You Either Love Your Mask or Hate It (LA 1308)

Transcript:

Jack Butala:

Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:

Happy Friday.

Jack Butala:

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

Jill DeWit:

And I am Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny, southern California. I'm chilling it out. It's Friday.

Jack Butala:

It is sunny.

Jill DeWit:

It is sunny.

Jack Butala:

Do you know about this Apple fire?

Jill DeWit:

No. What Apple fire?

Jack Butala:

It's east of Riverside. It's pretty serious. It's causing most of this gloom and haze. It's not the weather.

Jill DeWit:

I don't see any gloom. I'm looking behind me. I don't see the gloominess.

Jack Butala:

I'm just going to check and see if it's cleared up. Anyway, today, Jill and I talk about you either love your mask or hate it.

Jill DeWit:

You either love your husband or hate him.

Jack Butala:

That's probably true.

Jill DeWit:

I'm sure it's true. I'm sure the guys are saying, "You either love your wife or hate her."

Jack Butala:

Here's a spoiler alert for what we're going to talk about. The types of people that watch TV, and really love taking direction, and being issued orders, and told where to stand, and how to stand, and when you can go outside, and when you can't, love their mask. That's their comfort zone. Am I judging them or engaging one way or the other and this side? No. But they're very, very comfortable in a W2 environment. In their minds, contribution to the effort, it's optional for them.

Jill DeWit:

I would argue this. I just want to bring up this thought. Remember, how do I say ... You know how people are on the phone, they can say things they would never say in person? And on the computer, oh, gosh, especially on the app NextDoor, people are so verbal, and social media is so verbal. They say things they would never say in person and out loud. I wonder if there's a little sense of security with this that they think, "They don't know who I am, I'm going to say what I want."

Jack Butala:

I'm sure.

Jill DeWit:

Interesting.

Jack Butala:

Absolutely. I'm sure there's some elements of that.

Jill DeWit:

I hadn't even thought of that.

Jack 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:

John. I'm looking for the question, like where's the question? It is a one-line question. John wrote, "Hello all. How is the pandemic affecting the land business?"

Jack Butala:

I love these simple questions.

Jill DeWit:

You want to go first?

Jack Butala:

Yeah. It's not.

Jill DeWit:

You just do it all.

Jack Butala:

Here's what happened. This ties in actually to the mask thing. Really, I could have titled this whole show, how does this mask thing tie into real estate investors and investing? And that's really what we're going to talk about. So, how does the pandemic affect the land business? It had had somewhat of an opposite effect that usual recessions have had. The recession is dramatically affecting employment, unemployment rates, but they're only affecting very specific types of businesses, specifically hospitality and retail. Those two are the major ones. Manufacturing, durable goods seem to be okay. So how is it affecting real estate?

The people that have their jobs, mostly the demographic that listens to this show, have been able to go home and effectively work at home. So they're not unaffected. The vast majority of the people in our social group have been unaffected by this. So the land ... What they're doing is buying real estate. They're making like we all do, some stuff changed and we're making decisions to change our life to adjust to it and hopefully, for the better. So it hasn't been affecting the land business. If it has been affecting it, it's only positive.

Jill DeWit:

I was going to take it to the next step, which is sales.

Jack Butala:

Please do.

Jill DeWit:

The jury's out.