When to Negotiate with Land Sellers NEVER (LA 1053)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
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 when to negotiate with the land seller? Never.
Jill DeWit: Right. Well, I remember we were talking when we were in the kitchen writing our topics, and I don't remember even why this came up, but I'm thinking this is important. Everybody thinks that we should negotiate. You should be good at negotiating. You should read negotiating books. I'm like, why?
Steven Butala: Even when you're this far along in your career, I catch myself not taking my own advice, and this is one of the things that I find people in our staff doing and I do it myself. I negotiate too much instead of just saying, "You know, that's it."
Jill DeWit: Not going to happen.
Steven Butala: Jill's famous for saying, "I love this asset at $22,000, but at $28,000 I hate it." Love it at 22, hate it at 28. It's up to you, Seller.
Jill DeWit: By the way, this is going to come into play later on today when we have a meeting about a certain asset that I don't like the price, and you're trying to make it, you want to negotiate. I don't want to negotiate. I want to move on.
Steven 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: T Kyle asks, My first mailer went out on July 13th, 1500 letters to two different counties. Here's the response. This is so good. He got one "You're a loser" email in quotes. "You're a loser," got seven or eight "Take me off your list" calls, three counter offers that were way too high, one yes, but I priced way too high so I had to decline, two acceptable counter offers but the sellers ghosted me, and one negotiated sale that I will be closing on this week, hopefully will net me $10,000 in profit. That is so cool. That's this quick little down and dirty recap.
Steven Butala: Exactly what you can expect. It sounds like he may be even priced it a little bit too high his first shot around, he or she. So do you think people go into this with the realistic expectation of what's going to happen in a mailer? Do you think we-
Jill DeWit: Yes.
Steven Butala: I'll turn it back around on us. Do we prepare them for what's really going to happen?
Jill DeWit: Yes.
Steven Butala: Because this is it, I think. This is an incredibly accurate recap. And I bet this is about a week old at least.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: So this is probably times eight, so hopefully he's got four or five other $10,000 net properties in there, which is the type of mailer that happens to us.
Jill DeWit: That's a good response for a 1500 unit mailer. That's a good response of a week's worth of activity. After three weeks it's a lot more and he's probably got a handful of deals now. So I think it's great. And I do think that we do, that's why we're here. I feel like that's my job. And that's the whole thing about Land Academy. We are here to properly convey what this is. I don't want to tell you this is easy. Everybody can do it. Piece of cake, whatever. No, I really want you to know what you're getting into because the right people will come into this with the right attitude and the right expectations and kill it.
Steven Butala: Exactly.