How Land Academy Works From Everywhere (LA 1126)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWitt: Hi.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Butala.
Jill DeWitt: And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how Land Academy works, from everywhere and anywhere I'm happy to report. Because that was one of the... You know, I honestly sat down as a real estate professional in the mid to late nineties and said in a huff and disgust, how can I solve this ridiculous, inefficient process of buying and selling real estate? I know it's profitable. I know it's within my skillset. Everybody's running around like a chicken with their head cut off doing these real estate deals without any real organization and everybody's unhappy. And so this is kind of what this is all about. For me, anyway. Jill probably has completely something else to say.
Steven Butala: Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free.
Jill DeWitt: Matt asks, I have a property under contract that is no doubt a residential deal. Buy for six, sell for 12, I think.
Steven Butala: Thousand.
Jill DeWitt: Buy for 6,000, sell for 12,000, I think. But it's zoned commercial general, which doesn't have any residential uses under the zoning except potentially mixed use with a plan development permit required. My general understanding of any deal as a residential lot is only made more valuable with commercial zoning. Before I pull the trigger on this, does anyone have any experience to say, yes, go ahead, go for it, or no, this could potentially be a problem.
Jill DeWitt: The property is in California. From the town zoning map, it looks like three residential properties to my right are supposed to be zoned commercial. So I imagine they don't have any trouble zoning it back down to residential.
Jill DeWitt: I wonder if they changed the zoning since those houses were built. That's my first thought. I'm wondering how urban that area is.
Steven Butala: When this happens, we jump up and down in our office. This is a very, very, very, very positive thing. I can't think of any circumstance off the top of my head, although I'm sure there is a couple somewhere, where commercial zoning, not industrial, but commercial zoning, is as a negative thing when you're buying a house. All it does is widen your choices for how you can sell it.
Steven Butala: You know, Jill and I, we have a couple of properties under contract that are zoned commercial, but they're existing as single family residences. And it's like when you really dig into what's possible there on this lot, it's insane. Sometimes you can build a ten unit apartment building. He says mixed used here.
Jill DeWitt: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: Mixed use is great. A mixed use building is like there's retail in the bottom, restaurants or whatever, convenience store, and then above it there's apartments, maybe there's office. Sometimes they are office condos. Maybe there's residential condos. There's a lot of options. So developers run around looking for this stuff.
Steven Butala: This is a very, very, very positive thing, Matt. In fact, my guess is if you did this deal, or do this deal, and it works the way I think it's going to work, this might become your business model. We have people in our group who seek these transactions out.
Steven Butala: And then finally, my last comment here is there's this concept of zoning down,