Saved By the Right Office Manager
Jack Butala: Saved By the Right Office Manager. Every Single month we give away a property for free. It's super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening.
Jack Butala: Hey, Jack Butala for LandAcademy. Welcome to the Cash Flow From Land Show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about hiring the right office manager when the time is right for you. Jill, she saves us just about every day.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: From some horrific thing. Our manager's name is Erin, and quite simply, we couldn't live without her. I'm sure you agree. Before we get into all this and hiring the right people, let's take a question from a caller.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Julia from Minnesota called in and asked "Can you apply your sending offers in the mail to farmland? Does it work as well?"
Jack Butala: I think what she's saying is we always ... We talk about sending offers to purchase in the mail for rural vacant land and houses, and lots of different property types. Does it works for farms too? Farmland too?
Jill DeWit: Absolutely.
Jack Butala: Well the honest answer is I've never done it, but it has to.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). How could it not?
Jack Butala: Right. Farmland as I understand it works for a price per acre. Everybody sits around with a cup of coffee and talks about the price per acre for land. We have some friends from Iowa that are snowbirds that are here right now, and every year they come back and I ask them what their price is and it always moves up and down like a commodity. I think it's somewhere around $9,000 an acre right now. I would think if it's that standardized, that's the key. It's so standardized that it's $9,000. You send a bunch of letters out for $6,000 or $5,000 or $4,000 or some number below retail value or what it would trade for, yeah. If ... Julia, if you do this, or need some help doing it, I love new stuff like this. Let me know. I'd be happy to send a mailer out with you and kind of see what happens. If you send it out in one tiny little area to 3 farmers, is it going to work? No.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: If you send a ton of it out, yeah. Someone's going to call you back.
Jill DeWit: Maybe with a bunch of different sizes. Don't focus on one size. Maybe have more different sizes to attract ... To reach more people at one time. That's what I would do. I'd set up ... I would think about how many letters I want to go out, and I would keep ... I would maybe expand the property size or some of the criteria until I have that. Maybe I want to send out 1000. For starters.
Jack Butala: For this mailer, what I would do is I would pick the ownership. I would pick ... The first thing I would sort for is all like kind owners, and you're going to see that owner X, maybe it's a corporation. Or farmer Z. They own like 22 parcels. Some are 100-acre, some are 40, some are whatever. I would do a special mailer that consolidates that through a data merge process.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: You would send a letter to farmer X who owns 2250 acres, you would send ... I would not give a dollar amount. I would say "I would like to buy a property for $5,000 bucks." $5,000 an acre.
Jill DeWit: Oh, okay.
Jack Butala: Just do it that way.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: What we do is per property code thing,