Why We Have Stopped Yelling at Title Agents to Close Faster (LA 1276)

Transcript:

Steven Butala:

Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:

Hello.

Steven Butala:

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

Jill DeWit:

And I'm Jill Dewitt, podcasting from sunny Southern California

Steven Butala:

Today, Jill and I talk about why we've stopped yelling at title agents to close faster. Have you stopped yelling at title agents altogether, or just the close faster? That's my question.

Jill DeWit:

A little bit of both. I'll share.

Steven Butala:

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:

Brandon wrote... Okay, this is kind of long. Looks like we have the question-

Steven Butala:

It's a good question.

Jill DeWit:

And then I have one answer.

Steven Butala:

Two answers.

Jill DeWit:

Two answers from some members that piped in. Okay.

Steven Butala:

And they're great answers, which is why I included them.

Jill DeWit:

Awesome.

Steven Butala:

Brandon wrote, "Hi guys, I'm sending my second round to purchase infill lots in the county. I've developed my own red, yellow, green spreadsheet, which I use for SFRs and infills." And he attached a screenshot for people to see. That's really cool. "Thanks to Jack, I realized that I'm a data nerd." Love it.

Jill DeWit:

Happy to help. Sorry, Brandon.

Jill DeWit:

"Once I put in zip codes, I got about 3000 results. But as I go through the list before purchasing, I see pages and pages of associations. Some are county wildlife preservation. Many are city owned or county owned. My best guess is probably 50% of the 3000 units or offers are either HOA, state, county, or city owned. So is it best to, one, buy and download the list, scrub out the city, county, and state owned, and HOAs?

Jill DeWit:

Number two, do I sit and uncheck all those boxes before downloading the list? More work, but you can go and uncheck full pages at a time. Number three, delete the others and leave in the HOAs and mail them for one of their lots?"

Jill DeWit:

So, Laurie, one of our members, wrote in, "Hi, Geraldo, you didn't say what service you're using for data. If you're using any of Land Academy provided ones like RealQuest Pro, DataPro, or DataTree, you can use the search filters to get rid of most of the government owned properties."

Steven Butala:

She means keyword search things like county, HOA. Just the keywords. The names of the city and the county, the state names, the US government, there's a lot of them. She's right.

Jill DeWit:

"HOAs aren't filtered, but from what I've experienced, you'll save a lot of time if you don't try to go through the search results and uncheck the suspected HOA properties."

Jill DeWit:

That is a pain in the ass. If you sit, you're looking at 5,000 units. Could you imagine? I'm just like, my head on my desk, uncheck, uncheck, uncheck, uncheck.

Steven Butala:

There's keyword search filters.

Jill DeWit:

Uncheck, uncheck, uncheck. He's talking about before downloading the data so he doesn't have to pay the [crosstalk 00:02:51].

Steven Butala:

Well, that's one way to do it.

Jill DeWit:

But, yeah.

Steven Butala:

But our keyword search filters to remove that stuff.

Jill DeWit:

Yeah. It's much faster to delete rows in a worksheet if you recognize there [crosstalk 00:03:00].

Steven Butala:

Use a map. On a 3000 unit, the top line of 3000 units, if you end up with 50% of the property... So to download 3000 units of our data costs $300. If you're going to not use 50% of those, you're going to save yourself $150 spending about two hours moving them before you download them.

Jill DeWit:

Check, check, check.

Steven Butala:

So you have to ask yourself, and again, we just talked about it, yesterday we talked about the math on this.

Jill DeWit:

Right.

Steven Butala:

If you download 3000 units, you're going to save yourself 150 bucks and you...