Getting Rejected by a Local Escrow Agent (LA 1307)
Transcript:
Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Howdy.
Jack 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.
Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about getting rejected by a local escrow agent. This is something, for the 25 years I've been in this business, has never, ever happened with very, very few exceptions. Happens a lot now. Jill's going to tell us why.
Jill DeWit:
Before we get into it, should I do that?
Jack Butala:
Sure.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. Let's take a question posted by one of our members on the Land Investors online community. It is free. John wrote, I downloaded a list from real class, and there are a ton, almost half of properties with the same mailing address and situs address. Would you mail those or take them out? Well, that's interesting. You know what it makes me think of? It's like you download a not big list and one guy owns half the County. Is that how you read it?
Jack Butala:
No, not at all.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Jack Butala:
So there's counties, I'm almost sure this is not County data. This is the zip code data. There are zip codes for air force bases that have seven APNs in them. There's zip codes in some big cities that are a medical campus, like acute care. There's zip codes for all kinds of stuff that are not what we all think of as a zip code. So what happened here with John is-
Jill DeWit:
That makes sense. You're smart.
Jack Butala:
The data people... Really?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Jack Butala:
I don't know if she means it or not.
Jill DeWit:
I do mean that. That was sincere.
Jack Butala:
I don't know if it's like, "You're smart." Bam"! Smack on the head.
Jill DeWit:
No. When have I ever done that?
Jack Butala:
Don't make me answer that.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Jack Butala:
I'm trying to get through the question here.
Jill DeWit:
What the heck was that?
Jack Butala:
Can you imagine if your siblings asked you that?
Jill DeWit:
What? My goodness, go ahead.
Jack Butala:
I can't imagine having that conversation like with my sister, Like, "Oh no, we never hit each other." She would just crack up.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Jack Butala:
So yeah, especially with zip codes, there's specific use zip codes. I think there's like 26,000 zip codes in the country, and I think that, for our purposes, the usability ones are like 12,000 to 18,000, some number like that. I don't know exactly. But here's the good news. All these data sources that we use, RealQuest, Datatree and TitlePro allow you to preview the data very, very easily without ever spending a nickel, ever. John didn't check. He pulled up his data set, he did all the stuff that you're supposed to do, like we teach.
Jill DeWit:
Click, click, click, click, click.
Jack Butala:
He's looking at it and he just hit buy. He didn't do that last step where you just kind of peruse the data. Like for instance, there's counties out West here that have a tremendous amount of Bureau of Land Management owned property, there's municipality owned property, a ton of native American owned reservation type property. And so for whatever reason, over the years, those properties have gotten assigned APNs, and they're of no use to us. We're not going to mail the US government a letter to see if we want... or any native American reservation. We're just not.
So you have to check the data to see if it's usable or if it's what you anticipate. There is some properties that have huge cemeteries on them. You don't want it. You got to remove all that stuff. So, check your data for free before you download it. So you don't get disappointed. Same property? I don't think it's the same. The only time-
Jill DeWit:
No, I think you're right. I mean, there's times that it does. If there's a big developer, let's just throw this out there, a Del Webb community. If Del Webb owns a whole thing as he's,