How to Protect Yourself Legally (LA 959)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hello.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from sunny southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how to protect yourself legally in the land business.
Jill DeWit: It sounds like it's scary. Like do I need protection? What am I missing?
Steven Butala: So I was coming up with topics before the show today, writing down topics as we always do. We try to do the whole weeks topics all at once and our customer service extraordinaire, Amy, helped us come up with this and she said, "There's one person in particular that really wants to start off and make sure that she's legal." And it-
Jill DeWit: I like that.
Steven Butala: ... just occurred to me, actually this whole week is kind of back office admin week and how to get a mailer out. Just the basics. Basic, basic stuff. Amy was nice enough to share that we have a bunch of new people, for whatever reason, in the last few months and they really need to just basic 101 type stuff, so Jill and I are happy to help.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: So how do you protect yourself legally? We'll talk about it in a second.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Steven Butala: I have, as always, a lot of ideas on that.
Jill DeWit: As always, a lot to say.
Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a question, posted by one of members on the LandInvestors.com online community. It's free.
Jill DeWit: John A. asks: What's the difference between DataTree and RealQuest?
Steven Butala: Okay, I'll give the background and you get to answer the question.
Jill DeWit: Oh. Okay.
Steven Butala: We are, Jill and I, licensed providers of the three major and the only three worthwhile, in my opinion, data sources for assessor data. RealQuest Pro, which has been the old standby since the late 90s. TitlePro 24/7, which is kind of a newer but not totally new data set that helps title agents, actually, help figure out ... Close a deal. And then the third on is DataTree, which is First American Title's almost brand new answer to RealQuest and TitlePro. So what do you think the differences are between the three, Jill, in general?
Jill DeWit: Well, first of all, RealQuest, I still love the best because especially for land because every time you go into accounting ... And let's go back. RealQuest is CoreLogic's data company. A lot of it is direct pull from the county assessors and some stuff is fed in, it's manually, because we all know there's counties out there that are still using books on shelves, believe it or not. So RealQuest sends people out and they pull those books off the shelves and they sit there-
Steven Butala: I don't mean to interrupt-
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: In the spirit of 101, I'm going to take-
Jill DeWit: Oh, okay.
Steven Butala: ... a step back further. There's 3144 counties in this country. Counties, parishes.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: They all have a tax roll or an assessor role and that's essentially a database with all the statistics-
Jill DeWit: Of all the property.
Steven Butala: ... about every single property in their county. Why? Because they tax it every year.