Business
Jack Thursday - What's Possible What's Fair (LA 1607) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun. Steven Butala: Today's Jack Thursday, and today I'm going to talk about what's possible and what's fair. Jill DeWit: I'm excited. Steven Butala: I'm fascinated with what's possible. And after doing this for years now, which I thoroughly enjoy, by the way, I like teaching. I had no idea. If somebody told me you would like teaching 10, 15 years ago, I would've said, "Why would I ever teach anything? Everything's fine." Jill DeWit: Because it involves people. Steven Butala: I'm sitting here doing these real estate deals. Jill and I are doing great. We don't have any debt. kids are doing fine. Jill DeWit: She takes care of all the people now. I don't have to talk to anybody. Steven Butala: And then we go ahead and do this. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steven Butala: Complicate our lives. Jill DeWit: And now you love it. Oh, come on. You softy, you love people. Steven Butala: I actually, truth is I like teaching. Jill DeWit: You like smart people. Steven Butala: But there's a lot of different sides to teaching, and some of them are good, some are bad, like everything. And there's a lot of different types of people that you can attract who want to be taught or don't want to be taught. So what's possible is the portion of what I love to talk about. And we'll talk about it in a minute. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And don't forget to subscribe to the Land Academy YouTube channel and comment on the shows you like. Jill DeWit: Steven wrote, "I was having a conversation about what I'm doing in this business with an old timer who made a lot of money flipping land early in his career. He asked what if it has toxic waste on it? I said we do a full title report and lots of due diligence and that if we can't find it and don't know about it, it isn't our fiduciary to convey that info. He said it wouldn't come up in the title report and that you would need a phase one environmental report to find out. Thoughts?" Sheesh. Go ahead. Steven Butala: The old timer's exactly right. The title report does only this. Bring it back to the eighth grade level here for a minute, and then I'll answer the question. The reason that you go to an escrow agent who requests a title report or title plan, depending on the state that you're in, to request that to get it done and then you take a look at it, is to get an insurance policy against the following, whatever they find. Jill DeWit: This is my favorite. Steven Butala: So all kidding aside for a second, the title report allows property basically to be finance-able in the future. It's kind of a insurance scam. Jill DeWit: It is. Steven Butala: So nothing's going to come up in that title report, except this. And you won't read it like this. I often think to myself, it would be great to have a graphic in a title report of a timeline. So 1830 happened and Joe Smith and Sally Smith, his wife, and their 18 children who never went to school because they were all farm hands, homesteaded the property in 1830. In 1840, the first child was old enough so we split off the property, some of it to him. In 1850, the second kid. And on and on. So you see that figuratively seeing this timeline up to when you buy it. That's all the title report's going to theoretically do. And it's only going to go back 30 years anyway, right? Jill DeWit: Traditionally. Steven Butala: Is it 30 or 20? Jill DeWit: 30. Traditionally, it's around 30 years. Steven Butala: A titled agent, they're just putting all the paperwork together. The escrow agent is putting the paperwork together, including the title report,