Why the Land Academy Wait List is Working so Well (LA 1163)

Transcript:

Steve and Jill here.

Hi.

Welcome to the Land Academy show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.

And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.

Today, Jill and I talk about why the Land Academy wait list is working out so well. What the heck is the Land Academy wait list?

It's working out for the members and it's working out for us. And I will explain it. It's going really great.

Jill will explain it. 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.

Mike asks, "Hi, everyone. First post. I'm new here and have no experience buying land before, but I've been selling expensive products online for several years. I've sent out about 2,700 rural vacant land mailers so far to three different counties. My first mailer was sent eight days ago, so I haven't got any calls yet. I want to move on to another county for rural vacant land, but I'm having some concerns about the new to sold listing ratio. It's about 150%, which is typically a bad sign. I downloaded the Redfin data for this county's land with the sole listings from last year. I was able to zero in on two specific zip codes within the county that I want to send mail to because of the price differences among the county. I feel like I can work around the 150% new to sold percentage by making the following assumptions."

"Number one, if I were pricing for all those specific zip codes for two to four acre properties, there are about 60 to 80 listings given on Redfin. That seems to be enough data. Number two"-

Totally enough data.

... "if I start by price per acre and there is a better new to sold at ratio, less than 100% for the top 20 lowest price per acre properties in each zip code. I can ignore everything else if I base my mailer off this price breaker. Number three, even if there's a less than stellar new to sold ratio, I can still move property quickly given I acquire it for around 20% of retail and sell it for 50% of retail."

So, hold on. There's just a little bit more, but that's it. You nailed it on number three. You can sell anything, any rural vacant land, any house or any type of real estate if it's dramatically less than everything else that's listed on the market.

Right, exactly. "I'm going to send the mailer anyway, but I'd like to hear if anyone does something similar since it will take me a month or so to know if I'm missing something. I didn't do this zip code approach from my other mailers. They were much more of a shotgun approach. Thanks."

Okay, so there's a couple of things going on here. Number one, he has experienced selling high dollar stuff online.

That's great.

I mean, I run around the office constantly and at the live events saying, "Hey, we're a company, a tech company or a customer service company, that happens to sell real estate." So this show is all about real estate, and Jill and I constantly talk about real estate, but really what really goes on is the same stuff as if we own a manufacturing company or a chain of convenience stores or nail salons, or dream it up. It's all business and the same stuff's involved. So I'm really glad to see this fresh approach from somebody where they're just choosing real estate to mark up and sell online. It's a great approach. I think it's a fresh ... It takes the focus off of real estate and onto running a business, number one.

Number two, what's this business of new list to sold ratio and where did he get it? He's obviously a House Academy member also because the new list to sold is how I pit zip codes against each other. And so what new list to sold means last month if 10 properties got listed in a zip code and 10 properties sold, the new list to sold is 1.0 or 100%, and that's what you want. You want a lot of properties getting sold and not so many getting listed. You want to be in that I list,