Real Estate Agent Side Business

Jack Butala: Real Estate Agent Side Business. 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:                            Hey.

Jack Butala:                         Welcome to our show today, this Tuesday. In this episode Jill and I talk about real estate agent side business. This is may or may not be ... The perfect real estate agent side business or any side business for that matter. Hey, before we get into it, Jill, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online communities free.

Jill DeWit:                            Okay, Trevor asked: "Have you ever negotiated with a county on a large group of over the counter properties that they owned? I know, send a mailer. I stay up every night looking at these properties that are so cheap, but I want them cheaper." That's so funny.

Jack Butala:                         I have a lot to say about this. Go ahead, Jill.

Jill DeWit:                            No, dive in.

Jack Butala:                         First of all, Trevor's awesome. He's been with us for awhile. Trevor, you're kind of breaking the rule about the mailers and thank you for addressing it at the end. You generally want to send mail out so that when you wake up in the morning, you're opening the mail and you're doing deals. You don't want to spend a lot of time looking for deals, you want them to come to you. If you're a regular listener to the show, you already know that.

Have I ever negotiated with a county? Yes. 9.9 times out of 10, it's useless. It's not because the person on the other end of the line that you're negotiating with doesn't love what you're saying, they do love what you're saying. It's just so hard to get anything done with any government. The county is a government. They have to go through all kinds of procedures and stuff. The first thing they do is they go to the Board of Supervisors and they bring it up. The Board usually ... Most counties that have a Board, they're unpaid or they're paid very little. They meet once a month and they go through an agenda. This gets on next month's agenda:"There's this guy that keeps calling, his name is Trevor, and he wants to buy everything but for a dollar a property." Almost always they say no because the first thing they do is they look up the rules. There's nothing there that states that or they look at the state statutes and the statutes say, "You must follow this procedure to sell these back tax properties." That doesn't involve negotiation so 9.9 times, it doesn't work.

That being said, there was one time that I did this and it worked really well. I didn't negotiate the price, I negotiated a release. I said, "Yep, I want every single thing on your tax role except these four properties." It was in northern Arizona I did this a lot of years ago. "I would like to buy them 15 per month." They said fantastic. We followed all the protocol, you're not adjusting the price. We're closing this thing down. I think there was 150 properties. It was Coconino County a lot of years ago. I tried it again after that and they wouldn't do it. We had completed the deal. I'm not saying don't try, but I really think that your time would be much better spent sending mail out.

The best deals, by the way, the best fantastic deals are tax liens. We shouldn't even be talking about this today. The list that you're looking at probably, in some states, are tax lien deals. You can buy the lien and then go through the 90-day foreclosure process or whatever it is in that state. Call the person and say, which is what we do all the time ... We buy the tax lien for 50 bucks and then send a letter to the person that says, "We just bought this tax lien. We don't want to go through this foreclosure. We don't want any trouble.