When Auctioning Land is Best

Jack Butala: When Auctioning Land is Best. 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: Butala with Jill DeWit.

Jill DeWit: Hi, happy Friday.

Jack Butala: Yeah, happy Friday. Welcome to our show. In this episode Jill and I talk about when auctioning land is the best way to sell it. One of my absolute favorite ways to sell real estate is at auction. Why? Because you buy it so cheap. Awesome show Jill. First, before we get into it though, let's take a question posted by one our our members on the landacademy.com online community. It's free.

Jill DeWit: Okay. Steven asked, "I'm having issues locating vesting deeds for a few properties. They aren't on Title Pro 24/7. Is there anything else I can do?"

Jack Butala: This is all you, Jill.

Jill DeWit: It's so funny, I'm a little surprised if they're not on Title Pro, so I have three places that I go. First is I go looking for it for myself, because I have Title Pro and I have Real Quest, Core Logic. Real Quest Pro or Core Logic ...

Jack Butala: Do does Steven.

Jill DeWit: Right, so I do my homework, exactly, and I check both those places first. If I haven't found it there, number two, I'm going to ask the seller, because there's a real good chance, it's like the pink slip for your car. You should have these important documents tucked away somewhere. My seller probably has it. If for some reason so much time has passed they've lost it, they don't know where the file is, whatever, then I'm going to go to the county and I can call the county. I don't even necessarily need the vesting deed, by the way.

The reason I want the vesting deed is to confirm ownership. I can call the county and either A, just confirm the ownership. "Hi, I want to double check this property, how is it worded?" They can tell you over the phone, "Oh, it's the Smith Family Trust." "Okay, thank you," because that's really all I need as I'm creating my new deed. If I want to I could say, "By the way, can I request a copy of that deed for [court a deed 00:02:03]?" They say, "Sure, send me a check, here's the address and it costs you $4," or whatever it is. You can do that and the county will mail you back a copy if you really want it.

Jack Butala: Exactly. My first gut instinct on this is that something's wrong, because ... Have you ever been stumped?

Jill DeWit: No.

Jack Butala: Neither have I. Title Pro's got ... Between Real Quest and Title Pro they're in like, what? 99.5% of the counties in the country?

Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala: It's fine. It has to do either with an education thing or just a basic misunderstanding. Another thing I want to mention, too is that we talk a lot, especially on this show about deed questions and conveyance and things like that. Here's the thing, if a property that we're purchasing costs more, our cost, our purchase price is more than $5,000 we send it to title, almost always, almost without exception. On all of the house deals we do we send it to title. What we're talking about and what a lot of these questions are, are based on low acquisition price rural land deals.

If it's a piece of property in this case, I don't know, let's say it's a 10 or 15 or 20 acre property west of the Mississippi that we're purchasing for less than $4,000 or $5,000 we don't get title insurance on it. It's too slow. It's too slow, it's too time consuming. Quite honestly, if something go wrong, and it hasn't in the 15,000 deals we've done, what did you lose? Two or three grand? It's not that big of a deal. We get a lot of questions about deeds and conveyance and things like that. If you're of the mindset, listener, that you'd never want to do your own deed, then that's fine. Or if you just do house deals or SFR house flips or wholesaling, this has nothing to do with any of that. This is for small,