Why is There So Much Unwanted Land (LA 1038)

Transcript:

Steven Butala:                   Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:                            Happy Friday.

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 talk about why is there so much unwanted land out there?

Jill DeWit:                            Lucky for us.

Steven Butala:                   Like yesterday, I've always wondered, you know, this is the kind of stuff that we end up talking about at cocktail parties.

Jill DeWit:                            True.

Steven Butala:                   Because I really think this is misunderstood.

Jill DeWit:                            True.

Steven Butala:                   Yesterday, too. I think that land itself is misunderstood and how much money you can make with land. And I think that it just centers around this word unwanted. It's shocking, staggering how much unwanted property there is out there.

Jill DeWit:                            I want it all. It is not unwanted here.

Steven Butala:                   There's something like 80 million vacant properties in this country right now. And so that's a lot of real estate at unwanted prices. Garage sale prices, a lot of it. At least half of it is that a garage sale price. Probably 10% of what it could potentially be worth, so we'll talk about it here in a second. 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:                            Marcus says, "Hey all, can you spreadsheet programs like Excel to be programmed to automatically scrub data? I think it would be great if I could enter in a bunch of words like school, township, cemetery, et cetera, and have the programs search the downloaded owner records and automatically delete every row that contain at least one of the keywords."

Steven Butala:                   As you can imagine, there are a lot of responses to this on the Land Investors forum and Joe Martin, one of our advanced members, is gonna put a presentation on at our live event on exactly how he scrubs data. It's literally the push of a button. I've created systems like this too, and it's pretty amazing. The reason that we don't teach it and don't spread it around ... I actually don't even personally use one. I really want to still manually go through there and look at it. The reason is because I think you need to learn how to do it. I think if there's an easy button to all this, that's not good. I think you're going to miss so much. Scrubbing data manually is how you learn.

Jill DeWit:                            Yeah.

Steven Butala:                   That's the talent in this. There's a lot of things that go on. A Lot of moving parts to this business, but it starts with choosing a good county or choosing a good zip code. Getting that data in a format that you can use it and create a mail merge, and then getting the stuff out of there that doesn't make sense. Otherwise, you're sending tons and tons of mail out. That's inefficient, so this is a great intelligent question and yes, there's an answer and yes, we'll be talking about it in great detail in October.

Jill DeWit:                            Right. There are some things that break, like you were just saying. There's some things that you can do to speed up the process for you that Joe is going to talk about at the event. But the other thing is you just got to get good at it too. If you're trying to do a workaround, I don't want you to do workarounds. you know what I'd rather you be doing right now? Spending time to not use a mouse in Excel. You think I'm kidding?

Steven Butala:                   That's right, Jill.

Jill DeWit:                            I'm not kidding...