How Real Estate Valuation Can Kill Companies (LA 1078)
Transcript:
Steve Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Good day.
Steve Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steve Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how real estate valuation, valuing property, can kill companies. And yes, I intentionally included the word kill in the title for effect.
Jill DeWit: Point taken. Do you soften the titles often?
Steve Butala: No, I guess I don't.
Jill DeWit: All right. I'm like, "Really?" I'm like, "What am I missing here?"
Steve Butala: Real estate valuation on both sides, on the acquisition and the sale. If you listened to yesterday's episode, we were really clear about how we feel about it. It's really ... we probably don't spend enough time on this topic. Well, we will now. We'll clarify it at all.
Jill DeWit: Oh, totally.
Steve Butala: ... on why it's so important.
Jill DeWit: I just would like to add, though, sometimes I think you hold back. And I'm here to tell you, Steven, now I know you've been really skipping along the top, holding back. I'm being totally sarcastic, obviously.
Steve Butala: Jill and I started this show in, I think it was 2015. It was 1100 episodes ago. I just looked back on that stuff, and how different ... you're pretty much the same, but how different I was. I was just really a curmudgeon, and ...
Jill DeWit: You think so?
Steve Butala: Yeah, because that's how ... because really, honestly, this is the truth. I really think to get stuff done in business, I think there's a place for being positive, but I really think that you have to just tell yourself the truth. Tell the people that you're doing business with, whether they're partners or are ... but this really ties into the show actually, ties into this episode. Exactly how ... just be a straight shooter and call it like it is. And some deals are, even though with the great deals financially, they're just going to blow up for a bunch of valuation reasons and a lot of it. So I didn't think this show would become as popular as it is. So I honestly tried to be a little bit more upbeat.
Jill DeWit: Oh, back then or now?
Steve Butala: Now.
Jill DeWit: Oh, okay. Got it.
Steve Butala: I never thought we'd get to a thousand episodes. I figured it would be a once a week thing that faded away after a few months. So I changed my attitude a little bit just to make it a little bit more interesting. But the truth of it is, and it'll come out on this episode because I've just opened that door for myself, you got to just be an honest, straight person and to get real deals done.
Jill DeWit: That's very true.
Steve Butala: And you need to be fair, fair with everybody involved, both on the buy side and the sell side. And that's what this show is about.
Jill DeWit: That's what I wrote down too. Good.
Steve 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 S. asks, "How do sellers say that they only use their title company that they've dealt with before, even going as far to say as they pay for them if needed?" Well, I'd take them up on that one, that's for sure. "It seems strange to me that they'd be willing to foot the bill to use a title company on t...