit:                           Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:                       In 45 days.

Jill DeWit:                           Exactly.

Jack Butala:                       Before we get into it, though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on LandAcademy.com online community three.

Jill DeWit:                           Okay. Michael asked this question:

“If I purchased a property on a quick claim deed and I attempt to record it, will I have to pay all the back taxes and get it current?”

Love this.

Jack Butala:                       This is a good question and it comes up a lot, and the answer is no. So you can purchase a property, any type of property, you can purchase a house.

Jill DeWit:                           Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:                       With back taxes on it and so the back taxes, they follow the property around. If you’ve been into this for a while, it seems like a question that somebody should probably know that, you know, a question that you know the answer to immediately, but when you really think about it, no. It’s kind of confusing.

Jill DeWit:                           True.

Jack Butala:                       And we’re all used to buying houses where everything is prorated by a title agent and they do all the work for you.

Jill DeWit:                           Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:                       Or it’s just kind of an unwritten rule that a purchaser and a seller split certain fees and don’t. So those are unwritten rules, just like I said.

When you purchase a property on a quick claim deed from somebody or you sell it to them, and there’s some taxes accumulated or any lien for that matter, it travels with the property. And as long as you disclose it, you know, you’ve got a nice piece of property, you sell it for two, three, four, 5,000 bucks, it’s got $1,000 worth of back taxes, you don’t feel like paying them off, then you fully disclose it entirely. If the buyer’s got a little bit of experience, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

Jill DeWit:                           Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:                       We do it all the time.

Jill DeWit:                           Exactly.

Jack Butala:                       In fact, it creates a little bit of a perception that they’re getting a deal.

Jill DeWit:                           It’s true.

Jack Butala:                       And maybe they are.

Jill DeWit:                           Well, you know, and I’ve even posed it this way with some buyers like, “Here’s the nice thing. You’re spending the money on the property today, obviously, buying the property. You don’t have to catch up the taxes today. If you want to wait and do it in 90 days or something like that to get it current, you can do that.”

And some of the buyers don’t know that. They think that it has to be all done, that they have to send in a check that day and so it’s kind of a nice … Seriously, they can budget and plan their money.

Jack Butala:                       I just, I want to tell a story.

Jill DeWit:                           Okay.

Jack Butala:                       Quite some time ago, you know, because Jill and I get hordes of tax bills in all the time,

Cross Marketing with Tiny House People

Recording Location: 33.840103, – 118.391379

 

Jack Butala:                       Jack Butala and Jill Dewit.

Jill DeWit:                           Hi.

Jack Butala:                       Welcome to our show today, in this episode Jill and I talk about cross-marketing with tiny house people and with the tiny house industry. I didn’t make this title up, they called me.

Jill DeWit:                           I know.

Jack Butala:                       Before we really really get into it though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com online community, it’s free.

Jill DeWit:                           Okay, Claire asked, “While looking at a county I noticed that a golf course Property Owners Association, POA owns a whole bunch of its own land. POA dues are $900 a year, would you say these are bad signs?” Jack?

Jack Butala:                       Okay it depends on the kind of investor you are. The good news is you can get pretty much cheap to free land on a golf course, by buying it right from the HOA. Home Owners Association, Property Owners Association, or LOA, Land Owners Association. Is that a bad thing? No it’s never bad to buy cheap property or in this case probably almost free property.

Jill DeWit:                           Right.

Jack Butala:                       Do we do it anymore a lot? Not really because we find we’ve got much larger fish to fry but Claire god bless her, she’s one of our original members is just knocking it out of the park. I think for her, that’d be perfect because she tends to really look into things and she’s really detail oriented. To answer your question directly Claire, no I think it’s a great thing. I would concentrate a little bit more on finding out how much property is actually out there on the market. If it’s oversat … all the regular logical stuff applies. If there is a ton of property and it’s real cheap and it’s not getting sold let’s say on Land Watch or Land Pin or anywhere else, what would concern me. If there’s only a couple lots and they are all 10 grand, jump in.

Jill DeWit:                           Exactly.

Jack Butala:                       I think I would … since whenever there’s a situation where you can go back to the well, where there’s a bunch of property and you just know it’s going to be there for quite some time, don’t buy a ton of it. Buy three, four, five properties, see how it goes. See what the reaction is.

Jill DeWit:                           Right.

Jack Butala:                       Hey by the way, on these HOA’s they will almost always write it down to zero if you ask them. If you say, “Hey I’m not going to buy these properties because there’s a bunch of accumulated leans or fees on them”. If you go in and say … Jill’s an expert at this, she did it, I can name three places she’s done it in the last few years. “I’m sorry we would love to buy your stuff, my check book is open, you got to write the leans down to zero”.

Jill DeWit:                           And I’ll buy several.

Jack Butala:                       Yeah.

Jill DeWit:                           That’s my thing, I’ll buy a chunk of them, what can we work out together? And they’ll negotiate.

Jack Butala:                       You can really hard ball that.

Jill DeWit:                           They can’t … what they’ll do though, they can’t mess with the taxes traditionally but with the HOA fees, they sure can.

Jack Butala:                       Yeah and in some very rare cases the county will write the taxes down.

New Land Investor Topics Live Tonight

Recording Location: 33.840103, – 118.391379

Jack Butala:                       Jack Butala and Jill DeWit.

Jill DeWit:                           Hello.

Jack Butala:                       Welcome to our show today. In this episode …

Jill DeWit:                           [crosstalk 00:00:05]. Sorry.

Jack Butala:                       In this episode, Jill and I talk about our land investor topics for our live meetup tonight in Los Angeles, South Bay, really, of Los Angeles.

Jill DeWit:                           Exactly. I have something funny about South Bay I’ll say in a minute, too.

Jack Butala:                       Before we get into it, though, let’s take a question from one of our callers.

Jill DeWit:                           Cool.

Jack Butala:                       On the LandAcademy.com community.

Jill DeWit:                           Exactly.

Jack Butala:                       It’s free.

Jill DeWit:                           All right. Jordan asked this question, “I noticed the latest recording date link next to the menu from which you choose a county in RealQuest Pro. It seems like most counties have very new data, but a few are a little older. How bad is it if the date is significantly, say over a year, in the past?”

Jack Butala:                       This is a great question and it’s actually a bigger picture. Actually, I sat down and wrote half of a blog on this exact topic.

Jill DeWit:                           Did you? Good.

Jack Butala:                       Called, “How to Pick a County.” There’s a simple three-step process that we use to pick a county from a demographic standpoint, like where we really think this will logically work. But what you also have to take into consideration is the quality of the data that you’re pulling and how much information you might have about once somebody does sign your offer and send it back, you know, can you actually do the research? There’s a few more semi-advanced ways to look at these counties to make sure that you can actually pull off doing a real estate deal.

Let me give you a couple of examples. In east Texas and west Texas and some parts of northern, let’s say, New Mexico, and there’s several other counties in northern Michigan for some reason, they just don’t participate in the RealQuest Pro program and they don’t, let’s say, have … There’s some counties in Arizona, you know, it’s hit or miss all over the country, really. There’s no rhyme or reason, east or west, north or south. They just don’t participate in it or they don’t have a GIS site. It’s not a high priority. Once you get a little further into this, you know, no one wants to get stumped. I’ve never heard of anyone sending a mailer out and getting completely and totally stumped and not buying one property if you do it right. But you want to look into these things. Does the county have a GIS site? Do they have working hours that … Do they work more than one day a week? Some counties, they’re so small that everybody’s got another job. They only work one day a week. It’s hard to get stuff recorded.

Jill DeWit:                           That’s true.

Jack Butala:                       You want to look into that. I guess Jordan’s question here is, “If it’s older data, how bad is it?” The answer, quite honestly, with this product type is it’s not that bad. Okay? These rural, vacant properties don’t change hands very much, but if you listen to yesterday’s show, Jill and I talked about turning some very large ranch-type transactions that are in the million dollar range in southern California. Those properties change a lot more frequently so ...

Jack and Jill Live Tomorrow in Los Angeles

Recording Location: 33.840103, – 118.391379

Jill DeWit:                           Hi.

Jack Butala:                       Welcome to our show today. In this episode Jill and I talk about Jack and Jill Live tomorrow.

Jill DeWit:                           I know, happy Tuesday.

Jack Butala:                       Yeah. Tomorrow in Los Angeles actually.

Jill DeWit:                           Yeah. Hermosa Beach even cooler.

Jack Butala:                       How much time have you put into really planning this thing?

Jill DeWit:                           A lot, a lot, this is going to be big.

Jack Butala:                       I’m excited about it, part of the Jill live thing.

Jill DeWit:                           Oh yeah, it’s going to be awesome.

Jack Butala:                       That’s great. Well I have no idea what I’m going to talk about but maybe we’ll find out on the show. Before we get into it let’s take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com. It’s free.

Jill DeWit:                           Okay. Steven asks this question: “When you close with a title company, and the transaction amount is the larger number, do you use transactional funding or double close to keep the buyer and seller from seeing how much you’re making? Does it matter?”

Jack Butala:                       What do you do?

Jill DeWit:                           This is a good question. You answered this the other day, I have to say, on our call and your answer was perfect because if you’re not front and honest, it probably will come out and you’d rather just be upfront and honest with it.

Jack Butala:                       Want me to to answer it again?

Jill DeWit:                           Yes.

Jack Butala:                       I’ll tell you. We do deals now. We do all types of real estate transactions but when we do a dual-closing or a double closing or depending on where you are in the country, or what your age is, it’s called different stuff. I’m a huge fan of just being incredibly transparent. Let me give you an example of a recent transaction. Jill and I are doing and have done a couple of deals, pretty large deals, in Southern California like in Santa Barbera County. They’re ranches and they’re very, very expensive. These are ballpark numbers. Buy for cash, for six to eight-hundred thousand bucks, and sell it to somebody who with intent is going to resell it. It’s still way below market value and sell it for let’s say nine hundred, all right? We make a hundred thousand bucks. The person that’s purchasing it from you through [inaudible 00:01:59], they’re going to-

Jill DeWit:                           They’re going to find out. It’s going to leak.

Jack Butala:                       I’m real upfront. If that really upsets the buyer, because let’s say the property’s worth 1.5. If that really upsets the buyer, that we’re making a hundred thousand and he’s going to make five hundred and he wants to make it all, that’s not the right person. That being said, if this person, Steven, here is brand new and he really wants to get the deal done, he may take a different approach. I used to do it much differently, a long time ago, for smaller deals.

Jill DeWit:                           Really?

Jack Butala:                       Yeah, but in this kind of transaction …

Jill DeWit:                           Because if it was a couple hundred bucks, no one’s going to care.

Jack Butala:                       For a couple thousand.

Jill DeWit:                           A couple thousand, right.

Jack Butala:                       Let’s say you’re buying a for...

Land Academy Member Kyler Dawson

Recording Location: 33.840103, – 118.391379

Transcript: 

Jack Butala:                            Jack Butala with Jill DeWit and Kyler Dawson today.

Jill DeWit:                               Hey.

Jack Butala:                            Welcome Kyler.

Kyler Dawson:                      Hi guys.

Jack Butala:                            We’re really happy to have you on the program today. Today our show is all about you.

Kyler Dawson:                      Perfect, sounds good. I’m excited to be here.

Jack Butala:                            Awesome. Jill’s got some real specific questions because she’s like that.

Kyler Dawson:                      Okay, shoot.

Jill DeWit:                               It’s so funny. I’m not normally the organized one, but in this area I am. I want to ask you first kind of your back story. Let me tell you what I’m going to ask. I’m going to ask you your back story if you want to just tell us a little about your history, then I want to go into how you found us, and then I want to hear what you’re doing now.

Kyler Dawson:                      Okay, perfect. I’ll just jump in. If I start talking too much just cut in and stop me. About a little under two years ago I was working full-time and just kind of wanted something else to do. The monotony of my day-to-day job was getting to me, and I just wanted to find some kind of side thing to do and keep my full-time job. I had a commute to work, about 45 minutes each way, so I just started listening to podcasts, a bunch of different business podcasts, trying to get [inaudible 00:01:15] of what I could do and all that. I came across a podcast for land investing and it wasn’t y’all’s. It was a different person’s. I liked the idea of it and the numbers seemed to make sense so I did research on my own and I decided to go ahead and purchase that program. I did that program for probably about six or seven months. Throughout the entire process I felt like there were just holes throughout it where I just wanted more information or there had to be a better way to do this or that. Just a little bit about that, I was getting data from the county directly, so I think you guys know that that’s like looking at the matrix and trying to decipher the information.

Jack Butala:                            Kyler, you can use Mark’s name on the air.

Kyler Dawson:                      Okay, yeah it was Mark’s program.

Jill DeWit:                               I was waiting.

Kyler Dawson:                      Yeah, I was trying to be politically correct here, but yeah, so it was Mark’s program. Nothing against the program because it brought me to land business and it gave me the idea and the passion. Just dealing with the county data, I’d send a mailer out, and no lie, 50% to 75% of the letters came back as undeliverable.

Jill DeWit:                               Oh gosh, wow.

Kyler Dawson:                      That name, that address, whatever.

Jack Butala:                            Wow.

Kyler Dawson:                      It was just, maybe it was just the counties I was dealing with, but it was just super frustrating and I just had so many questions about different things. I bought a couple properties through him and was lucky enough to sell them for a profit, but I just bought them completely wrong. I mean, I was just getting lucky and I just knew that there was a better way to do this. I went back and just started searching land investing podcasts and somehow stumbled across y’all’s very first podcast, I think it was a different one than what it’s called now, but just on y’all’s podcasts, the first few I listened to, y’all were answering a lot of the questions that I alr...

IN THIS PARTICULAR LATV SESSION:

(The following questions are paraphrased from the voicemail/email recordings and requests…)

Jana from Michigan asks:   What makes you guys the experts?

ITEMS MENTIONED IN THIS SESSION INCLUDE:

LandStay.com

I hope you enjoyed this episode! Please email us your questions at [email protected].  We will find room for it on our program.

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

Thanks again for listening.  We are with you in your real estate ambition.!

Please don't forget to follow/like us on your favorite social media spot below.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes.

IN THIS PARTICULAR LATV SESSION:

(The following questions are paraphrased from the voicemail/email recordings and requests…)

Marissa from San Diego asks:   Which County should I start in to make the most money?

ITEMS MENTIONED IN THIS SESSION INCLUDE:

LandStay.com

 

I hope you enjoyed this episode! Please email us your questions at [email protected].  We will find room for it on our program.

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

Thanks again for listening.  We are with you in your real estate ambition.!

Please don't forget to follow/like us on your favorite social media spot below.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes.

IN THIS PARTICULAR LATV SESSION:

(The following questions are paraphrased from the voicemail/email recordings and requests…)

Steve from Flagstaff, AZ asks:   How much money do you REALLY need to start in this business?

ITEMS MENTIONED IN THIS SESSION INCLUDE:

LandStay.com

I hope you enjoyed this episode! Please email us your questions at [email protected].  We will find room for it on our program.

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

Thanks again for listening.  We are with you in your real estate ambition.!

Please don't forget to follow/like us on your favorite social media spot below.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes.

IN THIS PARTICULAR LATV SESSION:

(The following questions are paraphrased from the voicemail/email recordings and requests…)

Karl from Cleveland asks:  Do I need to pay the property taxes while I'm waiting for it to sell??

ITEMS MENTIONED IN THIS SESSION INCLUDE:

LandStay.com

I hope you enjoyed this episode! Please email us your questions at [email protected].  We will find room for it on our program.

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

Thanks again for listening.  We are with you in your real estate ambition.!

Please don't forget to follow/like us on your favorite social media spot below.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes.