Jack and Jill : Land Academy

Brandon Parker00:00This is Brandon Parker. Welcome to the Legends of Land Show where it's my job to deconstruct the tactics of elite land investors, how they think about their business and strategies that drive their success. My guests today are Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWitt, also known as Jack and Jill. They're the founders of the Land Academy and DeWitt family of companies with over 16,000 transactions and twenty years of experience. They specialize in land flipping and educating land investors. Through the Land Academy, they give tools, trainings, and community support, and they help others do what they have done in the land business.

Brandon Parker00:37You can find them online at landacademy.com and their podcast, Land Academy Show. In this conversation, we cover being an entrepreneur, land business, what sets the land investors that just crush it and make lots of money apart from people who maybe flounder a little bit, what great land teams look like. And one of my favorite parts of this podcast was the future looking aspect of how Jack and Jill operate, seeing patterns and macro trends.

Brandon Parker01:07And we get into what's next for land, what 2025 looks like, some alternative methods to go out there and just make massive amounts of money, and all kinds of just entrepreneur opportunity. These are the conversations I love, my friends. Without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Jack and Jill. Welcome to the show, Jack and Jill.

Brandon Parker01:44So wonderful to have you. I know that you've both been doing the land for decades at this point, and you have tons of experience. Maybe we could start where you kicked off, how you founded the Land Academy and what the story behind that is.

Steven Jack Butala01:58I started buying and selling land in the early nineties out of sheer disgust for my job and for the way real estate transactions were happening around me. I was a commercial real estate broker right out of college and by default because of the recession at that time, economic recession, I went into buying and selling nursing homes on behalf of large clients because healthcare is a little bit more, recession proof than any any other type of real estate. And I unknowingly got involved in some of the most difficult real estate transactions that are ever created, but you gotta get state approval and federal approval and Medicare, Medicaid, all that stuff.

Steven Jack Butala02:38So I I went back to the drawing board after all of that and tried to figure out what the most simple type of real estate transaction could possibly be. Like literally on a whiteboard, I wrote it all out, and that is buying and selling a piece of land for cash.

Brandon Parker02:54And

Steven Jack Butala02:55it just parlayed into, we've done 16,000 plus transactions. Amazing. Yeah. Just, it made sense to me at the time. And then ultimately Jill and I joined forces in it. That's when it really got big because

Jill DeWit03:08she's really good on the phone. That was like sixteen years ago. Yeah. We did that. Then Land Academy now, 2025, will be ten years of Land Academy. Was really fun to talk to somebody about that too. Thank you. I'm like, I think I'm qualified to say now that I can show you how to do this.

Brandon Parker03:26Oh, that's so good. What was it like combining forces? You said that you have specialties and what's that look like? How do you look at teamwork for building land teams?

Jill DeWit03:35We don't let Jack answer the phone. Yeah, not anymore.

Steven Jack Butala03:39They only let me talk like... This is it. This is the only exposure I get. Yep. The only two way conversation I get to have is like this. Not even with our staff. I'm glad I could help you. They

Jill DeWit03:50they let me talk into the camera, but that's That's about it. Maybe at the Christmas party. When we get together, we invite you for that. So that's good. That's awesome. No. You wanna share about that? Because he was doing it all at different points in your career before me. You've done all the hats. So by the time around two thousand and seven or nine rolled around at that time, we were the largest seller

Steven Jack Butala04:14of real estate on eBay. I concocted this scenario where we would buy land the same way we buy it now through mail and through going to tax deed auctions, which we've stopped a long time ago, we stopped doing that. And then just auctioning it off $1 no reserve on eBay. We were doing two and three and four transactions

Jill DeWit04:33a day. No way. And... Somebody even got to hourly. Was a really a peak there that was like insane

Steven Jack Butala04:40number of deals. So it was great while it lasted. That recession hit real hard and everybody just stopped buying real estate. And so I thought it was over. I expected it to wane out, but not end like that. And then entered Jill. And she said, we had all this inventory, just a ton of inventory. And Jill said, who's your typical buyer? So I gave her a short list. She got on the phone and liquidated all of our inventory. I didn't know it then, but that was the beginning of Land Academy. She just, when Jill puts your mind to it with, with things like that, she won't get off the phone until it's all sold.

Steven Jack Butala05:11True. And it's still like that. True.

Brandon Parker05:14That is killer. Yeah. See, that acquisitions part or that sales part, it seems a pretty key team member to have. And Jill, you did what, seventeen years as a salesperson with the airlines. And so you've got like a serious background.

Jill DeWit05:27Coming into this. Yep. I know how to sell. Yeah. Yeah. So our line has always been still, whatever it's on the buy side or the sell side, he has one job, and it's to make my phone ring. I don't care what it is. Whether I'm buying it or selling it, I'll get it done. If there's a deal there, I'll find out, and I'll get to the bottom line. I just keep the pipeline jam full, and she creates real estate deals where there was not one moments before that. And we've tried other things. And for us, direct mail has never, never failed.

Jill DeWit05:59We're still doing that testing other things, but maybe follow-up stuff, but still getting that offer in the mail just sings to people. Yep.

Brandon Parker06:08And have you seen ebbs and flows in direct mail or what's that look like over just longer terms? How's that looked to you or has it just been just steady the whole time?

Steven Jack Butala06:18That's a great question. I believe right now the response is we've have the lowest response rate that we've had since I've been sending mail. True. Which is probably around since 1999. So, I think there's a couple reasons for that. Number one, there's a there seems to be, Jill and I were researching this earlier today, This wait and see attitude in real estate. I don't know what exactly what that's about. Might be election related. It might be interest rates and and mortgage rates are extremely high comparatively over the last several years.

Steven Jack Butala06:50So... But there's just this wait and see. And also, I think it's, there's no denying it any longer. The mail scenario has a little saturated. There's a lot of mail going on for all product types. True. So, what we've done is expand our product type. We're we're actively buying and selling mobile homes and single family residential property in rural areas. When

Brandon Parker07:12did you make that move?

Steven Jack Butala07:15Probably this year. We've always done it in the background. We just haven't really talked about it. Right. But we've really stepped it up recently. And I'll tell you, it's a different acquisition. There's different responsibilities during the acquisition when you buy a vertical structure. True. You can't just sit comfortably in behind your desk. There's some stuff you gotta get out in the field and do it. We just spent six months in an RV going up all through the Rocky Mountains. We're looking at these little rural towns and it was a blast, first of all. Yeah. And it was really profitable.

Steven Jack Butala07:45And very informational. Really learned a lot. Yeah. What's the coolest thing you saw on that trip? The most interesting land deal, the biggest learnings. I get, tell a little bit about that. Sounds cool. Awesome. The variance, for me, it was a variance in prices on a single rural town block. There's $3,000,000 house next to a $400,000 house and that at the asset, which just reeks a profit for us. Mhmm. But and the asset difference doesn't warrant that kind of spread.

Steven Jack Butala08:16True.

Brandon Parker08:17So what's your approach when you see something like that?

Steven Jack Butala08:21To send out mail. Buy it. Yeah. We get... There's opportunity there. You're just an expert at getting a local phone number a and a local mailbox within

Jill DeWit08:31hours of Yeah, us all be friend people. Oh yeah. No That's the thing. If it's all real consistent and there's real easy numbers, it's no variance there, then everybody knows what I should sell for. Of thing. But when it's all over the map, there's so much opportunity. And you don't know how to put a number to that unless you have some experience. That's the hard part. So, but for us, I'm like, woo hoo. When I go into a market where he does the front end, he's the data guy. He picks the market, Phones coming in and I'm going to look at comps and I'm like, there's not many.

Jill DeWit09:04You did this on purpose. I know you did. It's all over the place because then I get to set the number now. I'm like, this is what we're paying. Yeah. And it's not rocket science. An economist would call it a market inefficiency. Yeah. So if you can picture like condominium complex that's in a high rise and it's got a 100 units, that's a pretty efficient market.

Steven Jack Butala09:23Variance in the prices are what those assets trade for. It's not very wide, but a rural SFR market is just by definition very inefficient, which is good for us. And

Brandon Parker09:38so are you finding those markets driving around and visually looking for discrepancies in the type of houses? Are you doing the data research and then driving in? Or are you approaching that?

Steven Jack Butala09:49Data research first, always. I have a short little list of what makes a rural town attractive from a buyer's perspective and what doesn't. If it's got, it needs to have one or two big employers. In a lot of these mountain towns, it's, in a university or the hub of a healthcare system. Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm.

Brandon Parker10:07Yeah. Guess with your background in in healthcare, that ties in. I bought some property out in Hernando, Mississippi, which is thirty minutes from Memphis, but that's the big hub for Amazon warehouse distribution. So a little bit of that concept there. So you're looking for where there's a job market, a growing job market, and then you're looking for some sort of variance. If you're looking at three bedrooms, there's $3,000,000 houses and there's $400,000 houses. And then what else interests you looking for in those rural markets?

Brandon Parker10:39So the first thing I do is I go to realtor.com/research.

Steven Jack Butala10:44And there they have a downloadable, multiple download options for all the statistics or not all but very pertinent statistics per zip code that will allow you to line up zip codes and make decisions about where we point the RV. For instance, one of the first statistics in that download, it's a million, it's a spreadsheet, it's more than a million lines. And it compares each zip code statistically in the first statistic that I look at is the increase in value month over month and year over year.

Steven Jack Butala11:20So, if zip code has an SFR or all real estate types and it's got a 10% increase year over year for this trailing month, now it's got my attention. If it's minus 10%, which is not that uncommon now, it's not... That the mid demand won't be high enough for us to go in there and buy, assets and liquidate them quickly. True. There's

Jill DeWit11:44no dart board in our office. Everything he does, it's... It's all data driven. Yeah. It tells you where to mail.

Steven Jack Butala11:51And then I can make her phone ring.

Brandon Parker11:54And then she can close the deals. That's awesome. You doing this while you're out? For example, this RV trip here in Colorado. So you're looking at stuff within a 100 miles or something and going from there? Okay.

Jill DeWit12:07Very cool. For whatever reason, it makes sense there for Joe and I, when we get into a little market after about three or four days of it, we know block by block. Oh yeah. We just have, I don't know, that just makes sense to us. True. I wonder why that is. Most people go to these lovely little towns and their first thing is let's go horseback riding. Let's do hiking and everything. Oh no. We hop in the car and I'm driving and he's spouting out numbers and telling me where to turn and where to go. Because all we're doing is driving and looking at real estate. That's our fun activity.

Steven Jack Butala12:39We were in Durango, Colorado for two months and we left. And we looked at each other as we were leaving and said, we did nothing here. And you

Jill DeWit12:47we I rode the did train once.

Steven Jack Butala12:50All we did was real estate deals, you and it's not even work. No. Yeah. Real estate deals and cocktails. Was- That's about it.

Brandon Parker12:58That's awesome. Yeah. I saw Jill walk in a property and she said, her property or land is in our blood or in our DNA. Yep. Totally. I can see that. That's so cool that you're doing. Have you always done the traveling while looking at land thing or is that a new development?

Steven Jack Butala13:15Our third and final kid went to college and we were set free. Yeah. Oh,

Brandon Parker13:20when was that?

Jill DeWit13:22About three years ago. Got the RV.

Brandon Parker13:27That's so cool. Where they end up going to college at Michigan State like you or where they are Right.

Steven Jack Butala13:32Now he's at ASU getting a master's degree in accounting. I'm proud Oh, nobody wanted to go back to Michigan. Go figure.

Brandon Parker13:39Yeah. Amazing. I know The snow and the negative temperatures are so nice during the winter though.

Jill DeWit13:47That's cool. Jill, where are from? Orange County, California. So I grew up in it. I watched my dad. He was a pilot. I understand you're a pilot. So he was a pilot back in the day. He was Air Cal and got eaten by American. And then he retired with American and then went on to fly for net jets. But back when he was getting started and I was growing up, he did a lot of charter flying and he was flying around like Don Cole and some of these really heavy hitter investors. I'm like, I would get to go on rides sometimes.

Jill DeWit14:19I'd go in this guy's helicopter. I'm like, who is this guy? And why do we get to go in this helicopter? Yeah. He was buying all the Southern California real estate. I'm like, this is great. So I watched my dad get into investing a little bit, buying and selling and just actually buying and holding and renting out homes. He did it in Orange County. Then he did it in the Dallas area years later too. So I'm like, I always knew what was there. And then my first real full time job, I worked for some developers in Orange County where they bought the land and they built the office building, or they built a strip mall like in Victorville, or they did one in Santa Ana.

Jill DeWit14:54And then they leased them up and held them. And I got to be involved in every part of it. And I loved it from dealing with the tenants to the construction loans and the bankers and all of that. The workers, they had their own construction crew. I got to know them and I'm like, This is it. So I pivoted to, I wanted to travel because I was in my early twenties. I'm like, Okay, I got a taste of it, but no, I just want to goof off and have fun. So I went to American for years and then undid that. And here we are. So when this came along and we got together and I found out what he did, I'm like, Oh, I can do this.

Jill DeWit15:29I just love it. Jill had that luxury of cutting her teeth professionally

Steven Jack Butala15:33in a real estate environment that doubles in value every ten years. True. And so when our professional partnership really kicked in, she was grossly overly optimistic. We should just buy all of this. True. And I'm like, I have property in Northern Michigan that has had the same value since 1980. It was worth a $100,000 then, and it's worth a $100,000 now. Oh, that's great. That same property in Orange County is probably worth millions. Oh my gosh. It was a $100,000 then.

Steven Jack Butala16:05It's... Yeah. 10,000,000 now. Mhmm. We gotta host Jo off once in a while. Yeah. Her optimism is offset by my pessimist, and then right in the middle, we usually That's do pretty

Brandon Parker16:17true. Yeah. That's great. You got the optimist and the salesperson.

Jill DeWit16:22Yep. You drive in, you got you doing all the data analytics to kill our team, for sure. I like that. When I pick a deal though, and I come to them and I say, This is how it's going to go. I will make sure it ends that way. I will not let it fail. Jill manifests her own success. Thank you. That's cool. Very cool. What

Brandon Parker16:41do you think acquisitions people are? People running their own little land businesses and things like that. Jill, just that little bit of just find a way to get a deal done. Some experience? Is it your mindset? What is it that just enables you to close deals? A lot of people are getting...

Jill DeWit16:57What is it? You can't be afraid of it. You have to answer the phone. Number one, I see a lot of people that are afraid to answer the phone. They have voicemail. They're using other things. So for me, especially right now, you got to answer that phone, befriend these people really quickly, find out if there's a deal there, and then push it to get it done. You can't get back to them in a week or take your sweet time. You say, You know what? All right, I gotcha. My offer was $16,000 whatever it is, and you want 25. All right, let me see if I can make 25 work.

Jill DeWit17:28In our world, I can usually make that. I know going into it, if he sent it out for 16, I could probably buy up to 30 or something because it's really worth 80 kind of thing. So I can probably make 25 work. And then I follow through. I get to know them. I tell them, Here's what I'm going do. I need a day. I'm going to call the county. Got to check on some things. We're going to be tomorrow afternoon between three and five, And is this the best number? Just push it through. Don't give anybody any time to change their mind or talk to their family, whatever it is and get it purchased.

Jill DeWit18:02So that's what I'm doing a lot of coaching people right now. They're too slow to react. Yeah. They're not getting In

Steven Jack Butala18:09every real estate deal, I believe there's a moment where you mentally make the decision to buy it. Yeah. And we see a lot of people in land academy that are really new, that don't have the confidence or maybe the, the experience True. To make that decision and they drag the deal out because they they have not made a decision to buy it and they that's largely because they haven't done the the the amount this the swift amount of due diligence to convince themselves that it's a good deal or a bad deal. So it just sits there. That's really bad.

Steven Jack Butala18:40Yeah. And then they wonder why people go dark. Yeah. And things like that. I'm like, lost that one. Either do the deal or you don't. And we go into every single deal saying, I'm gonna buy it. We're gonna buy it, but it has to be the right price. Yeah. And I think that a lot of it's just a mental state long before you even send the mail out or make the calls in your case. That's

Brandon Parker18:59intuitive. I see a lot of people get stuck at that same spot. It's like, it's like, they call it the due diligence. Oh, I gotta look into this. I gotta look into that. We'll get them back on the phone and start closing the deal. It's not about looking into stuff and getting more information. That seems like there's some sort of mental block there.

Jill DeWit19:15What's a- You got to have a number too. I always tell people, you can't say, let me get back to you. You have to end that very first phone call with a number. Don't waste any time. And don't, and if your number doesn't work and they say, me tomorrow with a new one, that doesn't work too. You're gonna forever be negotiating

Steven Jack Butala19:32against yourself, Jack. What stops you from doing is moving on to the next deal if you're not gonna do it. True. You just get in a a holding pattern. Yeah.

Brandon Parker19:40You mentioned a swift amount of due diligence coming to that number.

Steven Jack Butala19:45How rough cut on that number? How good are you coming into something really close? What's that look like? How do you coach people about that? So I hate due diligence. I hate it. Everybody does, I think. Don't know. Don't don't mind. Enjoys it. Yeah. So I wanna get through it as fast as possible. And I'm actually, once we decide that the economics of the transaction works, which takes seconds, then I'm trying to find something wrong with it. Right. And so we have a concept called the eight As. What's gotta have, actually I haven't written down because I... Good. The people that you're talking to have to be alive.

Steven Jack Butala20:17Very often they're trying to buy property from dead people. And it just, from a legal standpoint, it's very difficult depending on the state, what to do. We look at adjacent. What is it adjacent to? Because chances are that's what the end use for that property will be. And if it passes that test, I don't, if it's adjacent to a gas station, I'm just gonna say no, there's EPA concerns and the world doesn't need another gas station. What adjacent access, can you get to it? Acreage, larger is usually better, not always. Affordable, is it cheap enough? What attributes does it have?

Steven Jack Butala20:48Does it on the water Or is it in the middle of West Texas attribute less? And then the final two, which are more personal than... They're more about you than the asset is abundance. If you're looking at 20 deals, chances are you're gonna choose a... Make a good decision. Right. If you only, your pipeline has one or two deals in it, you're gonna start seeing things, at least in my case, that aren't there in a positive way, and that's not good. And then finally, afraid, which we just talked about. If you're afraid, if you send out a mailer and you've got a pipeline full and you're afraid to do deals, it's just not gonna get done.

Steven Jack Butala21:19So you gotta address that before. You just address it through education and experience. I mean, we have, Joe and I have, we operate and instruct Land Academy and that's what get you out of that mentality and into the deal making mentality, or we try Mhmm.

Brandon Parker21:36And do you do that with frameworks, the, comping frameworks and the frameworks like you just said? Or is it... Oh, some mental stuff? What's the coaching look like? All of it like we

Jill DeWit21:47have anything that you want from one on one handholding. We do group calls every week on Thursdays. Is it handholding Atlanta Academy product? It's a new one coming. Come out and walk the property with you and actually hold your hand. 20 Here's what we're doing. Type this in right here.

Steven Jack Butala22:05Don't tape your mouth. I've

Jill DeWit22:09kind of done some hand holding. Okay, maybe not... You know what I mean. Yeah. But some people don't need that much help and some people need weekly attention and we have it all. But the main thing is too, we have a nice community. I think because of us, the way we came out of this, out of the gate was Land Academy just happened on accident. We were investors first. We weren't educators looking for something to teach or professional marketers looking for something to sell that would make money.

Jill DeWit22:43Oh no, we've been land people forever. We've been quietly happily doing our thing. Even now and then we go, Why did we? We could have been quietly still doing our own deals and now we've built this whole big thing, which has been wonderful. I wouldn't change it for the world. Cause now I have all these people to do deals with. But Land Academy came on accident too. So many of our buyers were bugging us over the years. Like, okay, I'm buying it from you, Jill, and I'm marking it up and making money. Then how the heck are you getting it so cheap? I'm like, I have Jack and they're like, what the heck?

Jill DeWit23:13So we created this little program and put it on DVDs ten years ago and this coming summer. Here we are today. But part of it, so part of the education is we have a really strong community that feels the way we do, which is we're all helping each other. There's enough land to go around. There's enough. And now with houses and mobiles and all the things that we're talking about within our group and helping people, You're not going to run out of deals. We've done mailers in counties and I've looked at him and I said, you know what? We've sent out huge mailers, like 17,020 units at a time.

Jill DeWit23:47And I'm answering the initial phone call. It's comical, but I'm like, I looked at him and I'm like, we can never leave this county and retire here kind of thing. There's a lot out there, if you know what you're doing. We created Land Academy because in my entire professional career as in some version of an acquisition person, I was constantly running out of money.

Steven Jack Butala24:05I remember the moment we sat down on vacation actually, and I said, how can we create something where we have limitless capital? And that's why we created Land Academy to create partners for ourselves, and it really worked out. We don't borrow any money, and I don't lend any money. Don't have any debt. None. I'll

Jill DeWit24:24do deals with people. If you need some dough, I'll come up with it. I'll fund it, but I'm not borrowing it. And you're not borrowing it from me. Now we're in this together.

Brandon Parker24:32That gives you a pipeline of basically JV deals with a lot of people that bring deals and you look at them and you'll JV on the right deals. Then what's that look On like you're funding

Steven Jack Butala24:42other people's deals. It's really great. There's a huge opportunity with undervalued SFRs, higher end range, especially now over the last few years. You can buy a house for $700,000 and sell it for $7.50 and not have to put any of your own money in. That's Really very powerful.

Brandon Parker24:58Mhmm. What do those deals look like? Is it just a... You're comping the value there and then you're just flipping it? I mean, it's just a standard flip. How's that whole transaction go? This is what we do from a data standpoint. The amount of data out there

Steven Jack Butala25:13in the real estate space for SFRs is amazing. The amount of data for land is not amazing. It's very underwhelming because nobody really cares about land. But if you look up, if you put an address of an SFR, you Google it, you're gonna get six or eight algorithmic opinions of what it's worth. So we take the average of those, and we do this in a mail merged offer campaign spreadsheet. We teach all this stuff in Land Academy and House Academy. And so now I've got an algorithmic, an average of a bunch of very accurate algorithms in my opinion.

Steven Jack Butala25:50And so I know an asset's worth $782,000 or so these algorithms think. So it tells me what to offer. I'm gonna offer $6.82. And we'll probably come in there to some... And you do that 10,000 times, you're gonna buy a couple assets and sell them very quickly. Houses sell really fast if you buy them below the market breakpoint. They they sell in hours, not months, like land.

Brandon Parker26:14So sounds like there's some trade offs there. There's probably less arbitrage. Are are you still able to find those deals where you're gonna find $150,000 or $200,000

Jill DeWit26:24of value on The higher numbers you go. You buy for 1.5 and you sell for 1.8 or something like, because it's all cleaned up worth too. This is like Southern California craziness, but you could do that.

Brandon Parker26:38So there's so much more data, more competitive, I'd guess, to some extent, but you can make quicker decisions on pricing. And it may be a little bit riskier with the houses. You've got section one and two reports and things like that. How do you look at that part? Do you see it as more risky or no? Evaluating

Steven Jack Butala26:55the asset itself, again, it's not very fun. Mhmm. There's an opportunity there to miss a lot of things, but we take one, possibly two inspections, regular house inspections, and we look at them pretty carefully and we'd make a decision.

Brandon Parker27:12That's cool. I think that was your question. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, yeah, just, I'm curious. I've heard a lot of people that come from SFR to land it's so much more simple, then I love the idea of the transition back and forth between them because there's some interesting benefits. What would you say the main differentiators between land versus SFR and are you going more towards single family stuff or what's your longer term thought on that? Land has always

Steven Jack Butala27:41kept food on the table. I don't see a... That'll never go away That's for perfect. Mhmm. It's good to hear you say that. Yeah. Never. I just love it. Me too. I have... There's a huge opportunity with rural houses now in these smaller towns, because of what I've called, what I call the Starlink effect. We had the first generation Starlink, just in a personal experience, the first generation Starlink in our first RV, and it sucked. Mhmm. And we have a product now that's bolted to the top of this, a different RV called In Motion, and it was originally designed for boats, and it's life changing.

Steven Jack Butala28:15Mhmm. It it's on all the time. It's just like in your house or in your office. It's truly It's life really cool. And this is what I tell our members. I caught the wave, the financial wave of rural vacant land in the nineties. There were not a lot of people doing it. It didn't make sense to anybody with any amount of money. I took a chance and it really worked out. That's happening with rural houses. We're probably both working for... We are working from home today. Backroom. So we figured it out and it's not gonna go away.

Steven Jack Butala28:46And so why wouldn't you live in rural Colorado versus San Diego? Mhmm. Yeah. It's half the price. It's more fun. People are nicer, all of it. So we're seeing a huge uptick in mountain towns along the Rocky Mountains. Mhmm. Value. Value wise. That

Brandon Parker29:03makes a ton of sense. We're both doing it. I'm sitting in my house right now in the Santa Cruz Mountains just why would I live in San Francisco? I've lived in San Francisco before. That sounds like a nightmare. Why would I do that?

Jill DeWit29:13Think about what your money could do for you two states over.

Brandon Parker29:17Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Mean, Yeah, there's all kinds of Idaho. I've kicked around the idea of going somewhere in the South. Yeah. But anyway, that, and when there's high speed internet that also gives, I mean, for me, I've thought about getting a place down in like Mexico on the beach or something. It's like, all of a sudden, if you can have high speed internet wherever you are, that opens up a whole world of opportunity. Yeah. You have a good point though. That was cool. I forgot about that.

Jill DeWit29:41When we launched Land Academy 9.5 ago, one of the number one questions was, does this really work with land? Like I'd explain the whole model. Then I haven't had to explain this model in years.

Steven Jack Butala29:52Everybody gets it now. It's kind of funny. Buy a piece of land and you sell it for more. Yeah. Yeah. That's our old business model. That's it. That's Land Academy. You don't even need to join Land Academy. Just Now you got

Brandon Parker30:03all away. You gave it all away for free. Amazing. But they don't get the hand holding it. Just take the duct That's tape so interesting. Have you had any other kind of bigger visionary calls, either of you? I love the idea of being in rural land early and this idea of the rural. What other bigger patterns have you seen or do you see coming up? Oh,

Jill DeWit30:26go ahead. Oh, no, this is all you. Hold him back sometimes. Comes up with all these ideas. I'm like, I don't know how I can implement all this. I love that. He is always our forward thinking leader, ahead of all the curves and telling us where to pivot. That's one of the values I know that our community loves. We bring to the table is I'll say, Hold on, give me six months. We're going to test this. I'll let you know if it worked or not, and then we'll report back. Then if it does work, we're going to show you guys all the path kind of thing. He's always out there coming up with these things. Even today, Brandon, he's got this idea and I'm like, Okay.

Jill DeWit31:00The last thing I want to hear the new idea. Let's hear them. Before we sat down to this, I said, I need you to tell me how many hours I have to expect upfront to devote to this and how many hours on a weekly basis. She wasn't this nice about it. No, I wasn't. She said this is where

Steven Jack Butala31:17the conversation ends. Open a dark room. Yeah. Come back out with the budget and let me know what the time commitment is. Okay. And I hope you do none of that.

Jill DeWit31:29Because he's got always got new ideas. We should do this now because we're watching what's coming. Listen, 2025

Steven Jack Butala31:35is not good for real estate. Yeah. It's gonna we're gonna see what I'm calling now a price adjustment. And it's counterbalancing what happened during COVID. So we'll see in a lot of markets. We're already seeing it in Texas pretty seriously. We haven't seen it in Arizona yet, but we'll see a 20 to 40% price reductions. I'll call, hopefully call it a stabilization. Cause that's what it, they should be valued. They just got overvalued because of low interest rates and all kinds of stuff. And starling.

Brandon Parker32:00Yeah. Mhmm. True.

Steven Jack Butala32:04So that, that's really, we're, we are, we're stock piling cash to buy a ton of property that's we believe is undervalued. Yeah. All, all product types, commercial too. Mhmm. Mhmm. So it's not like some... Big secret. Yeah. And it's not that smart, you know. It's not, we're gonna buy undervalued assets and sell them for more when it's time. Yeah. Duh.

Brandon Parker32:28And it plays into your theory that some people are doing the wait and see thing. I mean, sounds if you're stockpiling cash, you're almost doing that. Maybe you're not doing wait and see, you're planning for what you think is going to yeah, plays into that whole thing. He knows. He's so good. You can see the data. The data tells you what's happening. The market goes up 20% year over year.

Steven Jack Butala32:46It's gonna have to come back down unless wages go up or interest rates come down and none of those things are happening. Wages are not gonna go up congruently with real estate values. They're just not. Reducing mortgage rates are the only way we're gonna clear out inventory. This is my opinion. Obviously, reducing mortgage rates right now has a catastrophic inflationary effect. So not like in 2009 where you can take your interest rates down to 1% and and let the market adjust. If we brought interest rates down to 1% now, the cost of bread would be $25 Yeah.

Brandon Parker33:21Yeah. Seems like maybe the only way out without a giant correction would be some sort of massive increase in productivity type of thing. We'd have to invent and grow our way out of the mess. But I mean that doesn't happen overnight. So yeah it seems like you're right on it. This generation is the largest, this new

Steven Jack Butala33:39house buying generation, kids that are 20 years old, in their 20s, is the largest generation in the history of ever. So it's been, we've been spoiled with that. Low interest rates and a huge influx of consumers.

Jill DeWit33:52Yeah. I don't know how this is gonna end. This would be my second. Correct. This is like your third or fourth time since you've been full time at this. Yeah. Mhmm. So you... He's seen it, lived it, breathed it. Boy, we struggled through it some years. What about hundreds and hundreds of Going houses next

Steven Jack Butala34:11for it. Okay. With equity Maybe

Brandon Parker34:13walk us through or tell a little bit of the story of those different corrections you've seen, patterns that you've seen that are similar. I think my first one was the 2006, 2007. I flipped my first house into that. I bought a house with a... 2006, somewhere around there, I bought a house with a broken foundation, jacked it up in the air, repaired the foundation, had this epic flip I was going to do. And I was like, I literally bought the picotop of garage. I was an economics major too in college. I just graduated. That was a real estate agent. I thought I was all shopping.

Brandon Parker34:44You're like, got this. Yeah. I was like, oh, Okay. Crush it.

Jill DeWit34:48That the house you're sitting in right now, Brandon? No, it's not. Yeah.

Brandon Parker34:54I ended up, exiting. My partner still owns it, but I was like, can take this. I don't want it. He's all. So yeah, anyway, I'd love to hear kind of the stories of the directions you thought.

Steven Jack Butala35:07The most acute, example I have, it was a real estate depression in two thousand and six and seven. We couldn't give land away. And it's incidentally, it's about the time that Joe and I joined forces professionally and socially. And the first thing we did is went out to West Phoenix and bought and resold houses. We bought houses for 40 to $60,000 and resold them for 80 or 90 immediately. And like all in one escrow. And those houses now, and before that recession were 2 or $300,000 and they're 2 or $300,000 now.

Steven Jack Butala35:41And I don't think that it's gonna happen, that kind of devaluation is gonna happen. Those are Wall Street bankruptcies and predatory lending. And that's not what we have right now. We just have an oversupply scenario and coming off COVID false. It's not a bubble, but it's just a false increase in value that just needs to be adjusted. And when it gets adjusted, that's when you buy. And the trick is, it's not a trick, but you just read the data and look at zip codes and then get, once you get into a zip code, bring it down to census tract and figure out what's going on in that market in the last fifteen years.

Steven Jack Butala36:17And you're going to see that you can see the future. What

Brandon Parker36:21do you look at there? So you're looking at like a steady increase. To talk a bit about what data you're looking at there when you dig into a zip code.

Steven Jack Butala36:29So if I were presenting this to Land Academy, our members in Land Academy, you would be able to see my screen, and I would show you. This is what happened in this ZIP code year over year and month over month for median values of SFRs, which ultimately bleed down into land values month over month. And you can see in 2022, if you have a whole entire year, all twelve months, you're seeing values go up ten, twenty, 30%. That's a real good indication of how it's going to come down.

Steven Jack Butala37:01If it's flat, I always pick on Michigan because I'm from there. You don't see these crazy fluctuations in value in Michigan. It's always out west for some reason. I like to blame a lot of things on California because that's where Joe's from. For sure. It's our fault. Yeah.

Brandon Parker37:17Is. I blame stuff on California too. I'm riding out in the mountains here, blaming everything on all that Yeah.

Jill DeWit37:24Used to be just Southern California got it. Now the whole state gets it. It's kind of nice. So we could at least spread it out a little bit. Yeah, for sure.

Brandon Parker37:34That's interesting. I didn't put that together earlier, but you're looking at the real estate markets and then coming to conclusions for the land market or seeing that kind of as an indicator for what the land market... This makes a ton of sense because there's such better data there. That's so funny. I'm always just only looking at specifically land stuff, but there's more data with the housing. Okay. That's very insightful. That's cool. I have a kind of interesting question. So Jill, working at American Airlines for forever, I'm sure you've traveled the world, probably seen all kinds of stuff, which is cool.

Brandon Parker38:04And so I'm curious in your, let's say international travels, it could be in The States. What's like the most interesting piece of land or like idea you had? You're like, Oh, I could do that with this piece of land. Have you seen any deals as you've been traveling that just kind of were

Jill DeWit38:20crazy? Back then, I wasn't thinking about any of this at all. Then? It was staying out late and having fun. It was that kind of a thing. If anything, I'd be following a band around or Yeah, see where Depeche Vogt's playing this month. There we go. Might've happened. No, but what's interesting is now, looking back, it's so hard. I know now I wouldn't have even tried it anyway, but buying and selling land in The United States, people still don't know that anybody can do it.

Jill DeWit38:53Doesn't matter where you're from. Doesn't even matter your age. I mean, you could deed a six month old a property, that's legal kind of thing. People don't know that. You don't have to be a citizen and things like that. But the flip side is not the same, but you can't just, I can't just go to England and buy land, A, and B, the data is not there. It's not Israeli available. Since we've been together, I've done Canadian deals with you and I'm trying to think if there's anything else international.

Steven Jack Butala39:21I don't think I've done any stuff with I spent two months in Costa Rica trying to figure that out and it was a huge fail. Yeah. The data's not there. To get it, velocity of getting a transaction done with the way the notarization environment is there is not conducive to what we do. And yeah, the older I get, the more I respect that. Slowing everything down. And

Jill DeWit39:43since we joined forces and I don't have that bug anyway, I love our country. Since we started, We've taken our sweet RV, two of them, one was really small too, all the way to Northern Michigan and just had a blast. And there's still parts of our country that I have not seen. And I want to see, we keep talking about it. Are we going to do the drive to Alaska like our friends do? I'm not sure, but that's a heck of a drive. I just love doing this in The States

Steven Jack Butala40:10anyway. Yeah. You want to get to know your partner really well. Spend six months in an RV with them. So cool.

Jill DeWit40:18Oh

Brandon Parker40:23my gosh, for sure. And

Jill DeWit40:25a smaller bed than you have at home. That's also helpful.

Brandon Parker40:30Oh my gosh. That's great. Yeah, that's so true. The U. Is so crazy. I love traveling around The U. S. I think about the difference between Alaska, somewhere wild in Alaska and then New Orleans. You can have

Jill DeWit40:41complete, like almost being in different countries just within The States. It's pretty cool. It's nice since Land Academy too, I've got the opportunity to partner and fund deals in all kinds of states that I had not worked with before. So Jack came in. When I came into the fold, he had a East Coast bad, West Coast good, West Of The Mississippi kind of mentality that he liked. Not socially. Just real estate. Yeah. That thing. So that was where I cut my teeth. So now I can speak of all kinds of states that, that I have not mailed, we have not mailed ourselves, but we've done deals there.

Jill DeWit41:16And I've learned so much. It's really cool. We have multiple people in a product that we have called Land Academy Pro, where we allow our members to use our staff so they don't have to go hire their own.

Steven Jack Butala41:26They're smashing it in the North... In the, Northeastern part of the country. Right. New England. Yeah. Never would have considered that. Correct.

Jill DeWit41:34Yeah. I'm

Steven Jack Butala41:36telling them, do you need more money? I can And help I'm like, they're in Canada and they're doing it all from Canada. Yeah. Mean, they're just killing They have 20 or 30 properties in escrow at any given time. Yeah. Wow. She's I'm thinking about it. She just won't stop. She doesn't stop. No, she won't let out. She doesn't sleep. That's true. She's like an infant. Yep. That's why. Oh my gosh. Not sleeping.

Brandon Parker41:54That's amazing. She's going be deeding that infant all of that, a bunch of property. They're

Jill DeWit42:00selling it. They're doing really well. It's Very really

Brandon Parker42:03cool. I often wonder about that because I see a lot of people Florida, North Carolina, Texas type stuff. What are some other random states you think that are overlooked or have opportunity?

Steven Jack Butala42:14I think the Dakotas are grossly overlooked. True. You have to buy it. Those are really rural markets and the data doesn't really support in a traditional sense establishing an acquisition pipeline there. But if you get it so cheap that a person who's looking at it to buy it, an end user, through the person you're selling it to, has that switch that I have to buy this. Mhmm. If they have that moment, because it's so cheap and pretty good property, then you'll kill it. South Dakota specifically is the quality of data there is really bad. So that's a huge opportunity.

Steven Jack Butala42:45I wouldn't advise it at all if you're brand new. Yeah. You know, I would stick to the, the, the stay set support it.

Jill DeWit42:52Utah's overlooked.

Steven Jack Butala42:54Yeah, think New Mexico has gotten pounded land wise but I just read a whole thing about, I don't know why New Mexico is not more popular as a tourist destination or a move from California to New Mexico scenario. Yeah. It's just not. Don't know why. Everybody knows Taos and Albuquerque. That's about it. Yeah. Mhmm. So there's lots of pretty places.

Brandon Parker43:13Yeah. Mexico is beautiful.

Steven Jack Butala43:16Think Florida's Florida's had a first severe devaluation.

Jill DeWit43:20There's beautiful lakes in Oklahoma and Arkansas and up and down there. The numbers tell Jack's in charge of all that. I think of, well, where do people wanna go? What's great about it kind of thing. Where's the water? Sunshine and rainbows gel. That's right.

Brandon Parker43:36Nice.

Jill DeWit43:38Can you imagine if we were... We've jogged about this. We reverse roles. What a disaster that would be. Oh my god. We should do that. I'm doing I all the learned from you. If I didn't learn from you, let's just say. So now I know... But if I didn't learn from you, how I would pick an area and how you would answer the phone not knowing me would be a whole different ballgame. Here's me answering the phone. Cool. You don't wanna sell it? I don't wanna buy it either.

Brandon Parker44:02No real I got stuff to do. What do you make to spend money on? Next week, we're starving. Ramen noodles all over again. There we go. So good. Jack, you were an investment banker. You did big mergers along the way and things like that with healthcare. What's the biggest takeaway you had from those big complicated transactions that has transferred over into land or how you just look at the land business in general?

Steven Jack Butala44:26So aside from don't do complicated deals, my biggest takeaway is just to run. I mean, there's so many ways to effectively and relatively simply do great real estate deal. I make a ton of money in real estate and it doesn't have to be complicated. We have a lot of people, I call them in our group that are, have STEM related personalities and have chosen those types of careers and no one can complicate something like a mechanical engineer.

Jill DeWit44:58All of our friends who are listening right now are going, yeah, that's true. And half of our friends are engineers. Yeah, yeah. Or recovering engineers.

Steven Jack Butala45:05I had a client. I did very well back in the day representing companies who were trying to go public. They would call me, and I had a couple of people working for me and retain us to go out and buy nursing homes or assisted living facilities at breakneck speed so that they could go public. The result of that was really bad acquisition decisions. We got paid no matter what, but I watched all this unfold and obviously said, whenever I get to be on that seat on the other end of that phone, I'm not gonna do this.

Steven Jack Butala45:36I'm not gonna capitalize. The the way that there was companies that are structured from a capital standpoint, it doesn't make sense. It it forces you to make bad decisions. Private equity is built on that model by the because you have to spend the money? Yeah. We have $100,000,000 and we have to place it. That's not good. That's terrible. Start with the quality of the asset and then finance it. Not the other way around. Mhmm.

Brandon Parker46:02Yeah. Have you ever considered bundling packages of land together or, like, doing things with bigger hedge fund type deals or anything like that?

Steven Jack Butala46:12Yeah. We had a a guy in our group. He went to our... One of the original live events that we had, and I spent a lot of time with him. Yeah. And he created a group without me within Land Academy with a bunch of members and it imploded. It's for the exact reason that I just said. Raised, he created a fund, raised a bunch of capital. And the people that put money into these funds, their mentality is, this is probably something you already know, but for our listeners, what ends up happening is you pick 30 funds, let's say, and you put $5 in each fund and you hope one of them ends up being Apple computer and all of the rest of them die.

Steven Jack Butala46:49And so losing money is our defunct funds is just something that everybody expects, especially in Palo Alto. Mhmm. So there are people that are startup professionals in Palo Alto that raise money fully knowing that it's gonna fail. They're just professional capital raisers. And I'm not making a judgment about it, but it exists. So there's so much more money out there than everybody thinks. Yeah. For this stuff.

Jill DeWit47:15We've been assured, certainly been approached. Oh geez. So much. So people like wanting to give us money. I'm like, thank you. I don't need it. I don't want it. And they say, where'd my return? To which I say, here's your money back.

Brandon Parker47:30Which is the one for one return. Here you are. Thanks for asking. Yeah. I guess that does start to get into a lot of poor incentives and then a lot of expectations and all kinds of things to manage that just become... I mean, part of what's so beautiful about land is it's the open world. You can do whatever you want as an entrepreneur. And I think that kills a little bit of it for sure.

Jill DeWit47:52Still a little bit of the wild west.

Steven Jack Butala47:54Yeah. And I like it. You know, you don't make money in land, it's because you didn't establish a pipeline or the decision... The active decisions that you made are not good. Mhmm. It's so simple. Mhmm. And that doesn't mean it's over. It means I learned. Gonna get a better pipeline, get a better partner, and make better acquisition decisions. There you go.

Brandon Parker48:14Can turn this thing on and off at any time. So that when I wind down, I usually ask two questions. One is if we bounce past anything that you'd love to revisit or want to dig a little deeper into the topics that we hit. Yeah. Did anything come up for you? What do we gloss past you'd like to chat about?

Steven Jack Butala48:32My life changed when I got this business partner. Thank you. And so whoever you are and whatever void you're trying to fill in your professional life, get the right business partner. Mhmm. And and your life will change. I can't, express that enough. It happened to me on accident. Thank you. I appreciate that. Right back at you. She never gives a speech. Bet her life didn't change because she got a I did. Yes. Wait.

Jill DeWit48:57No. I do I do brag about you. Like, it's nice. People come into Land Academy, right? And they have both of us now showing them the way and helping them and being right there as a resource. I at least had you. You had nobody. So he'd forget this whole thing out all on his own. I'm going give you a little kudos. So before we did direct mail, he was faxing. Mean, the whole thing that we do, our whole business model was not copied at all. I got to reach these people. There's got to be a better way than trying to cold call 8,000 people in a week. But we could sure send out 8,000 offers in a week and let them come to us.

Jill DeWit49:30World was beautiful before there were spam laws. That's You're

Brandon Parker49:34just shooting the faxes right into people's offices. Yes. You've done so much interesting stuff. I love the visionary part of what you've done with, like, when you said that eBay thing earlier in the conversation, I like, Dude, that's cool. Okay. Wasn't it amazing? He got to meet He Meg

Jill DeWit49:47went to all these I big came into the tail end of it. He owned real estate and eBay, I'm like, It was impressive. That's That's where a lot of those transactions came from. It was a machine

Steven Jack Butala49:59that- We would buy entire subdivisions and just decide that instead of the land being worth $1,200 it was worth $2,200

Jill DeWit50:08And just reset the whole thing. Yeah. You're making the market at that point. You're like, okay, here's the, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's cool. It was really, really cool. I just want people to, whatever you're going to do, to just go in with both feet. I watch people, and it breaks my heart when I have people been with us for three, four years that haven't sent a mailer yet, they're like, this is going to be my year. I'm like, what the heck? I appreciate, you know, soaking up the knowledge and being part of it. Or maybe they're here for the entertainment, which I question too. But I want everyone to succeed.

Jill DeWit50:40And I always tell them, I'm right here. What do you need? Me to help you look at a deal, motivate you to send out the mail, talk about answering the phone. You have us, you have this great community, and now we have ten years going on behind us. We'll get you there. If you're interested, we'll get you there. But you need to decide first this is what you're gonna do and you're just gonna do it. You know that moment in the first Rocky movie where Adrian

Steven Jack Butala51:02says win? She tells him when he's all depressed and he's, I want you to go win. And then he starts training and everything. You can kind of see it. Give me goosebumps. That's what you need. I know. You need that in your life. You need a person like that in your life socially and professionally.

Jill DeWit51:15And if you're not that into it, get a partner who's going to put you there. Maybe you have a lot of dough because we have people that come into Land Academy and they're retired, right? But they're not done and they know what's going on. They're like, I don't want to work that hard. I'd rather be the bank for somebody. Great. There's plenty of real go getters in our community that would love to partner with you, knowing that you're just going to sit back and be the funder. There's a place for that too. Our

Steven Jack Butala51:40biggest challenge in anything professionally has been staffing. Yeah. And I will never, as long as I live, understand the disconnect between finding somebody who's, between just the lack of quality people that work for us or our partnership with. And I just staffing is, if you can conquer staffing, what Bill Gates or Steve Jobs said, if you do everything right in life, you'll eventually just become a full time recruiter. And, we have not been able to crack that.

Steven Jack Butala52:11How

Brandon Parker52:13do you think about staffing? Where do you find people? What's that look like? Can you talk about that a little bit? I can tell you what we've done wrong. Yeah. I got it. Very helpful.

Jill DeWit52:21Do we have another hour?

Steven Jack Butala52:24So you're paying people more. You're That's the

Jill DeWit52:28it. Let's give them a commission. No, that's not it. How about unlimited whatever? No, that's not it. That's one of the things that I do love about Land Academy is I'm working with other entrepreneurs. That's really all it is. I'm not bringing somebody in to work for me. I'm showing them. All we're doing is sharing our business model with whoever else wants to learn and show them how to make their own company.

Steven Jack Butala52:53We are acquisitions people, That's Joe and true. We are not operations people. That's true. We've proven that over and over again to ourselves and to everybody. Yeah. And so when we bring somebody in, we expect them to take ownership. True. Especially even if it's in an equity role from a partner standpoint. And it's just shocking how that doesn't happen. A, it, they look at us like parents. Now they're here and we're here to help them and tell them what to do catch them when they fall. It's the exact opposite. It should be, that's what they should be doing for us. And I don't see that as a generational thing or or gender or, and I can't, I don't know what it is, but it's just how it is now.

Steven Jack Butala53:27That's all I can say. I think the percentage of people that are successful is smaller than we realize.

Jill DeWit53:32It really is. I mean, the number of people that have been really been successful on Land Academy versus everybody that we've touched I is not a just saw a statistic.

Steven Jack Butala53:43But they're good. There were some ones that just took it to the moon. There's a huge number of new businesses that were created during COVID, and eighty five percent of them are defunct now. Oh, wow. Yeah. I believe So they're not taking ownership in their own ownership. I believe that. Like this won't, whatever we do, we won't let it fail. No, that's not who we are. That's not. And I'm not patting our, I'm not patting myself in the back in any way. I just, I think it was, you're either wired for that or you're not. Correct. And so what we've seen historically is people bold faced lie about what they're capable of and what their background is.

Steven Jack Butala54:16We ask them then to take tests to see if they know Excel and they figure out a way around that. And so they get a great score and they come in and then they sit and look at you and say, all right, please, please parent me. Right. Mhmm. I sound frustrated. It's because I am. Get it.

Brandon Parker54:36Get it. It's that.

Steven Jack Butala54:39Jill and I, I have I have walked around our office for a decade and said, we're one employee away from making tens of millions of dollars a installing mobile homes. And we have yet to... If you are an amazing mobile home installer, jacklandacademy.com

Jill DeWit54:56is my email. Please. I don't care what state you're in. We'll figure it out.

Brandon Parker55:00And what's mobile home installing entail? Is that like a general contractor? I mean, it's... Yeah. You need to know how understand how septic

Steven Jack Butala55:08systems work and how much they cost, how to install or manage the installation of a well and a shared well. And we'll do every... And the mobile home installation part, which is simple compared to the other two. And we'll do everything else. We'll buy the land. We'll subdivide it. We'll market the property. Have the thing delivered? All of it. Yeah.

Jill DeWit55:29Can't find somebody. It's like one little piece right now. That's a beautiful thing. I mean, the

Brandon Parker55:35real estate, like the housing crunch that there is, I've considered in Santa Cruz area here, just in the mountains, there's all kinds of little pieces of properties plugging tiny houses in and just Yeah. It would be unlimited as fast as you could do it. And you can get rid of them. So it's a similar concept. But, yeah, maybe we'll... That's a cool thing about the podcast. You have a bigger audience than me, but you never know who these things reach. And someone's, oh, that sounds a great opportunity. Yeah. I am a mobile home installer. I think that there's two opposing things that make it hard, I think, just to be an entrepreneur.

Brandon Parker56:06It's got to have both a serious bias towards action with that little bit of optimism, but then also some sort of analytic skills when those things sometimes are opposing. And so that's what's impressive. I mean, that's why you and you both have grown so much as you have both of those. I think that most people have a little blend, but it's hard. I think the bias towards action is the thing that just is the biggest sticking point a lot of the time.

Steven Jack Butala56:32That's absolutely true and we see that with the new Land Academy members. To be successful in real estate, you do. You have to have four, five separate talents. Work at a partner. I can't stress that enough. Get a partner that's got the talents that you don't have.

Brandon Parker56:45Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. Where is the best place to find you both online? Landacademy.com, I'm guessing. Yeah. Totally. Fantastic. Do you do socials? Are you active on any socials or landacademy.com

Jill DeWit57:01the best place to kind of Oh, best there. Yeah. And you can send a note to our team at support@landacademy.com, and they'll reach out any questions you have. We also, every Thursday, we do a weekly member call and with our community in the last, I don't know, six or eight weeks, we've been opening it up in the very beginning few minutes to the general public on YouTube and Facebook. If someone... It's Thursdays at 02:00 Pacific time, I believe. So if you just go on to our pages, you'll find it.

Jill DeWit57:33If you want to just be a fly on the wall, you could do YouTube just watch us there for a few minutes and get a feel for us and our community and things that we're talking about. We're doing that too. Or if you want to just, you could even send a note to our team and I'll let you be, they'll give you the zoom invite. If you want to just attend once to hear the whole call too, which is really beneficial because not only it's us, but you get to see the deals that our, our, community is doing. We'll have questions sometimes about education, sometimes about a situation with a seller. How do I get out of this?

Jill DeWit58:04I want to buy this and here's where we are. What do I do? And other things as simple as I'm about to pull the trigger. Should I do this deal? Yeah. Should I do this deal? Yeah. And Jack will go, We let's look at can really help that. He will look it up and go, all right, here's what I, and here's what I think. You need to check this. And if these go green light, then yeah, you should buy it. Sometimes it's, you need to hang up the phone and go buy this right now. And sometimes it's like you're paying too much. That too. You need to rock it back and tell them this is what you can do. And then it makes sense. That's a good thing to just support at landacademy.com if you want a one time invite and you can check

Brandon Parker58:39that out too. Yeah. Honestly, it's almost irresponsible to be running a land business in your first couple of years if you're not part of a community where if you can go get that type of knowledge and just ask, what are you doing? You're not. Yeah. Do you want to take ten years to catch up to where we are? Or do you want to do it in ten weeks? It took me ten years to learn how to do this. There we go. And riffing off the ten year anniversary for land academy popping up soon. Are you having a little online party? Are you got any plans for that? Or I don't know what... Yes. There's 's going be some great stuff in 2025.

Steven Jack Butala59:08What are they? I don't know. Okay. Are you going have a party to Jill? That's not a question. Yes. Oh, yes. We're having a party. Oh, totally. Decide how, when, where. Yeah. Give me a reason to have a party. She walks around wondering what you can have a party about. Totally.

Brandon Parker59:22That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. How about upcoming meetups or in person stuff events? Do you guys do anything like that? We have. We haven't recently,

Jill DeWit59:31but we should probably... We've been talking about bringing that back. Maybe that might be a ten year thing. I don't know. We did one a couple years ago. We do a high level mastermind called Our Career Path, and we gave the top one person joining voice support, have one of you come in person, meet us, and we'll do our last week together in person with individual and everybody in the whole room said, why can't we come? We'll buy our own tickets. And so they all did. And we all went out to dinner and had a good time. You know what I'd really like to do, and I've tried without success, is to put together

Steven Jack Butala1:00:02a live event where all of us are there. Seth is there. Jack Bosch is there. Mark's there. Mark and I worked together in investment banking before any of this happened. Wow. And,

Jill DeWit1:00:13that's how Mark learned this. Mark learned from him. Mark was the first guy. Remember. Yep. You guys are the real OGs of the land. We did. That's so cool.

Steven Jack Butala1:00:22Yeah. Seth was in our group for a while. Uh-huh. Yeah. I would love to have just we're all there. Mhmm. I think we could get a pretty good audience. Mhmm. And really actually do some serious good in some deal making. Yep. Mhmm.

Jill DeWit1:00:36That's killer. I don't have the staff to put that together. So again, Jack's email, if you are a good event coordinator and you could put this together, please reach out. We'll show up.

Steven Jack Butala1:00:49Jack, Boston, Jill, and I and Mark all live, like, within four or five miles of each other in Phoenix. And It's hilarious. It would be so easy to do it. Yeah. Oh my gosh. No kidding. That's a... That is a good ambitious goal here to make the That's Seth's a house in California, though. Before we did that, we Seth's for a spouse right now. He will. He'll come. He'll say yes. Yeah. The other guys. I don't know what doesn't happen. Yeah. Yeah. So

Brandon Parker1:01:13cool. Wonderful to meet both of you. Excited to, yeah, to get to know both of you. What a killer. I can tell that your community is just amazing because you guys have such a cool team. That's very cool to meet you. Thank you for coming on the show today. And, yeah, any parting words for people?

Jill DeWit1:01:31Put a schedule together and stick to it. Yep. We'll get it. That's good. And don't be afraid to answer the phone. Just answer it. Who cares? Get a deal done.

Steven Jack Butala1:01:41So On

Brandon Parker1:01:42that note, thank you both for coming on the show today. Was a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you. The Legends of Land show.