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People Who Create Change are Overwhelmingly More Content (LA 1400)
Transcript:

Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Happy holidays.

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 the people who create change are overwhelmingly more content. I read an article a couple of days ago. I don't know if you call it article anymore. What do you call it? A piece.

Jill DeWit:
That's true.

Jack Butala:
It was by a pretty ... It was like CNN or something.

Jill DeWit:
I think it's still an article.

Jack Butala:
It was a credible source that somebody did a study and I'll talk about it more in the content of the show, but people who make some serious change in their life end up happier, a lot happier. And what better time to make change when the world's on fire, right?

Jill DeWit:
That's true. Oh, boy.

Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of the members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free.

Jill DeWit:
Lucas wrote: Hi folks. Land Academy posted an ad on Instagram today about assessed value. I have a question about the usefulness of assessed values when pricing a mailer. I understand that the assessed value doesn't reflect the actual retail value of a property. However, does it make sense to use the assessed value as an indicator when the property doesn't fit the normal data?

Jack Butala:
Yes.

Jill DeWit:
For example-

Jack Butala:
This is a very good question.

Jill DeWit:
Imagine a scenario where a bunch of properties have an assessed value of 30 to $40,000 with retail values close to $100,000.

Jack Butala:
Excellent example.

Jill DeWit:
Most of them are wooded and undeveloped. Then I see one property with an assessed value of $400,000. When I check it out, I can see that it's cleared, there's a road, and it's in a high-end neighborhood with an excellent view. This makes me think that the assessed value can at least help me distinguish between the extreme spectrums of a given county, very valuable versus very useless. So I'm thinking, can I use this column to manage the outliers in my dataset and hopefully get more accurate and a precise mailer. Does this make sense? [inaudible 00:02:11] Lucas.

Jack Butala:
Lucas, you're 80% of the way there.

Jill DeWit:
Great.

Jack Butala:
So let me clarify what he's saying. You take a dataset, it's got, what did he say, 30 to $40,000 retail values. Let's say there's a real consistent assessed values of 30 to $40,000 with retails of 100,000, right? This is long after we've gone through the process of collecting data on for sale and sold property in the area.

Jill DeWit:
And picks the county and now we're going down.

Jack Butala:
Yeah, in a perfect world, the assessed values would be consistent with the price for acres and you would look down a dataset of let's say, I don't know, I'm going to just use an example of a thousand lines of data and everything's peachy. It's like, oh, it all ties. It's great. And then at the top, there's properties that have an assessed value of zero, a bunch of them. Why? Because they're probably non-profit properties. And then at the bottom, there's assessed values. I'll use his numbers of 400, 500, 600,000. But they're all at that same county, same APN scheme. What the hell? They're outliers. They're data exceptions. In the world of data, that's what they call it. So what do you do? Do you increase your price per offer in that like he suggests? No. What you do is you lop them off your data set because it's screwing up your averages.
If you have in a thousand unit data set, if you have 25 to 50 with zero on the top, and then at the bottom, you have, let's say 50 or 80 that are in the millions or the hundreds of thousands or the 50,000 even, it's going to throw your data way off. So you terminate them.