Land Investment Only Works with Motivation

Jack Butala: Land Investment Only Works with Motivation. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening.

Jack Butala:                            Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.

Jill DeWit:                               Hello.

Jack Butala:                            Welcome to our show today. As always, in this episode, Jill and I talk about land investment only works with motivation. Wait, we wrapped up yesterday's show with that sentence, I think.

Jill DeWit:                               Kind of.

Jack Butala:                            That's weird.

Jill DeWit:                               Yeah.

Jack Butala:                            Land investment only works with motivation. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online community. It's free.

Jill DeWit:                               Okay. They asked, "When optioning a property, should I list the full information on the listing? What do I do if buyers look up the property and see that I'm not the owner?"

Jack Butala:                            Go ahead, Jill.

Jill DeWit:                               You go ahead.

Jack Butala:                            Or I can answer if you want.

Jill DeWit:                               Go ahead, Jack.

Jack Butala:                            No, you go ahead.

Jill DeWit:                               No, you go ahead.

Jack Butala:                            This is a great opportunity to big picture say this. This question and tons of questions you're going to see throughout your career start to get really repeated. What I do is I just practice canned answers. Here's my canned response when I get this question: no, it's not the ... Hey buyer, the property is not in my name. It takes such a ... sometimes up to a year for the recorder and the assessor to get on the same page about who owns it. First, it gets recorded, it goes to a database and if it's in rural urban county, they have the same database and it gets recorded quickly. If the assessor gets updated, in some of the rural counties, it takes a year. I've seen it take two years. That should always be your answer about why isn't this property in your name, not just about optioning. However, you never want to lie, so if somebody's smart enough to say, "I did all my due diligence. I want to buy the property. The property is priced right. How do I know you own this thing?"

If it's above $4,000, here's what we do. We do it through escrow and you need to be real upfront about with the escrow agent. There's all these tiny little boutique escrow companies popping up everywhere and the more boutique they are and the more new they are, the more willing they are to do creative stuff for you. You're not going to find that regular first American title agent who's going to do a lot of independent servicing and it's not their fault. They just have regulations that come down from corporate and that's how they have to do it. You want to explain to the escrow agent that this is a dual closing and it'd be great if we don't discuss the economics of the thing with every single party.

Jill DeWit:                               Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:                            But I don't think that it should necessarily close the deal. If the person, the buyer is interested in the property, they like it, they like the price, they like the terms, I think it's okay to disclose the whole thing.

Jill DeWit:                               You know it's funny?

Jack Butala:                            It's not.

Jill DeWit:                               You use the term that I have. I have equitable title. That's an easy thing of you just say that too, "I have equitable title in the property," and lay it at that.