What We Learned at Santa Barbara County Assessor

Jack Butala: What We Learned at Santa Barbara County Assessor. 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 B.: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.

Jill D.: Hi.

Jack B.: Welcome to our show today in this episode Jill and I talk about what we learned at the Santa Barbara County Assessor's office. Awesome show today Jill. First, let's take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com, our online community, and it's free.

Jill D.: Cool. All right, Fred asked, "I have researched a couple of rural counties and there is one that is a possibility, but I noticed that many of the parcels do not have electric power to them. Landwatch Has parcels in the area for sale and they seem to emphasize off-grid living. In your search criteria, do you recommend properties that would require off–the–grid living? Do they sell quickly, or is it better to go with a county with power to most of the parcels?" Great questions.

Jack B.: Go ahead, what do you think? I'd love to hear your take on this.

Jill D.: I can sell either, it doesn't matter. They are different buyers that want each. Do I seek out certain ones? Not necessarily. Am I afraid of either of them? Heck no. Are there plenty of solutions out there with solar and generators and having water trucked in and not needing to have a well and all that? Yes, it's a thing called tiny houses. There's a thing called mobiles, I mean there's all kinds of solutions now out there, because a lot of people love this and want this.

Jack B.: Exactly, so Jill's exactly right, the short answer is you want to sell property. You want to buy property that you can sell quickly and you want to have a diverse portfolio of stuff for sale, some with power, some without power. There is totally different groups of people out there that seek property out that's completely off-the-grid. They've done a ton of research on solar and things like that so as a seller it's important not to get real hung up on the details of all these properties. Again, we talked about it yesterday. Everybody brings something to this table when they get with us and a lot of people for a lot of reasons are very used to knowing every single detail about the asset they're selling. You know, that's not necessarily a bad thing but if you want to sell property at a pretty high volume like we do and sell a ton of property every week. It's just physically impossible to learn all of these details.

Jill D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jack B.: And I think a lot of this comes from, a buyer calls and says, "Hey I'm real interested in this property, does it have any power?" My recommendation when that happens, and it happens all the time, is to have some version of a canned answer. Here's mine, "You know, I'm not sure. We work from air-conditioned offices in Scottsdale. We sell about 15 properties a week, and if I researched all of this stuff, it would be real tough to find that out. But that's a good question, so what I'm going to recommend that you call the county, maybe Planning and Zoning," and in some cases this is not true, it could backfire because county people can get a little upset. But have a canned speech and then say something like this, "Many, many, many of our buyers bring their own power sources," and stuff just like Jill said.

Jill D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jack B.: They put a little tiny house on there, they put an RV on there, it's solar powered. They get their power from somewhere, so I guess the moral of the story here is, this is a great question by the way, but just don't get too wrapped up in the details of each one of these deals.

Jill D.: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You'll start to learn areas and you'll know. What I do too, if you find yourself Fred, and say you have a property for sale. You bought it, it's rural,