Going Broke Land Investing or Not (LA1688) RERUN
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Howdy.
Steven 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.
Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about going broke land investing or not, hopefully not. This came up because somebody directly emailed me and asked me, "Am I going to go broke doing this?" And I said, "I don't know. Are you?" I mean, I can tell you... That's what this episode is about. I can tell you exactly how to go broke or how not to go broke, hopefully. And what it takes like in your soul, and in your skillset, and in your attitude, and everything. Jill has got a lot of notes too, because I think a lot of it... Jill talks to a lot more, "I'm thinking about joining, but I'm not sure yet," people.
Jill DeWit:
And this is one of their big concerns.
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
And I tell them, here's exactly what you do then, and you won't go broke.
Steven Butala:
Excellent. I'm going to enjoy the show, just like you are, listener. 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:
Mike wrote, "I've seen a lot of talk and varying opinions on this. When would you remail the same acreage," and he put in bold, "Same acreage in a county you've mailed before. Would it depend on days on market and activity in the county, since some places will have a quicker turnover and change of ownership. Remailing after two months, I guess you'd piss off a lot of people, and it would be too soon to get a significantly different response or change of ownership. There must be a sweet spot. Any thoughts?"
Steven Butala:
So this question is not addressed in our formal education program, so it comes up. In fact, it comes up every single live event. It just comes up a lot. And it's a great question. And God, I hate when people answer questions like this, but I'm going to answer it like this. It's up to you. But I can tell you what we do, and I can tell you what other people do, and both are successful. We never ever remail the same acreage county, maybe in our lifetime.
Steven Butala:
What we do is, if we mail a county in, let's say, it doesn't matter, Minnesota, some specific county in Minnesota, I usually mail between five and 10 acres to begin with, or some number like that, depending on how the number check comes out. There's 5,000 properties in one county in Minnesota that are between one and five acres that don't have any improvements on them. Okay, bang. I'm going to mail it. If we have success, then we'd mail five to 10 acres. If we have success with that, then we mail 10 to 20 acres or whatever.
Steven Butala:
I cannot think of a single time in my entire career where I went back two months later because I had a bunch of success and remailed the same thing. So every time I get questions like this, this is what I ask myself. Why would you do that? And I bet you a dollar the answer is this. Because I don't want to buy any more data. I don't want to spend any more money.
Jill DeWit:
That's what you think is going on? Oh, that's interesting. Got it.
Steven Butala:
I already scrubbed all this data. It's already all in place. I'm happy with it. I got a good response on it. I'm just going to do it again. I want to skip that whole part of my life and just send it back to O2O, or maybe just call O2O and say, "Hey, can you just mail the same thing again?"
Jill DeWit:
I've heard people doing this when they thought they priced it so wrong, and they want to come back with a new price, and they want to hit the same area. I can kind of wrap my head around that one. Maybe you came in and you offered too little, you offered $100 an acre, and you realize, "Oops, I should have been offering $500 an acre." Something like that. And you're like,