223: From Duplexes to Millions: Building a Multifamily Empire
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Want to learn how to make big money in real estate? Join us as Christian Osgood shares his simple steps to buying over 300 rental properties in just three years. Find out how he retired his wife and built his dream home. Get easy tips on seller financing, fixing tough properties, and what mistakes to avoid. Tune in for clear, actionable advice on growing your own real estate business!
In this episode, we're discussing...
Fast Growth: Christian quickly moved from small duplexes to bigger multifamily deals, realizing this was essential to reach financial freedom quickly after a personal event.
Turning Bad Deals Good: He bought a very troubled 38-unit property with many problems, but transformed it, turning a negative cash flow into a high-value asset and becoming a "paper millionaire."
Strong Resolve: He showed incredible commitment, even considering living on-site, to fix his challenging property, showing how important belief and dedication are.
Smart Seller Financing: Christian found that getting seller financing is easier when you have trust and good relationships within the real estate world, not just by asking for deals.
Networking Power: He emphasized how important it is to meet and learn from experienced investors, which helps find good deals and gain valuable knowledge.
Learning from Errors: He openly shared a big mistake of getting into hospitality (a resort) too soon, highlighting how different it is from multifamily and the importance of checking all costs, especially payroll.
Stay Focused: A key lesson was that losing focus and jumping into new business types, even with creative financing, can severely hurt your cash flow and growth.
Resources from Christian
LinkedIn | Multifamily Strategy
Resources from Mike and Nichole
Gateway Private Equity Group | Nic's guide | Franchise With Bob
+ Read the transcript
Mike Stohler: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. I am happy to announce Christian Osgood in today's episode, Christian is a dynamic figure in the world of real estate investment. Does that sound familiar? People? He is renowned for his innovative strategies and commitment to empowering others as the host of Multifamily Strategy Podcast and YouTube channel, Christian shares as wealth of knowledge and experience inspiring countless individuals to achieve financial independence through multifamily ownership. This guy's amassed over 300 rentals in a little over three years, so that's pretty good. We'll talk about how he did that and the secrets, and he actually fulfilled his goal of retiring his wife from teaching.
I think that's all one of our goals. And he ended up building his dream home today. He works alongside his wife Danni, as a passionately builder, company's Multifamily Strategy Kensho Property Management and Apex Property Management. How you doing Christian?
Christian Osgood: I'm doing well, also realizing I need ChatGPT to update my bio here at some point.
So seller finance Kensho not all that long ago and started a new PM as I moved to Texas, I did not want to own a property management company in Washington State and live in Dallas. That would've been the opposite of freedom.
Mike Stohler: Talk to us a little bit about what got you started in real estate investing and how you kind of mindset to where you're at now.
Christian Osgood: I started with Dave Ramsey, so my dad gave me the save your way to financial freedom model, as my mentor in high school at the time. I did the go to college, get a scalable job, scale a career, go from one job to another, went through sales, got my income to like a quarter million dollars a year. And that's about as far as I got my career. The whole time the goal was to invest in real estate.
It was earn money, buy a house, buy assets, the very, very Dave Ramsey method.
Bought my house, then I bought a duplex bought it conventionally, nothing crazy. Cash flowed about a thousand dollars a month. That was the last of my money. Then I found another duplex in a town called Moses Lake. Didn't have any money, reached out. It needed a lot of renovation, so I got a loan, 101% loan to value.
Had a successful flip of that property, and was sitting on about a hundred thousand dollars. During that time, I was like, "Wait a second. I bought four units in eight years doing this method."
And so I was looking at, "Do I work another eight years to buy another two, three duplexes?" You got some skills you make a little bit more, more. So maybe I can buy eight more units in the next eight years. But that wasn't really inspiring to me around that time.
We had just got through 2020. My wife's teaching kindergartners in an impoverished area of Seattle. It was in an area with a lot of Somalian refugees at the time. English is not their first language. There's four or five kids in the house. Both parents work or they have a single parent family, and she's teaching kindergartners over Zoom.
If you can imagine how fun that was, it was not. She comes back and almost immediately gets pushed down on the playground by a very large kindergartner. Broke her back, lower back, displaced her hips, and the school decided not to report it and tried to cover it up, unfortunately as a race issue.
So we had a change of goals. We went from, "Hey, earning money is great, and buying a few rentals is fine." Two, I just left my job to pursue full-time real estate and now I need to retire my wife in less than two years.
Duplexes are not the correct vehicle to retire your wife in like two years or less. You do have to scale up and just roll a larger set of dice. So the next deal I did on market for 13 years, 38 unit building right next to the duplex that I just bought.
Yeah, $2 million price. They were open to seller financing. It had gone out of contract every time I went under contract, so I knew there was something wrong with it, but $2 million for 38 units in Washington state is insane. I went there and immediately figured out why no one had bought it. There were some drug problems at the property.
In two of the units, there was a homeless camp on the back of the property. It was stealing electricity and the roof on one of the four buildings was bad and one other septic tanks was bad. Eight septic tanks. That campus had a bunch of problems. A lot of people weren't paying rent. It was bringing like $7,000.
People will tell you it's impossible to have a negative cap rate. It's not if your operating expenses are higher than your income, your cap rate is technically negative. So buying it for $2 million at, we got 4% interest seller finance, it would've still been like a negative one cap deal. That being said, there's a lot of people there who weren't paying.
So we came in, me and one partner from the office. Didn't bring any money. Just the two of us found the deal.
Made the decision, "Okay, no one wants to buy this deal. 'cause the people who have $2 million to put on this, you need to buy it in cash or sell their finance."
The bank is never gonna lend on this.
Mike Stohler: Right.
Christian Osgood: The whole thing was, it's too much project for anyone who could afford to buy this thing. Except for two guys who are really, really hungry, who can do the project, be on site and see it through.
Two weeks into being under contract, we talked to the neighbors next door. They were about to develop. 108 homes on the lot behind us. They also wanted the homeless camp gone. They agreed to build us a wall. So we have this beautiful brick wall all the way around it. They cleared the homeless for us.
So that was self resolved.
We raised $350,000, which was not nearly enough, but at least got us started.
Yeah, we got in, closed the deal, bought appliances, made a huge show of like bringing in all the new fridges and the, they let all the tenants know, "Hey, we actually care that alone." 10 tenants who were not paying started paying. Because we actually fixed their units. We gave them working appliances.
As it started to cash flow, we fixed one unit at a time. We brought collections from $7,000 to $28,000. Got an appraisal appraised for $4.1 million. Pulled the money out, bought out the partners. That one deal. Paid us $350,000 and bought out all of the partners.
The real estate bought the real estate. No money left our pocket. That was better than a perfect burr. Uh, it was super hard. That was a rough project. We actually spent like two weeks living in the building, but we took a class F to a class C+ building.
Instead of paying ourselves, we reinvested back in the building, redid the windows, the roof finished, the rest of the units, brought it to $32,000 a month. That was the first deal where on paper I did one deal and became a millionaire on paper.
I was like, "Holy crap, that, why was I buying duplexes? This is the best thing ever."
Mike Stohler: That is the success story that a lot of our listeners want to hear. They think, "Mike, you know, you're one in a million."
I had that exact same starts, mine was a 28 unit that, luckily here in Arizona, I was allowed to carry my gun on the side, on a holster on the side. because I was like, when I need to, it's that type of property. You have to have that resolve.
because that when I did that project, it almost broke me. I had to evict, I think 18 out of 28 and it was seller financing. I had the guy come up to him, he says, "You know, I own this complex. This is mine." As he had these two caddies saying that he ran it.
So a lot of people's like, "Oh my God, you know, how do you do that? And some of the resolve, was it just that I know that real estate is it, and that pushed you through to go overcome all these challenges because it's just like, you know what? I believe in myself and I know that it'll turn around.
Christian Osgood: My goal was very specific and measurable. You can pull this directly from Dave Ramsey. His goal setting thing is like the formula.
I'm like, "Okay, I got two years to pull off this goal. Ideally, we'll do it faster." I retired my wife from teaching 11 months too, which was crazy. But we came through and went, okay. I believe that real estate is the path to do this. This is what I've dedicated my last five years to learning. So it's kind of time to either do it or don't do it.
I believe in multifamily. I know I need to do bigger deals. I have an opportunity. I do not see a universe where we cannot get this thing. We're $3 million, we're buying for two, we can get it to three. Now, there's reason to believe we can go above that, but super conservatively, I think we have a deal with a million dollars website.
And every way I can cut it. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get it there. My business partner at the time, Cody, he was 21. He has 30 other units in that town, all seller financed. One of them was very, very, very heavy reno. So I'm like, "Okay, I've renovated a duplex in this town, does not qualify me for 30 duplex."
We have at least enough experience to where we can sit on this campus and I'll physically camp here until this thing is making enough money because it can and should be worth this much money.
The deferred maintenance is there for sure, but it's not so bad that it can't be fixed. It's one bad roof. It's one bad septic that just needs to be pumped more often. It's not actually broken yet. It just has a failed drain field. Yeah, I'm like the problems are. Surmountable. They're super hard, but they're surmountable.
And the most you've ever been able to earn grinding on your nine to five is $250,000 before tax. Yeah. I'm like. I will move forward. If I just lived in a tent outside this property and made this thing work, I will make five times what I've made.
I will get five years of working back. I think most of us can make that happen. It wasn't actually that big of a leap. I'm like, we are young and dedicated enough where this deal would put us on the map. Yeah. And it's gonna unlock. A whole bunch of other opportunity. 'cause if we're gonna pull this one off, we can do that now.
Now as I've learned, I see why people didn't buy this because I've made more money on deals that were astronomically easier. The reason that people don't do this is because I should have come in at like a million for this is the reason that you don't do that. But I wouldn't have had this deal and I wouldn't have learned what we learned.
And you, your first deal, I call it the stupid tax, but when you start out and you're new, you're the dumbest you will ever be. At what you're doing, you with no experience. I was like, this is the opportunity we have. Is it the one that we want , I'd love for it to be easier, but it's the opportunity we have.
So we closed on it. And I think that's the difference between people who make a lot of money in multifamily and people who don't is do you close on the opportunities in front of you or do you not? There's some people who just see things, they analyze 'em forever and they just don't write the offer paralysis.
If you can just write the offer and get it accepted, you're still barely committed, right? You have refundable earn money, but that seems to be the part. People get stuck. They're like, "I think I have a deal, but I didn't write the offer and then I looked back 10 years later and why didn't I buy that deal?"
I'm like, "I just don't. I didn't want that to be me. I wanted to just buy a deal and you know what? I'm broken. I have a house. There's only one thing I know that I can definitely do."
I can get a job and buy a house. So my wife and I had that conversation. I'm like, if we lost everything on this personally guaranteed seller finance note.
If we lost everything, are we okay with this? And she's like, we met each other a few years ago. We didn't have any money. Now we have a house and a little bit of money. We can do that again. That's fine. What's the actual cost of failure? It wasn't actually that high.
Mike Stohler: It's great information, ladies and gentlemen, is sticking with it and the self-belief and, I talk to a lot of people that's, one more seminar and I'm ready to jump in one more.
It's like, oh my God, you're just not doing it.
So how do you find people out there? It's like going seller financing still works in today's market, it's like, how do you go out and find someone to do seller financing?
Christian Osgood: I love the question as, you know, like seller financing is just always, it is just always one of the options on the table, right? Seller financing's been around since before the banks. That's what you used to do, right? Yep. I don't have the cash right now, then give it to me in payments and with interest.
In the Bible. This is not a new concept. Seller financing is a thing that's always on the table. I found for low down seller financing. It's typically done when people know, and trust you. , If someone doesn't know you at all, the down payment goes up.
Traditionally, that's why I see, unless someone's in like a lot of trouble and you're fixing a major problem, they're gonna, you know, then there's pressure. But nine times outta 10 for me, I have found that not asking people to sell their properties, find the people who are ahead of you.
For example, and instead of saying, "Hey, would you sell me your portfolio?" Like, how do I take this guy out to coffee? I'm imagining as I'm telling some of my story, you're probably already thinking of some of the things that you know that I haven't experienced yet.
You're like, oh, okay. You've done several phases past where I'm at today.
When you're looking at how would I move forward, there are people who have done what you want to do unless you're Elon Musk trying to get to Mars or something like landing a rocket. Again, no one's done that, but for 99.999% of things.
Everyone has done the thing that you want to do. Your goal is not that unique, especially in real estate. It's been done. So meet the people in your market who have done the thing that you want to do. Take 'em out to coffee. I'm in Texas now, so we can do barbecue, but spend the time not asking them to buy their buildings, just spend their time talking about real estate.
How did they do what they did that. Built a lot of relationships. That also gave me the connection to every lender, every partner, every lawyer that I use, it's all I call the guy who's already done it in my area and said, who have you? Like, they've already gone through the hard part. Yeah, and what I've found is a lot of these people, and I've seller, I've got seller financing people in their early thirties.
So generally speaking, the people ahead of you have been playing the game longer. You meet with a lot of people. I'm 33 today. You meet with a lot of people who are 50+, they've been playing the game longer than you. They know everything that you need to know. And generally speaking, I don't know if this is true for you, but I seem to see this as a trend.
Their friends and family don't really care too much about the real estate and they don't get it. They usually like to talk about real estate. It's not actually that hard to get someone to open up about how they built their awesome business that gave them freedom that no one listens to them talk about.
And so I've done a lot of meetings. You hop in a truck. You drive around, they show you the portfolio, you get coffee, you ask good questions about how they structured 'em. You give 'em some of your pieces where you're stuck. I'm gonna add one thing to this that everyone tries to do. I don't know where this trend came from.
It's probably a popular book, but it's all that, that like lead with value thing or I get young people all the time who are like, how can I offer you value? I'm like, first of all, if I have to define the value that you give me, you're already annoying. Yeah. Coming in understanding, at least for me, I don't have any value here.
You're ahead of me. I'm here just asking for you to share your knowledge. I found there's a ton of people who are willing to actually just sit down and freely offer knowledge. Yeah. And they appreciate that you listen to 'em. And as the relationship grows, the value comes later. There's something that comes up that you can do for them, or a relationship that you end up with further in the game.
It feels like a roundabout way. But I have never in my career asked anyone to sell a building before. I've still not done it. It has always been the other party's idea. A broker has come to me or an owner has come to me and they said, Hey, I have a friend who is selling a property.
It is too small for me. It is perfect for what you were trying to do. I remember our meeting. I remember you're trying to retire your wife. We have an actual personal connection now, and they're like, I called them. They know you don't have a lot of money. They wanted 25% down. They'll do 15 because I called them, you should do this deal.
And then you look at the deal, you do your own underwriting, and then after you close the deal, you go back to 'em and you thank 'em for setting up the deal. It's the part people forget. Yeah, and rinse and repeat. I've done a lot of repeat transactions with people because they own a lot of real estate.
Their friends own a lot of real estate. You move from being an outsider to an insider. That's how you get seller financing.
Mike Stohler: And it works the same in with hotels and, ladies and gentlemen, what is something that Christian keeps saying over and over and over again, something I've beat the dead horse with is the networking.
Talking to people, getting to know them. You know, how did we get in from multifamily hotels because I knew people. It's because you're sitting there and say like, I don't know anything about this type of asset class. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna learn. So no matter how successful you are, ladies and gentlemen, get that coach, get that mentor, take people out to get a shiner B in a and a barbecue or at least coffee.
And that's how it works. No matter what you're doing, ladies and gentlemen, there's RIAs, which is the real estate actions.
And you're right, I go out on the circuit. I teach, I love, especially when you're actually wanting to learn. Yeah. And not wasting my time.
I can tell usually by how they write the email, or send me the voicemail. What are some of the stakes? Man, I have made some mistakes. I got started, ladies and gentlemen. I call it PG pre-Google Days.
There's really no excuse now.
You have this podcast, you have Christian's podcast, you've got Google. You have all this information. What can you tell us Christian, some of the costly mistakes you made?
Christian Osgood: So this is gonna be fun. Because you switched in hospitality. I did a hospitality project and that was the biggest mistake I made. It was too early in my multifamily career for me to diversify my focus.
Focusing on the main thing and not getting shiny object syndrome is like one of the main things that tank entrepreneurs, people know this. I identified myself incorrectly as a creative, financed real estate guy. So I went, okay, I'm buying a resort, 12 acres, 20 cabin.
I'm buying a multifamily building. It's real estate. Both were seller financed. I was like, this is right in my wheelhouse. They're completely different businesses. Unbelievably dissimilar. Yep. Hospitality is much more active. And if you buy a smaller resort, 20 ca isn't huge. You always have an active component.
You need to make a lot of money before you can hire a staff to actually make that deal. Make sense? Most hospitality people will either one do crazy destination places that are like very unique, high value or you go 60 unit plus period. Yep. The smaller than that and getting efficiencies in place cost effectively is almost impossible.
Or you need to own a ton of 'em. You can own a ton of boutique things and then take your systems, but you have to have a way, like a systematic way to systematize things and cut your cost, because running 20 units by itself in the middle of nowhere at a beautiful summer location, really, really hard to do.
I've found you can buy unlimited rentals if and only if everything that you buy cash flows day one on long-term fixed rate and long-term fixed rate debt. If I buy it and it pays me in the beginning and I have a long-term with no changes to it, it is very hard for me to lose it.
If I keep buying it, my income goes up every time I can just go buy more stuff. The basis of my multifamily thesis. Always increase your income at acquisition. You will never lose it. If it's long-term fixed rate debt?
And most of my seller finance notes are 10, 15 or 30 years. I actually have long-term seller finance debt. When you put these things together, you can hold 'em on the resort. We did long-term debt, four point half percent interest. We did not know how to underwrite that. So problem number one, there were two sets of books we were provided.
Bank statements for one. A competent underwriter of hospitality could have looked at that and said, payroll is too low. They're paying people under the table somewhere else. I know. I could see that in 25 seconds now if you gave me a bank statement. Yeah. Did not see it because expenses matched bank statements.
That was how I knew to underwrite multifamily. I was like, of course this is Right. No, they had a business side and the, they hid some stuff in there. Two, assuming that you know how to market hospitality, totally different job. I took. Professionals in multifamily put 'em there. Long story short, I also did a thing where I did a debt pay down.
At the end of every year, I pay down a quarter million dollars principal. It's low interest, it's interest only through the year, which was genius 'cause that actually helps normalize the up and down. I have low recurring cost, and then at the end of summer when we've just retained the most amount of money, we have the principle due.
It was a creative way to do it. The problem is. It builds equity really fast. You pay down this thing like crazy, it doesn't cash flow.
Mike Stohler: Yeah.
Christian Osgood: I thought it could make more, but we had no proof of concept to know that it would make more, it made. We did better than the prior owners did, but we did make anywhere near where we did originally projected, and so what ended up happening is I had a resort that made a whole bunch of money.
And then I paid it all off in principle and I can never do any repairs or improvements or marketing to the resorts. I had a perpetually broke LLC that needed contributions that builds a ton of net worth and was a pain in the ass in my first year of multifamily. So I had to scale my portfolio to build more cash flow to support the recurring down payments for the stupid hospitality.
That is what you call being an idiot. It is also. The downside of seller financing and creative finance. We got too creative and you get what you sign for. Yeah. We negotiated ourselves into a stupid debt structure that made us on paper worth, like we have millions of dollars net worth in it now. We've paid off like a ton of this resort and I don't like running it.
And there's like no buyer for a resort, a beautiful resort in the middle of nowhere, Washington. Yeah. I'm like, shoot. All the value is in the debt and the debt's not transferable. So I have this 4.5% interest rate. I'm like, no one will buy it because I slightly overpaid and I got amazing long-term, low interest terms.
All the values in the terms that aren't transferable. I have a thing I couldn't get out of if I wanted to. I have to run a resort now. There's no choice. Perform or die. That was dumb. That was the dumbest thing that I did in my career. I'm grateful. We scaled through it in the multifamily, my multifamily spits off more than enough to support it.
Now there are many days where I sit down and I'm like, I want to build this huge pool in my backyard. I'm like, we could have done that 15 times over if I just didn't do that one deal and dump all the money into that. So that was my lesson. Make the main thing. The main thing I lost a of cash on that at the growth phase.
Where income and cash is most valuable.
Mike Stohler: Ladies and gentlemen, what's the moral of this story is don't switch asset classes unless you partner with someone that has decades of experience in that asset class. And that goes, if you're going from fix and flips to single family, even to multi, there's enough difference.
But going from multi to hospitality, it's zero, zero things alike.
Christian Osgood: To those listing, by the way, that is the solution. My partner is willing to be bought out. I'm like, if I add in now the person who has the experience, yeah, you can go back and the beautiful thing about contracts, anything can be renegotiated.
That's right. Great thing about anything in writing. So I'm like, that is actually the fix that we're pursuing right now is I'm like, we've come a long way from where we started. If someone just bought out a partner and swapped in, I can still get that experienced operator.
That is what I'm actually. Actively seeking now is like, would someone who loves hospitality, who understands deeply the marketing of this? Yeah. And can come in and just assume the partner's obligations who does not want to keep paying for it. I'm like, if we swap players, it is technically a fixable thing.
We could just re-engineer this to be the deal it always should have done. But you don't wanna put yourself in that position, right? That's you're like, oh, now I have X and Y that have to be executed before It's awful. Yeah. Yeah, it's awful. It sour me on hospitality completely. I'm like, I never, yeah.
Mike Stohler: We're both laughing 'cause we're both been there, done that and things like that. And you learn from it.
Christian Osgood: I'm sure you've shared this on your podcast, but if I could turn around for you, you've been in the game a lot longer. What was your biggest mistake that you made? I wanna learn from you.
Mike Stohler: I think it was my third deal. You understand, even if it's a franchise and has a lot of keys
You do have to look at that payroll. I never looked at. Some of these are mom and pop owned. What I didn't realize is that the dad was the gm.
The mom was running all the hospitality. The kids were running the front desk. , The cousins were doing the housekeeping, and so that payroll was extremely low. It was kinda like kind of similar to what were saying we,
Christian Osgood: So we both got slapped by not underwriting payroll correctly.
Yeah.
Mike Stohler: So it's like, okay. Wow, that's pretty good payroll.
Christian Osgood: Now we know.
Mike Stohler: Now I know that I look at all the last names of the people on the payroll,
Christian Osgood: So that's why I got a smirk when I mentioned the payroll, that this makes sense now.
Mike Stohler: I got, that's the smirk when you mention payroll. I'm like, go. Yeah, yeah.
We've all been there. We've all done that. And then something that you look at is, most of my hotels are franchise. It's knowing if that franchise works in that area. Oh yeah, yeah. That type of hotel. You don't put a high end Marriott in Timbuktu. Nope. People can't afford it. Truck drivers that are coming through there aren't gonna stay that, what do you want?
You want a Motel six or, or a quality in or something like that. Just free breakfast, free internet. So they get a good night's sleep and go, so you have to make sure that that asset is there. And then the third thing really quick is the, what we call drivers. What drive, again, what you would look at in your Washington property.
Why do people stay there? Why do they want what drives people to want to go to that spot? And we now have, we require two to three drivers in case one goes away. You've got two others, two other reasons why people stay there. So we learned really quick that. You can't have a, a hotel next to a university if covid hits and no one's going to that school.
So it's
Christian Osgood: now my individual separated cabins in the middle of nowhere would do amazing in Covid. That would be probably the perfect retreat. Get out the woods, the perfect from
Mike Stohler: if they were allowed to even go there, you know? And so yes, it's those types of things. Yeah. What can you tell people that are listening, they want to be like you.
They want to get started owning. You know, they've watched some HGTV episodes and think that they know it all. But what can you tell our listeners if they want to get started?
Christian Osgood: If you wanna get started? The first step? Is getting around people who are doing what you wanna do.
I think we, we both said it on this, like, it, it's becoming an insider. It's going to your local RIA or a local meetup. There's Washington State. When I got started, there was like three groups that are just fantastic. One in Seattle, one Tacoma. My buddy, y he is become a really good friend. The owner of that group, in Washington State Real estate investing.
It's this huge Facebook group. They host monthly events. Everyone who's, everyone attends that, like you can get connected with massive players, people on the come up. It's you get around, people playing the game, get comfortable with underwriting. A deal is number two. Like you need to, when you see an opportunity, you need to know it's an opportunity.
Otherwise you can't do Jack. If you do those two things, if you get around people playing the game and you get confident, I can look at a deal and I can underwrite it to the point where I'm comfortable putting in an offer. I buy mid-size multifamily, moving forward a hundred units a year without syndicating, without doing any sort of crazy, I could do more, but it takes like three transactions.
I'm not actually even transacting that often. I'm doing two, three deals a year, moving over forward a hundred units at a time. You will outpace almost everyone in the industry. You'll be a top one percenter. If all you did was, I know I'm looking at an opportunity and I can write it up. I'm buying big enough deals and I'm around the people who are doing them.
If you do that, you're pretty much there.
Mike Stohler: Yep. So what are you doing now, Christian? Any type of syndications, any type of things, anything for our listeners to get involved in? I'm.
Christian Osgood: Actually look at putting together the first indication. I love JVs. , And those work, as long as you don't have too many members, everyone has to have an active role.
Otherwise, you're creating a security and like, good luck with that lawsuit if you screwed that up. , Be really careful if you're doing a jv, be super careful. Know what you're doing. I've always done JVs. Partners with the sign rolls. I'm doing a deal. It's gonna be 1,000,006 50 raise, $6.4 million, 76 units, three bed, two and a half bath, two story.
It's gorgeous. , Doing a really fun project. This will be my first time syndicating.
I'm doing it for two reasons. One. I want to open it up to more people. I think I could do it with two partners, but it just felt like the right deal to learn something new. I've never done or executed on the deal structure.
We've done seller financing, land TR contracts. I don't like Subject To, but I've done it as a portion of one acquisition where we have a clause that says, if this gets called. The prior owner has to pay it off and then sell or finance it to us. So I've done it all though. I've done so many different methods of acquisition.
I haven't done the syndication, so I'm like, you know what? I think we're gonna do 503B. I think I'm gonna do B, so I can't actually solicit for it. So this is not a solicitation for funds. That's right. Yeah.
Mike Stohler: Yeah. We're not talking about the project itself, ladies and gentlemen,
Christian Osgood: But we gonna probably do a 503B on that one as my first indication just because of the group and community that we have.
Other than that closing a lot of deals in Texas. I found this town, Stephenville, Texas, where we just do deal after deal. A beautiful little college town, multiple, just like hospitality, multiple drivers. Dairy industry has been there forever. They have a massively growing college.
They just went, division one development is coming in on every block. They just put the areas. Amazon warehouse is like 95% built. But you look at a town like that and you're like, buildings are going up, and then you drive there and you're like, I could live here. It is immaculate. Go that type of market. That's what I'm focused on.
We're growing in and around Stephenville, Texas. Waco, Texas. Taking out deals. Started the PM company 'cause we're doing so much Section eight and Litech. I like to just, I like to do that with my own team, my own way. I'm a high control person. So we're rolling out, rolling out pm third party We opened up this year actually,
Mike Stohler: No.
Is there anything before I let you go that I have not hit on that you'd like to? Tell our listeners, anything that I might have missed?
Christian Osgood: I try to mention this on every podcast because it's the silliest thing and it is the one thing that I needed to hear when I was getting started.
You're not a real estate investor until you buy a piece of real estate and that's all you have to do to be an investor. I, almost everyone that I meet, and I was super guilty of this for eight years. We go from first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, high school, maybe college, first, second, third job to qualify to get somewhere.
We're just like, it's, we're trained to do it. You don't have to become a real estate agent to buy real estate. You don't need to be a property manager. You don't have to work at the CoStar group for four years. You need to learn how to buy a piece of real estate, and that doesn't take very long. You can learn it in, if you just sat down and went for it, you could be really, really, really sharp at buying a piece of real estate in 30 days.
You need experience. You're not gonna be an expert, but you can learn everything that you need to learn to close your first deal in 30 days. So if your goal is to be an investor, there's only one way to do it. Cut all the other stuff out. Don't add steps. . Buy a piece of real estate.
Mike Stohler: Yeah. There you go.
Christian. How can people get a hold of you?
Christian Osgood: People can follow me on Instagram @christianosgood. You can also check out my YouTube channel.
So Multifamily Strategy on YouTube. I took a little over 2,000 videos to get there, so if you guys are wondering, that's terrible. That means I grinded through a lot of being really bad to get any good at that, we share a lot of information and it's somewhere you can follow the journey.
So you can watch me go from a basement where I say, "I'm gonna close on this 38 unit building and I'm gonna become an investor to actually doing it." Until now, you can watch, like before I owned real estate to where we are today. And it's free. So if you guys wanna learn how it happened and see like the full story, check it out there on YouTube.
Mike Stohler: Yeah, there you go. Ladies and gentlemen. Again, no excuses. Go out and buy it and use resources like Christian's YouTube channel to learn and get involved in real estate investing because that is the way the future God's not making any more real estate, ladies and gentlemen, so we might as well own some of it. Thank you so much for coming on The Richer Geek Podcast. Have a wonderful night.
Christian Osgood: You do the same.
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ABOUT CHRISTIAN OSGOOD
Christian Osgood is a dynamic real estate investor, mentor, and host of the Multifamily Strategy Podcast and YouTube channel, where he shares practical insights on achieving financial independence through multifamily ownership. Starting from humble beginnings—saving diligently for nearly a decade to buy his first properties. Christian’s mission took a powerful turn in 2020 after a life-changing event led him to retire his wife, Danni, from teaching and pursue real estate full-time. In just three years, he scaled his portfolio to over 200 rentals, built his dream home in Texas, and co-founded three thriving companies: Multifamily Strategy, Kensho Property Management, and Apex Property Management. Today, Christian works alongside Danni to mentor aspiring investors nationwide, helping them master creative finance and build lasting wealth through real estate.