Creative Marketing for Property Sales (CFFL 549)
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWitt.
Jill DeWitt: Hi!
Jack Butala: Welcome to the show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about creative marketing for property sales, it seems simple, but sometimes there's a lot to it. Or is there?
Jill DeWitt: I have some good ideas.
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 DeWitt: Okay. Shamgod asks, "I have a very thin, strange shaped lot in an are where many lots are selling for over $40,000. Is it worth trying to buy if I can get it for a few grand? I doubt you could put a house on it. If so, how do you value it, and who would your end buyer be other than the neighbors?"
Jack Butala: Yep. Neighbors are the buyers. This is a great ... You know, and I can tell Shamgod's just killin' it with some of this stuff. So I mentioned on a few shows earlier, I think it was three or four shows ago, when somebody goes to subdivide a property, it's the same thing when you go to bake a cake. You're gonna have some leftover material. And it's probably gonna go to waste. So when you subdivide a piece of property and cut it all up and put twisty, windy roads and things, there's little pieces that are unusable, it's just the way it works. Or maybe the terrain's uneven, that's probably what you're talking about here.
There are good fragments and bad ones. So you're gonna have to decide which one that is. In fact, a lot of times, they actually assign an APN, an assessor's parcel number, to the roads. I've seen that happen, that's pretty useless.
Jill DeWitt: I have too, right.
Jack Butala: Or drainage ditches, or all kinds of stuff.
Jill DeWitt: An alley.
Jack Butala: So you're gonna have to really discern. You're gonna have to discern if the property is worth it or not, I'll tell you a story real quick.
I went to a tax auction where there's all kinds of property being auctioned off by the county, and I'm only interested, when I go to those things, in buying land, and the vast majority of the people there want to buy six or seven houses that are listed, which is good for me, because then I have less competition, less biding competition. But anyway, I ended up buying, knowing this, I didn't research this until I got there, sitting in the room, a tiny little piece of property in the backyard of a subdivision, where there's developed subdivision with houses all over the place, it had a water tank on it. Or a water well or something, I could just tell from Google Earth that there was some structure on there that was meaningful.
Turned out being a water wall, water tank that all the subdivisions shared. I paid like $200 for this thing. Sent a simple letter out to 20 or 30 people in the immediate area and said, "Do you guys wanna buy this? Or does anyone want to buy this?" I ended up selling for 20 grand. So if that's the kind of fragment that you're talking about, then it's got some value. If it's just an easement that somebody incorrectly subdivided, which happens all the time, no, you don't want it. So that's the answer. I hope it's a water tank, man.
Jill DeWitt: Yeah, me too.
Jack Butala: If you have a question, or you want to be on the show, reach out to either one of us on landinvestors.com.
Today's topic, creative marketing for property sales, this is right up Jill's alley. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWitt: You know what's really interesting about this, I just thought of one more thought about this lot,