The Titanium Vault hosted by RJ Bates III
RJ Bates III, affectionately referred to as the Viking Wizard by his students, started his real estate investing career in 2014 after attending a real estate education program that put him $65,000 in debt. RJ contracted his first deal he found on the MLS and wholesaled it for a $7,500 assignment fee. That was the end of his former life and the beginning of his venture into becoming a real estate investor. Since that moment, RJ has become an influential figurehead in the real estate investing industry. He has successfully purchased and sold over 2,000 properties all across the USA including wholesale deals, rehabs, rentals, owner finances and short term rentals. One of his passions is being the host of The Titanium Vault Podcast where he interviews the top real estate investors. He has won back to back Closers Olympics earning him the reputation as the King Closer! Finally, RJ and Cassi DeHaas, his partner, have started their education platform called Titanium University.
The Titanium Vault hosted by RJ Bates III
Jill DeWit & Steven Butala: 16,000 Real Estate Transactions with Zero Debt
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Since 1999, professional real estate investors, Steven Butala and Jill DeWit, have completed over 16,000 real estate transactions without incurring any debt or leverage. In this episode with RJ Bates III they go into detail how they make offers across the country using their unique direct mail offer strategy. This allows them to make aggressive offers and solely focus on building rapport with seller's once their phone rings instead of discussing price. From this massive success, they felt compelled to start the Land Academy in 2015. The Land Academy is their educational platform that showcases their entire business structure so other investors can learn from their success. To learn more about Land Academy visit their website at http://www.landacademy.com
Listen up real estate investors, entrepreneurs, and agents. You're in the right place. Unlocking the secrets to real estate investing and entrepreneurship. Welcome there . That titanium vault hosted by RJ Batesville . Third, here's RJ.
Speaker 2Hey guys, welcome to the titanium vault. I'm your host, RJ Bates. Today I'm sitting down with Jill Dewitt and Steven Butala, how you guys doing today?
Speaker 3Excellent, RJ, thanks for having us on.
Speaker 2Yeah, I'm, I'm honored to have you guys, you know, it looks like you've done a little bit of investing in your lifetime. You know , I don't get many sheets that say 16,000 transactions. That's, that's a few deals that y'all have done in the past.
Speaker 3Exactly. And we're not stopping.
Speaker 2So why don't you guys take a quick second kind of briefly introduce yourself. Tell everybody what it is that you do in real estate.
Speaker 3I am a , the guy that stands next to Jill. My name's Steve, and uh, thank you. I love it. That's awesome. Jill and I, a in 2015 after two and a half decades of completing transactions, land driven transactions , uh, at that time was about 15,000 deals. It's closer to 16,000 now decided to start a company called land academy.com. Fully thinking it's not going to work at all . And it turns out there was just this pent up a market demand for people wanting to buy and sell rural vacant land, which is not what we specialize in. But that's where we started with , uh , and all types of lands. So since then , um , geez , we've created maybe five or 600 partners for ourselves and uh, uh, you know, it's just been a crazy wild ride including up to and including right now being, being here with you . RJ .
Speaker 2Well, let's, let's talk about that. You said it's not where you got started. What, how did you guys get started in real estate and buying rural land?
Speaker 3This is great. This, this is all Steven . So I started , uh , in the very early nineties, brokering nursing homes and hospitals on a national basis and very quickly learned in a couple of years that it takes a year to do a deal. It's like the most complicated commercial real estate deal you can do. You've got to get federal approval , state approval. All kinds of reimbursement stuff and insurance, all kinds of things happen. It takes a year to get a deal done in a year's a long time for a lot of stuff to go wrong in a deal. Got a few deals done. A one big deal in particular. And I spent almost a year between that last longterm care deal and buying the first piece of real estate. And I went from the most complicated piece of real estate transaction and two maybe the most easy, you know, buying a piece of land directly from a seller without a title agent and without a lender, just taken out all the BS out of a real estate deal and then quickly sold it on the internet for twice what I paid. And then, so here we are, whatever, 25 years later, 16,000 deals later. And we're still, I mean, geez , I just looked at our, our CRM before we got on here and uh, there's probably no , there's over 350 deals I think in there that, that are like ones that we think we can do. So we've been busy.
Speaker 2That's awesome. So let's talk about that. So you're fine. You're going direct to the seller and you're , you're purchasing the piece of land and then just turning around and marketing on the internet and selling it to someone else
Speaker 4or we have a buyer lined up in a lot of cases. [inaudible] describe what you're doing right now cause it's a perfect scenario. I was just gonna say, cause it works with all property types. So even though we land Academy is all about land cause that's the easiest way to learn this. What I'm doing right now today is the exact same business model. But instead I'm , I'm buying five and $10 million properties here in LA County and flipping them the same way. And but the differences I kind of , I have the buyers kind of already have a , I have a group in my back pocket that I know what they want but I'm still , I'm reaching out to these sellers and I'll tell you what it is. It's direct mail. I'm, and they're calling, literally called getting a letter from us, an offer letter from us. And there are apps, they are calling my phone or you know, this is what I'm doing right now and I'm making the deal directly with the seller and then we close the deal. That's it.
Speaker 2It's the, we have a lot of wholesalers. That's how I got started in real estate was wholesaling. So do you refer this to wholesaling or are you actually closing on it and then marketing to your buyers and closing?
Speaker 4Uh, on the land side we buy it, taken away [inaudible] inventory and hold it done period and such. That's it. Some of these bigger five, $10 million deals, I don't need it. I don't need to sit on it. I don't need it . I'm comfortable with my group. I have like with houses, it kind of depends on my buyer list on the deal and the , and the deal. Exactly. And if I'm afraid someone's going to , there's a chance I might not get the deal or there's a reason I did close real fast. I'll buy it. I'll take it an inventory. I'm , I only own it for a day, but I control the asset. I'd like some, most of the ones I'm doing right now, I've got an established group and I'm just handing it over to them and they , they love it because no agents, I'm with the seller, we're all saving money there. And um, was gonna say , um, it's just, it's just easy
Speaker 2I guess. Well you brought up something that's interesting there as well. You said you're doing this all through direct mail and you know, I think, you know, I talk about marketing a lot on the show and you know, there's some people that are pushing other forms of marketing in the investing world. They kind of say direct mail is dead. And every successful investor that I have on here says no direct mail is still definitely working. Yeah. There's, there's new trendy things like ringless voicemails and now the SMS texting and things like that. But direct mail still works, but you guys are sending out offer letters as your direct mail. I think that's a big difference than what a lot of people are doing. So go into details about what that looks like.
Speaker 3I think we have , there's a sign in our office that says we are a data company that happens to sell real estate. And so I like the college data centric. Uh, I was a partner at KPMG with an a , I have an accounting background, so I'm just an naturally a data person. And we, because on our show we have a podcast too. We constantly talk about data and wa mail merges and how to price things. It's just very brainy data. Those are the types of people that ended up joining our group that are , had this, that are very, you know, they're like former engineers or we've got aerospace engineers and accountants and things like that. So the whole premise of sending out an offer campaign for us goes like this. I run an analysis, whether it's any product type , um , the zip code that I'm thinking about running. So I'm going to use, I always use Mesa, Arizona as an example. Please don't send mail out to ape Mesa. There's like six or eight zip codes in Mesa and I pit them against each other . So I look at days on market , um, a number of properties that are actually listed on the MLS as compared to the university properties in that zip code. And I, I do what I , I red, green, yellow analysis. So if the days on market's real low, there's not a lot of property that that's for sale there consistently. And, and it seems to be moving, cycling through, let's say in the last 12 to 24 months, I choose that zip code. Then I identify all the logical candidates that want to sell their property for houses. We remove everybody who's got a mortgage for land. We pretty much sent it to everybody because I don't know, in an urban area at least there's not that many pieces of property. So we just, we send it and we have the secret sauce, if you will, on how we do this is how we price it, which is what we teach in our, in all of our programs. And so if it's priced properly, generally for houses, we price it at about 70% of what we think. Uh, the retail value is , uh , in some cases lower. Sometimes we use a dollar a month, but report purposes is this, this is how we do it for land. We go in way hotter because obviously nobody lives on land that's just sitting there and not being used. We go at closer to 25% and everybody gets an actual offer that says we would like to buy your property for 28,000, $300 and 22 cents and we'd like to close on Thursday all cash. There's nothing that you really need to do. Give us a call. If you want to look us up here, do some research or uh , just sign it and send it back or take a picture of it in a very predictable and consistent number of people. Uh , send it back and respond positively. I'll , I'll throw out the years it hasn't changed. So what's really interesting, and I found out, found this out even now with children, these really large deals in Los Angeles County. What's interesting is they all say some version of this. You know, I get a lot of mail from people who want to buy my property, but I never get an offer like this that's already priced right. And so we, we do that. We can do this 20 or 30,000 units at a time or more through mail merges . And so that's a new concept to a lot of people that come to us at once. They kind of, that switch kind of clicks in their head. They get it. Yeah. I mean that's, that's incredible because I'm even thinking about our company and I mean it's almost, it can catch you off guard when the seller calls you and says, Hey, you said you're willing to make me an offer. What's the offer? Right ? And you're like, well, I need to know that , you know, we don't do land, we do a lot of houses. So it's like, well what's the condition of the house? And, and then we tried to build the rapport and things like that. You guys are kind of skipping that step in the sales process and just going straight for the offer, the dollar amount. Right. You . You mentioned that you do not only vacant land, but you're also going after houses as well. Do you ever see that you're getting more offers accepted on the land side compared to the single family homes or is it about 50 50? Do you know what's interesting about that? I tell ya, I used to think that our house numbers, we're lower yields than our land. I mean it's a little bit less. I'm happy to share actual numbers with you. For rural vacant land and a well-thought-out County, we can do your research for every 300 to 400 offers that we send out. We buy a piece of property and this is scraping the bottom 20 30% of what we think it's worth. Four houses in an urban area, semi-urban area, let's say like Mesa , Arizona is what I would call semi urban . It's about eighth , between 1,820 500 offers. We buy a house and immediately resell it for what Jill's doing. These real urban w what I call a zoning type mailer where she's looking at a pretty high dollar , uh, you know, as , as somebody who , somebody gets an offer in the mail for one point $6 million for a rundown house that's prezoned to build a small apartment building that's a pretty damn good payday for yeah . So her numbers are staggering. We just did a 17,000 unit mailer and I think she's got, what, 36? It's three 30 right now. So if we haven't, that effort is too new. We're doing it with a business partner that's local here that, that um, you know , he's done this before and he's just mesmerized by our process. Like Jill just got off the phone with him right before we , uh , got in front of the camera. So I don't know what the numbers are like there, but it's going to be better than better than 2000. It will be lower than 2000. Yeah.
Speaker 2So let's talk about this real quick. I think you kind of answered it earlier when you said mail merges, but how were you going in? And it's, you said you sent out 17,000 letters, right? So that's 17,000 offers. Yep . How are you calculating these offers for 17,000 pieces of land and properties before you send out the mail campaign? Is that built within your CRM? So stick with me. I'm going to try to make this entertaining and not freaking boring. Mostly for Joel, not for you. I have a years and years and years of experience of boring gel . So this is not going to be one of those moments. I'm really talking to myself now imagine a 17,000 line spreadsheet and each one of those lines is the assessor data for all the properties for whatever reason that you've identified as ah , accepting an offer. Let's just say they're in a zip code and they don't have any debt. So when you go on to Zillow and Trulia and Redfin and all of that, they all have algorithm values on these houses. So what we do is we have a way where , um , we have people in the Philippines that go up , down every single line, 17,000 lines and fill those numbers in. We're working on making it automatic and we're actually pretty close to that from a tech standpoint. You divide those numbers out and so now you have these five or six algorithms that are out there divided by five or six. Yes , take the average and then let's say you want to offer 70% of that, you multiply 70 [inaudible] each one of those assets now is what we call smart pricing. Now those assets are all very individually priced very, very quickly and you can usually turn it around overnight. So now you've got that same 17,000 [inaudible] spreadsheet with very individually priced assets that are custom priced. You mail merge it with your document that says, you know, this is Excel to Microsoft word. If you go on YouTube and look up what a mail merge is , you'll learn about it in inside of two minutes. And uh , you send them to the printer. We own a company called offers to owners.com as a bulk mail printing company that services our members and us obviously. And everybody, yeah, it's open to the public and they get an offer. Well there you go. I mean, so I , I haven't done a thousand podcasts episodes like you guys have, but we're, we're right at about a hundred. You're going to be right at the breaking point of a hundred on . One thing that I've noticed in the two years of doing the podcast [inaudible] is that there's a couple of things that people that do volume, there's, there's a consensus here. They all do direct mail. Great . And they all utilize virtual assistants , which I'm assuming by people in the Philippines you're referring to virtual assistants. Exactly. Is the consensus between anybody that does volume. So thank you for continuing the trend here for all of our listeners. So hopefully over the past years, if they want to do volume, they're going to learn a couple of things, which is direct mail is not dead and you need to utilize virtual assistants . So , um , I , I want to kind of shift gears here and , uh , and go to just you guys. Um, you guys have been doing this since the 90s. You're partners and all facets of your lives . Yeah . Um, what are some key traits here , um , that you guys feel make a partnership as strong as y'alls is? I completely understand this important . There's myself and my company, so yes, I agree. Patients. That's it. That's all I got. What about you, Steven? You know , any socially? I've said this for years, I'm on the air and he's any, so any social relationship that works, one person has to rollover. And that's me. I love it. I love it. I have to ask because I , I'm big, I always push the book traction. I'm big on the CEO, CEO , visionary integrator. Which one of you is the visionary in this? In y'alls company. Okay. And Jill , do you fall under the role of integrator and implementer within the business?
Speaker 4That's exactly right.
Speaker 2So I , I think that's very key to a partnership. And, and I think this is very key for people to understand that even if you're in a relationship and you want to be partners with your significant other, you need to understand that you still have to have roles within your company. And just because you fit together in your personal life does not mean that you're going to be great business partners. And so I think that's probably a key to your success, is that you clearly understand that Steven , you're the visionary and Jill, that you're the integrator and you guys kind of fit in that. And then I could, I could kind of sense that even when, you know, Stephen's talking about, well, Jill's working on these things, you know, and I'm over here creating this 17,000 lines spreadsheet. I have this vision for what we're going to do over here. So that , that's cool to see how that works out between you guys. So let's transition to land Academy. Cause I know this is, you know, this is a passion for you guys. You've been doing that since 2015 so give a very simple breakdown. What is land Academy?
Speaker 4Well , uh, is , uh, our education company and program where we teach people to have a business just like ours. And it started because the years leading up to that we've been, you know, quietly doing our thing, you know, wholesaling land and different property types and doing just great. And so many of our buyers kept coming us saying, all right , knock it off you guys. I'm buying it from you. I'm marketing up and making more money. How the heck are you buying it so cheap, right? But enough to go around. We're all, we're all comfortable with that. So we would share it with them and tell them, it got to the point where like, there's only two of us. I can only teach so many people at a time. So we've thought, all right , let's just make this program, put it out there. Who was even safe in it? Anybody's even interested in like, Oh my gosh, were we were overwhelmed with our response. And it has grown into this incredible community where we all are the same way. By the way. It's very brainy. Everybody helps each other. We were all there at one time. We're now funding each other's deals. So anybody new come in doesn't have any money, big deal. Either I'm going to find it or someone else who's going to fund it. We're not gonna let a good deal go to waste. And it's awesome . So land Academy teaches basic, our whole business model start to finish from, do I need an LLC? What do I do first to , you know, do I want to sell on cash or terms and how do I grow my business? And then now we also , um, well , like I said, we fund deals, we provide all kinds of tools and access to all the data that we have at our rates that pros can usually have that new people coming in don't have access to. And we've added some products that didn't even exist. We've created [inaudible] .
Speaker 3I'll give you a couple of examples . Well , we're the only licensed providers of all three data aggregators, assessor data aggregators, and I'm aware of data tree, a real quest pro and black Knight title pro 24, seven. And so a huge bottleneck for us over the years and everybody else is in the land business is locating property that doesn't have a physical address and hasn't a post office has an assigned it yet. Right yet it's in every dataset. So we hired some people and I headed up a team to create this product called parcel fact.com where you can just type in the state, County and the APN, which everybody has because you get a tax bill, you have that information and bang and pops up and shows you all the data that's surrounded area and that you can click through and take a look at historic sales. It's pretty, it's pretty bad ass. I don't know if you can say ass on your show, right ?
Speaker 2No, you can say whatever you want. We've got much worse said on here. We've had much worse on on titles of episodes on [inaudible] . I mean we , we've had some, we've had some colorful guests on here. Okay, so Steven , I have to say it is man, you , you blow me away. You , you are, you are beyond a highly intelligent, I don't know if people tell you that or not, but man, I'm, Nope, I'm , I'm over here going , uh, I hope I can just keep it , keep up with what you're saying over here. I mean that's people who absolutely do not tell me that. Oh, I tell you that every day it's all peaches and cream man. Right, right. I mean, that's incredible stuff that you guys can come up with. Cause I mean, I, I've run into these issues where there's a piece of land and I'm like, I don't, I don't know what it is. I don't know who owns it. I don't know. There was no address. Yeah, we deal with it. You know , [inaudible] done nothing with it.
Speaker 4You have a realtor and get anything. Nothing comes up. It doesn't hurt.
Speaker 2Well that's incredible. You guys have come up with that. So on the land Academy , uh , how can people find out more about it? Um, if you guys are comfortable enough, what does it cost and what does the program look like?
Speaker 4It's landacademy.com um, the current price I think is around, I want to say $2,400. And then at the same time we get you set up with our tools. You have access to all the things that we talked about. Um, and more we do , um, weekly member calls we have, that's one of the things about land Academy two is [inaudible] two parts. Number one, it's our whole business model right there up front. We don't believe in upselling or you have to wait for this long dollar wait for that level. That makes me so $50,000. [inaudible] we have no one one thing and it's our whole thing we shows to just put it out there and that's it. And then the other thing is we have a lot of support. You know, we create our own online community. That's called landinvestors.com that's free. People can go look in that right now. Again , account and you know, start asking questions right there.
Speaker 2landinvestors.com is a kind of like the bigger packets for land people. It's really popular and you don't, you don't have to be a member or anything . In fact, we encouraged people to go out there and say, ask questions. Like, is this for real? Are these guys for real? Uh , does this SOC does , is Montana a good place to do this? Right? I mean, any questions that you can possibly think of doing research to see where you want to get educated and why and all about the land business. Well, there you go. You kinda gave my next question , um, which is for all the people that are listening, you know , you are out of the 100 episodes I've had, you are the third land investor that I've had on here and , and I've never really gotten a direct quote answer to this. And so hopefully you guys can because you guys have done far more than the other two. So , um, who is in the right location to do this? Because I have listeners all across the United States and you brought up a good question about, Hey, is Montana good place to do this? And it may be if you don't live in the right location is as easily to do virtually.
Speaker 4May I go, okay, sure. The answer is yes. You can be anywhere. And we have several members. Like we just had a live event in October. We had two guys that flew in from Germany. I didn't even know they were coming. And I'm like, Whoa . It was so cool. They're like, yep , we're doing it over here in Berlin. I'm like this . So yeah, you can be anywhere in the world and do this. And that's the beauty of rural vacant land. I don't have to see it. I'll just stand on it. Google maps, I can hire a photographer, I can get draws a come in there and that's good enough. I don't have to be there and, and, and I don't have to let somebody in and show it, you know, kind of thing too. It's very, very easy. So , um, and as far as areas, this, this is one of the things that makes me mad too, but some people talk about a secret County or something like that. That's a bunch of baloney , right ? It works everywhere. It depends on , uh, how hot you're coming in with your offers. Is your offer price and how much you're willing to spend. Because I'm here to prove it to you right now. I'm finding D I gotta I'll tell you a deal right now. I'm doing a deal in LA County. It's a a four unit complex, but it's, it's gonna be turned into 12. Um, it's opening escrow today. We, our offer price was like nine , uh, 13 or something like that, like 900, $13,000. The guy was happy with nine 40. I said, Don, he's like nine forties , my number. I'm like, you know what, we can do that. Why? Cause it's , it's, it's in it's current condition. It's worth 1.3 today. So I'm already buying it and he's out . And by the way, it's leased up, but they're month to month. So it's really easy to make these changes. So it doesn't matter where you're mailing, it's just understanding what you're doing. And also it's two parts. The offer price, what Steven does, his magic getting my phone ring is his magic and that's what he does. But then my magic kicks in and I know how to talk to these people. And that's what I teach to , how to talk to him , how to be transparent, make them comfortable with you and want to sell to you and work with you and you, and how to make it real easy and get these deals done. Or like this guy, he's, he's basically leaving $400,000 on the table. But you know what? He's, he's ending. He's giving me a hug. It's a burden that has , I'm taking it. He's like, thank you. And no one's ever talked to me like you, and no one's ever made it easy. Yeah , no one's ever, gosh helped me like this. I'm, I hope you go in and kill it on this deal. No one. And that's the way it should.
Speaker 3What we're looking for. Well , I'll directly answer your question. This works in every single zip code in every single County in the country. The variable is not where it works. The variable is , is how you price it. So there are places like Elko, Nevada, a or there's places that are very rural in the country where you can send offers out and 50 to a hundred dollars an acre and get a good response and resell it for a hundred to $200 an acre. Right? There's, you know , but you're not going to do that in Manhattan. You're going to , you're going to really reprice it and look at commercial, commercial aspects of things, which it's not beyond the scope of this, but you can buy some skyscrapers in Manhattan or undervalue in the same way you can buy them. And I'll go Nevada. So it's all a mad a function of intelligent pricing. Smart pricing.
Speaker 4No . I'm going to go back to something you said, Jill, about, you know, the magic is Steven's getting your phone to ring and then your magic is
Speaker 3building the rapport with the sellers
Speaker 4and making them trust you. Yep . And so often when we talk about cells with the motivated sellers,
Speaker 2we, we've , you guys have been so creative to flip the script there because more often than not, we're talking about you go in, you build the rapport, and then you talk about the offer. You guys are getting the offer out the way the awkward stuff's already done that when your phone rings, you know, they're either calling you for two reasons. They're either calling you to F off, why did you offer me so low? Or because they actually want to sell their house , their land or their property. And so you're gonna know that within the first three words of what they say to you on the phone and at that point in time, it's all about just being yourself. You said being transparent. I think that is super creative and, and just ah , that's, that's awesome that you guys have created , uh , that process because thank you . That is like what I would say top three topics and all of the masterminds and education events that I've been to.
Speaker 3That's what everybody wants to talk about is
Speaker 2how can I overcome higher offers or how can I build rapport? I'm struggling with getting the contract signed. You guys are literally making your phones ring with people saying, basically, I'm ready to get nailed this down and sell my property right now. I mean, was that always how you guys did it or did that evolve over the years?
Speaker 3Uh , that's a, go ahead. That's how I am. Do you want to, is that what you're going to say? Yeah. I mean I C I started the whole the land company on buying back tax property and we still do that. We still, there's still places where we buy tax tax deeds and foreclose on tax liens. It's not our main business by any stretch and we could never do the volume there that we do with land, with data and mail. Right . But yeah, I mean I remember when real quests , which used to be owned by first American in real early two thousands kind of opened it up to the public because used to be just for insurance companies and stuff and that's when my life changed. It's just that that switch just flipped in my head. And I'll tell ya , it doesn't flip in everybody's head. This isn't for everybody roasted here on these shows and we make the sound easy and we're happy and we're doing these huge deals and we live in a house on the ocean and stuff it and every, there's , you know, I'm here to tell you this is, that's a full day for both of us, right ? It's a lot of work. You know, this, it's a lot of work and a lot of time and some of, there's a lot of blood, sweat and tears that goes into it, but in the end it's profitable as hell.
Speaker 2Yeah. And you know, it's funny you bring that up because that's one of the things I always want to preach on this podcast is , uh, one of the things I didn't anticipate when I started a podcast was, is somehow that elevated me to people's eyes of, I run a perfect company and everything's easy. Did you guys realize that when you started at podcasts like, Oh yeah, really . Everyone was like, Oh, you're a superstar. I mean everything runs perfect in your company. And it's like, Oh no, I bought a microphone and I record things on my computer. That's all that's changed. So you know, for me I think it's very important for people to understand. Yeah, there is a lot of work that goes into this. There was a lot of time and effort building in the systems that you guys had to do to get to the level that you are today, not only for your company but also for land Academy. I mean that's a whole separate company that you guys are running over here. I mean I'm looking at this list, I mean I think you guys have what, 10 companies, something in like days that maybe running a lot of companies over here. So it's incredible the amount of time and effort you guys have put in the building that you know , empire that you have created at this point. So I do want to let all of the listeners know on repeat like, Hey, there's a lot of time and energy and failing forward that goes in the trade and those kind of stuff. So one things that we haven't touched base on here, and I think I know where you guys are probably going to take this answer, but you're talking about you going and getting a piece of land and it could be in the middle of nowhere, right ? And even if it is 25 cents on the dollar, who are you selling it to and where are you finding these buyers?
Speaker 4That's all you know, we found that if you are , um , coming forward, if you have something for sale, I buy it for 25 cents on the dollar. Let's just say I'm selling it for 50 cents on the dollar. If you think it's not going to move fast, if I put it in front of the raw, you know, the right person. You know, you're , you're mistaken. It does. And that's the only thing Steven has said this forever. It's true. There's only two reasons something doesn't sell. One, it's not priced right cause you probably pay too much and too , you're not reaching the right people. And we put it out there everywhere. And that's the thing too, that we help and coach and teach people don't just think this is good for eBay or this is good for Craigslist or this is good for LandWatch or anything like that. You need to make a system and this is all Steven's doing to this. He's all about systems and I'm, I'm very, I'm the a free spirit over here. I've had to kind of reel it in. But um ,
Speaker 2we have a rural piece of property [inaudible] it's got reasonably good access and it's really priced well. You're going to sell it on Facebook marketplace to some kind of prepper or something like that the first week. Yeah. There you go. Always a place to sell. Yeah.
Speaker 4Yes . If it's a Lake front thing, you make sure you put it on all your things, but then you kind of also put it in front of the hunting groups, maybe of one that's could be a hunting property. And that's one things that people have to kind of , um, I talk about a lot. We do some , um, consulting too. It's like, yeah, I gotta get out of your own head sometimes. Just because it's not your cup of tea doesn't mean it's not that person's thing. Right . Someone's gonna love this. It's property way out there that nobody can find them on. Cause I want to be off the grid.
Speaker 2We just bought a piece of property in Southern Ohio that's 10 acres. Ah yeah . Zone four motel specific, use zoning for 50 grand and we're just about to close on it for I think 600,000 or six 50 and all we had to do is just kind of do a little bit of research and reach out to the people that on regional and national motel chains
Speaker 3in that area. It wasn't, this is what is great at. She'll seek these people out, give him a call and say I've got the smoking deal and the property's worth probably a couple million bucks. We always leave money on the table. Always, essentially. Right. That's part of our model.
Speaker 2Yeah . And then the crazy thing about that is, is that probably took some time [inaudible] to do the research to find those very specific buyers. But think about the amount of profit that is in that deal. And the amount of time and energy that, and , and I've said this every time I talk about land and at some point in time I'm going to come out and say, I finally listened to myself and after doing all these interviews, but I mean not the , the time and energy that we put into building cash buyers list so we can wholesale a single family home for 20 to $25,000. I mean, that's like the average wholesale fee in DFW is 20 to 25,000 and you guys are sitting here and talking about, you know, probably two to three times the amount of energy that I put into selling a home like that. Well , you're making 500 to $550,000 profit on this kind of deal. You know what I mean? That's incredible. There's not the power to do that with some of these single family deals and the ability to go anywhere. I mean, you're talking about so far or you've thrown out deals that you've done and Southern LA Mesa, Nevada, now you're talking about Southern Ohio. I mean, that's, that's crazy. And , and you guys and really just like narrowed down how you can find those hot zip codes and find that. I mean that's, that's incredible that you guys do it. And you shocked me when you said you actually go after the hot zip codes. See, I would've thought it would be the opposite because my thought process would be a hot zip code. Those sellers would just be able to turn it a lot faster and they, if they wanted to sell it, they would people's salary idea to go after those hot zip codes. So people
Speaker 3in our, in our experience , uh, people sell their real estate for, for life changing reasons. They don't sell it on price. Like even these, the LA LA County high power deals, people that sign it and send it back or call Joe and maybe renegotiate it a little bit. They're in a life situation that's causing them to do that and they're not interested in maximizing price. Sometimes it's a death in the family or some type of job change or a life change . So , uh , I got over that, you know, 25 years ago they , they call and say, Hey, can we do this pretty quickly for the same reason they might go to a check cashing place. That's why they come to us. Gotcha.
Speaker 2Well guys, this has been a one of my, one of my favorite interviews. Um, you guys are awesome. You guys blow me away. 16,000 transactions. Um, I , I don't know, it'll be a while before I find someone that tops that number. Do you guys have any, any final thoughts or, you know, sales pitches for the land Academy better than, Hey, we've done 16,000 transactions. We know what the hell we're talking about. Yeah, I do actually one, I, if you've had two other people in our space , uh , on your, on your show and that's awesome. I'm sure that they were land Academy members at some point. There you go. I would, I would almost agree. I think that that I can almost guarantee that to be a fact.
Speaker 4You know , and, you know, we're, we're very transparent. We're happy to help. I tell you that the best thing , um, I can share if anybody needs help in anything. Hey, talk to our online community whether you're with land Academy or not, you know, we're here happy to help. That's , that's our whole thing. We have a lot of people that aren't members and have blurred from us and then they kind of come around like, alright , this clearly works. I'm ready to grow my business. I need you now. And that's when they, you know, and we can help
Speaker 2Joel always mops up what I say. What's the best way people can connect with you and follow you guys?
Speaker 4Um, land Academy . Dot to call .
Speaker 2Okay. And what's the name of the podcast?
Speaker 4The land Academy show.
Speaker 2Is there anything else that you have named the land Academy that I should now ask you about or even house Academy? They could even [inaudible] . Alright guys, thank you so much for joining us today. Uh , for all of our listeners, you joined us on iTunes. Uh , give us a five star rating. If you don't want to give us a five star rating, then don't review us at all. Only give us a five star rating. You're watching it on YouTube, only. Give us a thumbs up and subscribe. If you didn't like it, just stop listening and don't give me a thumbs down. All right. It's awesome for today, guys. We'll see y'all next week.
Speaker 1Thanks so much for listening to the titanium vault with your host, RJ Bates . The third for more info and to stay up to date, visit www.podcast.thetitaniumvault.comandonfacebook.com/the titanium vault. If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review and we'll catch you next time on a timetable involved .