When to Use Escrow for a Land Deal (LA 1018)

Transcript:

Steven Butala:                   Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:                            Happy day.

Steven Butala:                   Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:                            And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California.

Steven Butala:                   Today, Jill and I celebrate Jill's birthday with you.

Jill DeWit:                            Thank you.

Steven Butala:                   And we talk about when to use escrow for a land deal.

Jill DeWit:                            Yes. Well, that's secondary.

Steven Butala:                   Happy birthday, Deal.

Jill DeWit:                            Thank you. Happy birthday, Deal? Jill.

Steven Butala:                   Oh, wow. That was subconscious. Happy birthday, Deal.

Jill DeWit:                            Yeah. What am I getting for my birthday?

Steven Butala:                   Happy birthday, wife deal-machine.

Jill DeWit:                            Oh, my gosh. You are the lucky recipient of a five-acre property.

Steven Butala:                   That's exactly not what you're going to get.

Jill DeWit:                            Oh, I like this.

Steven Butala:                   There will be large gemstones involved.

Jill DeWit:                            Oh, I like it even more. Thank you.

Steven Butala:                   As always. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com online community. It's free.

Jill DeWit:                            [Armon 00:01:00] asks, "Hi, everyone. I've in the land business for a year, and recently the transaction volume has been picking up significantly." Love it. "I've been ignoring my social media and online presence."

Steven Butala:                   Uh-oh.

Jill DeWit:                            I understand that happens. "I personally do not enjoy using social media."

Steven Butala:                   Me, either.

Jill DeWit:                            Right? "But I know how important it is for this business. Since I'm running this business alone, I'd rather focus all my time and attention on doing deals rather than digital marketing."

Steven Butala:                   Amen, brother.

Jill DeWit:                            Yep. "Do you know anyone who can manage my online presence for me? Everything from customizing my website and updating it with properties I have for sale, to posting on my Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn every day. I want to have a hands-off approach here. Any suggestion of people I can work with or ways I can go about doing this?"

Steven Butala:                   Go ahead, Jill. I want to hear what you have to say about this. And then I'm going to tell a story about what happened to us in the beginning.

Jill DeWit:                            Oh, yeah. That's a good story, too. All I can say is hire. Just kidding. We actually have, technically, three people working for us that do different versions of marketing and social media and such. It's hard to do. It's hard to find the right person, too. Took us a while to hire and get the right people, but we have them now. And even then there's always tweaking.

Steven Butala:                   Right around 2010 when Jill and I ... It was a little earlier than that. We realized the social media thing's not going away. The internet is the way to do all of this stuff, but you can't be consolidated into one tiny little operation like I had on my own. So what did we do? We looked at our phone and who our friends are, and we started to interview people that had social media jobs in our little social, personal network in Scottsdale. After about the fourth interview of people that had, "I managed Facebook for the local utility," kind of thing, we would sit down, buy these people lunch or drinks or whatever-