Offers Academy for Getting Listings

Jack Butala: Offers Academy for Getting Listings. 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. In this episode Jill and I talk about offers academy for getting listings. If you're a real estate agent you should listen to this. It's actually pretty cool. It's a good, consistent way to get listings. 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: Ryan asked, "I'm going through the notary closed checklist and I realize that I do not know how to check for clear chain of title. Do I need to do this for every property? How do I check for clear chain of title?"

Jack Butala: Go ahead, Jill. You're so qualified for this.

Jill DeWit: You have all the data. You have all this at your fingertips. You, Ryan, if you are a member and have all of our tools, which I'm assuming you do, let's just go with the easy way, you do, you have a thing called Title Pro. Guess what that means you get to do? Do your due diligence just like you're a title agent. Most title companies when they write their policies and their insurance and all that good stuff, they're going back between 30 and 40 years. Guess what you can do? Go into Title Pro, pop in the parcel information, go back and look at the chain of title 30, 40 years. You're looking to make sure grantor, grantee, everything lines up, everything needs to be perfect and smooth in the transaction. No granted to this guy and then all of the sudden this owner pops up like a new thing. You need to see, and you can check all the deeds, you can see the documents if you want. You can just act like you're a title agent.

Often, what's so interesting to me is, some of the people that we deal with, it's been the same person for 30, 40, even more years. I always find that so interesting and funny and it does pop up often. I'm dealing with the same guy that he says, "Yeah, you know what? My wife and I bought this in 1961 and our kids were little and we thought we were going to retire and move out there. Well that didn't happen and the kids don't want it." It's really easy for me to go back and I can pull up that deed and go gosh darn it, he's right. I'm staring at it, 1961, and I can see that it's the same guy the whole time and I can see all the tax payments that he's made, he's current on all that, because I have that information.

That's how you do it. You're going to go in there, Ryan, you're going to put in the information, put on your title agent hat, that's one of the things about our world, you're wearing a lot of different hats. You take off your acquisition hat and you're putting on your title agent hat because now you're reviewing the transaction and you need to do your due diligence and make sure. That's how you check for that. Do you want to add anything, Jack?

Jack Butala: I do. The first thing you want to do, and our team does it on the very first phone call, is to qualify the signer. Someone is going to convey that property to us or to you and you want to make sure that the person that's actually going to do the signing is the person that's qualified to actually sign that document.

Let me give you some examples about how this can be a little bit confusing. I'm not trying to complicate things, but it can ... There are certain times you just have to walk away because it's unfixable because the signer's not qualified. Here's a few examples: John Smith owns a 40 acre property in Nevada and his son, Carl Smith, calls you and says, "I signed the offer, you sent an offer to my dad, my dad passed away. I'm Carl Smith and everything in his estate was ... I got everything in his estate. I'm the beneficiary of the whole thing.