3 Reasons you don't Own Multifamily Apartments

Hello and welcome back to Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian, your channel host today, helping people get unstuck. I've mentored hundreds of people through real estate. I own about 850 units myself. Technically, I'm 6 days away from owning over 800 units, but you get the point. Money's in the account. We're closing that deal. When we are doing real estate transactions, when you're getting started, I got stuck in that endless— it felt endless to me. It was really only 5 or maybe 8 years of like, hey, how do I get started? Why do I own less than other people do? How are other people succeeding when I'm not? There's a few sticking points that I find very consistent. I'm going to share 3 of the largest ones that I see very consistently, having done this and gotten people through it hundreds of times in my career and going through it myself. So if you are getting started in real estate, this should be very valuable. As always, you guys can ask questions in the chat as we go along on today's episode. So, uh, excited to see everyone, and let's get this thing kicked off with number 1, diving right in. Number one thing that I see with people getting stuck on real estate deals is they do not spend the time to learn the math. And I know this sounds super boring, but if you don't understand the numbers or you can't communicate the numbers, you are not going to submit offers that make sense. Or worse, you're never going to submit a darn offer. Ask yourself this right now. If you are someone who is trying to scale in multifamily right now, go through the mental drill. When was the last time I actually submitted an offer on a piece of real estate? You should be spending, if you care about this, 10, 15 minutes a day, consistent, a little bit of activity. You should be submitting about an offer a week. Normal, reasonable pace. You don't do that if you don't know how to underwrite deals. So different iterations of point number 1, you see an unlisted price on a listing online in your market and you're like, well, I don't know what's going to happen when I call them. I'm not going to pick up the phone. Super dumb. That could take you, uh, 5 minutes or less to have a good conversation with the broker. Every time I have those conversations, we talk about the deal. It says unpriced, so we're not going to talk about the price until the end. And then I'm like, realistically, at about what price do you think that they're planning on moving on this? And then the brokers let you know. Why do brokers list it as unpriced? Because they want to enter conversations with people. It is an easy way to eliminate lookie-loos who never pick up the phone. Only serious people call. However, if you want to be a serious buyer, uh, the price is right there. It's just on the phone number. You call them, you have a conversation. It's the same conversation as if it was listed. Also, side note, you never buy a property— almost never— for exactly the listing price. So whether it's listed as price unlisted or there's a price on it, it's still just either a suggested price or no price at all. It has nothing to do with the math that you are going to do for what makes sense for the offer that you're going to submit. So if you're getting stuck on those, it's by are the most, like, by a million miles, the most common roadblock for people. You can alleviate that in a month. Um, I, I don't know if there's a link in this specific video, but if you go to skool.com and you go to Multifamily Strategy Community, it's $1 to join. Not because I want your $1, but specifically because if I charge a dollar, all the scammers don't show up. So we just have this epic community of 3,000 people who actually want to be there. There's a calculator and a whole bunch of tools that you can go through for analysis. I have a mini course that is completely free on there. It is separate from anything else we do. If you want to check out an awesome community with awesome resources, check out that calculator. Check that out. It is available for you. And again, it is completely free, uh, minus the $1 to make sure that you are not joining the community to try to scam everyone and sell them useless junk on why they can start their Amazon store or whatever the heck they Happens when you have a completely free community, but should be the best dollar you ever spend. Skool.com. You can do the resources there. I have YouTube videos here on the channel on how to analyze deals. I will break down how to do it. You can actually look in the channel, like, subscribe, go through the channel, find the video you're looking for. I teach how to do this actively all the time. Do the basic practice of find one deal online a day and just underwrite it until you get comfortable with your market. It is the easiest thing you will ever do. But if you've found you've listened to every podcast, you've read every book, you've joined— maybe you joined a few mentorships and you didn't do this step. Number 1 by far, underwriting. Not even close for any of the other ones. However, I will dive into number 2 because I see this happen all the time. I am known online for doing a ton of creative deals. Even the deal that I'm buying next week is 200 units. It's 5.5% down. It's adjacent to free real estate. Pretty cool. I love creativity. I love getting creative with deals. People try to start with creativity. You do not find seller financing or creative financing or equity partners or any of the creativity by looking for it. You don't try to engineer it. You try to do a great deal, which simply means we underwrite. It's so boring to get creative finance. Is the— I wish someone taught me this. If you're looking for a nugget from YouTube, this is the one. To get creative, you write everything conventionally and you figure out where it works conventionally. It is so boring. And you submit an offer to either a broker or an owner of, hey, this is where the deal works for me. Now they get back to you with either yes, which is great because that means you won on price, or they say no, and this is what I'm looking to do. But you figure out exactly by submitting a conventional offer what it is that they want. And then you get creative to adjust your offer to what they want. You're solving a them problem. I talk about this all the time on the channel, but when you solve a them problem and you actually solve their problem, they always say yes. No, no exceptions. If they want something and you're giving them exactly what they want, of course they'll say yes. Same works for you. Get them to say yes by solving their problem, not your problem. You're not missing money because you don't find creative finance deals. You're not negotiating deals to have the ability to get creative. I know it's a simple difference. Number 2 thing that people get stuck on. So many people, I have to, like multifamily strategy, one of the onboarding things we do in the first month with a lot of students is I have to unteach them what they think they know about creative financing. They've got married to some online strategy, usually from like a YouTube Short. It's not even a full video. But they'll see something where like, hey, subject to is the way to acquire all this stuff. No, it's a creative finance clause that sometimes is the right answer, very rarely, on very specific deals that do not have a due-on-sale clause. It is a tool in your tool belt, nothing more. But they get stuck on it, or they get stuck on the BRRRR method. I use the BRRRR strategy all the time to buy out partners of deals so that I can get into real estate with no— little to no money, depending on the deal and my liquidity. And then I can use the deal itself to buy the partners out where they get an epic return and I get to keep a building. I love the BRRRR method. I don't look for the BRRRR method. I look for deals that have cash flow and make more money and upside. And I take whatever the deal wants based on the amount of upside and the amount of cash flow it has, and I structure the debt and the equity around it. Learning how to get creative means that you know how to play conventionally. There's an analogy that I really like. I'll give it to you guys here. A great actor, like, think of, like, just hold in your head a famous actor. A fantastic actor in a movie is only so good at improvising lines because they know the script so well. It's not because they're like, oh my gosh, you can just put them up there and they wing it. They have put in a ton of practice. They know the line. And now that they have mastered it, they're able to play with the script. It's the same way with creative finance. When you get creative, You know the deal conventionally so well, well, you know where it works, you know the pricing, you know the rents. Because I understand the deal before creativity, I can insert the minimum amount of creativity to get to a yes, which is why over 70% of my deals have creative financing. It's not because I'm a creative finance guru, and it's certainly not because I'm looking for it. I'm looking for real estate deals. I'm looking for ways to buy the properties that I want to own in the areas I want to own them. That is all you need to do. The boring step of number 1, learn how to unwrite conventionally. If you do number 1, it leads right into number 2. Don't seek creative finance. Learn how to get creative out of conventional finance. Should be life-changing for you. Number 3, surprising on this. I actually wrote out 10 things. I wanted to share 3 of them here today. I don't want to do a video where I just talk about thing after thing after thing after thing. I want to keep this actually interesting. Um, when I really ranked all of these, number 3 was actually an interesting one. It wasn't the one I thought it was going to be. I find that a lot of people actually get stuck on imposter syndrome for a long time. And by a long time, I mean years. You come in, you've kind of convinced yourself, hey, I want to be a real estate investor. I'm going to be a real estate investor. Before you buy a property, that mental jump between I am me, the 9-to-5 employee, I am me, the— wherever you're at, the single parent, the, the the college student, the failed athlete, wherever you are in your current career, I'm going from where I'm at today to being a real estate investor and starting this particular business. There is this point where it is just really hard for people, and I think it's the dollar amount because there's a few extra zeros in real estate when you're buying multimillion-dollar properties compared to other products. There's just something different between I'm putting together a deal on a piece of real estate instead of I'm putting together a deal on Facebook Marketplace for a guitar, which by the way, That's where I bought this guitar. They're functionally the same thing. It's the same skills, it's the same negotiation. You buy real estate with money, you buy guitars with money. People still want to make money. Money is not actually your limiting factor. But I do, because I was here, I did the same thing that most of you did. I went from first grade to second grade, to middle school to high school, to— I did college. Some of you did, some of you didn't. And then I went from first job, second job, third job. I worked my way up corporate. We are used to adding steps to become something as an entrepreneur in any field, not just real estate. There is a certain point for most people where the transition from where you're at to accepting, I'm a real estate investor now, it takes time. For me, it was physically— I remember I was on the train going into work, reading books, being like, I am a real estate investor who just happens to not own any real estate right now. Didn't take too long. I was a real estate investor who only had a duplex. And it didn't take too long because, I mean, like months after that, I was a real estate investor who had 2 duplexes. That was the process. That's what it looked like. Training yourself to believe that you can do it and that you belong in that room. Almost everyone, and I've interviewed over 100 people on my podcast, all of them are recorded here on this YouTube channel. Of every investor I've had on, everyone who I've worked with, the people that I learned from, almost none of them started out in a family that had significant real estate holdings. Almost everyone started from ground zero, leaving that job they came from. They lost their job as a computer programmer. They worked their way up as a bartender. They just graduated high school and don't want to get a real job and they want to just build their own company. I've seen all of it. A lot of the people who are very successful started with Equal to or less than you are starting with. So the biggest thing— again, this is what I thought I'd talk about today, but when I really wrote it out, this is where people are actually getting stuck. You get on the phone and you, you hesitate, you stumble through the call, and you do not feel confident that you're going to close the deal. You cannot portray in your voice on a phone call to a broker how confident you are when you are not feeling confident. It will— these are professional salespeople. It comes through the call. You have to work through the nervousness. I would spend a little bit of time every day. Not, not a lot. People don't spend time thinking in general, and this is probably true of you. You probably have your phone on almost all the time. At night, you probably watch a TV show. You have work, you have family, you have friends, you have hobbies. Spend 5 minutes just quiet, 5 minutes a day. That's it. Just think about what it is that you want to do. Do this for 1 week. I want to buy real estate. This is important to me. This is what my life will look like when I get this. This is the cash flow I'm trying to build. My next step is X. If you get through that, amazingly, the last 5 years you've been thinking about apartments, within 5 months you can own one. Those are the places people get stuck. They get stuck on analysis. They get stuck on the money thinking That they need to look for creative finance and they wonder why they never find it. It doesn't sit out there being like, hello, pitch creativity. You need to find and construct the problem that you're solving to actually get creative. And then 3, you have to get over the personal hurdle, which is a huge thing for people. Imposter syndrome is real. Push through it. I believe it can be solved. Absolutely. Bottom, like full conviction, you can solve this with 5 minutes a day of quietly In a week of just quietly focusing on your goals. Find a quiet spot, get away from people. I get it. I'm a parent too, and I run 3 companies. I have as many jobs or more than most of you. Find that time for yourself. For me, it's 5 minutes to 15 minutes depending on the day in the sauna. No one else is in my sauna. There's no room for anyone else in my sauna. I have a teeny sauna. Find that space for you where you can have that little bit of quiet time. It will move you forward mentally as an investor. Massively. All right. That's what I have for today. Those are the 3 that I really wanted to share. I've been thinking about these. I've been really trying to spend more time lesson planning as I go into the YouTube Lives, uh, the same way that I do in the mentorship. Um, I really spent some time writing this out and thinking about this and of everything that people get stuck on. Those are the top 3. Like the number 1 is a million miles ahead of everything else. 2 and 3 are still a wide margin. The biggest hurdles, like the gap between 3 and 4 is pretty big. So hopefully one of those or all of those resonate with you and you can take this. And we still have some months left in the year. It's— I'm filming this right now, early September. We're live. It's the 9th, I think. Yeah, we're September 9th. There's still a year to buy a deal. The best opportunities in the market are going to be here this year is where it opened. Next year and maybe a little bit into 2028 is like open season for buying tons of rentals. I'm under contract for 400 rentals right now. I've already closed on 224 this year. I'll more than double my portfolio this year. Next year, I'll double what I have today. It's not just about having more. It's— there's so much opportunity. This is an awesome time to take the field. There are a lot of big groups that are trimming their real estate. They made some bad assumptions. There's some people who are losing their real estate. But these are the years where massive amounts of mid to large size apartments are going to trade hands and they're going to get locked into people who are going to hold them for a long period of time. So we're in a very unique market. If there's a time to get over the hurdles, this is the year to do it. Close one deal this year, close one deal in Q1 of next year. That should be your focus. As always, I always invite people to check out Multifamily Strategy. You don't have to. I give all the information on YouTube. I do not have a course. I always— this is so important to me. We are not an information company. We are an execution company that has— that just happens to be really good at information. We have a solid course. It is a backbone for actual mentorship. If you are looking for a group that's going to work with you without assigning you to some random person or telling you to sit down, it's like, hey, just watch the video. We're an actual mentorship. If you're looking for that, check it out. If you're just here for information, We have it. It's free. You don't need to pay a dime. If you're like, hey, I want to invest in my education, I have a book on Amazon, the book on creative real estate. You can check that out for like, I don't know, whatever Amazon charges for it. It's like $10. If you're looking for an actual mentorship and you're trying to get past information, my argument to everyone, if information was what was limiting you, the last courses, books, YouTube channels would have got you there. If you're like, hey, I want to do this now, very, very, very, very actively doing it. And there's no one on planet Earth who's buying more than we are right now while teaching how to do it. So it's a fun ride to be on. I always invite you to join that. That's Multifamily Strategy. You can check it out at multifamilystrategy.com or the link in the description below. Either way, like, subscribe to the channel. I love sharing about this. I love answering everyone's questions. Um, I appreciate this a ton. I see in the chat here, you know, a few people have some imposter syndrome. I get it. Also, thank you, Sean. I appreciate that. Um, the, the book, I've always wanted to put together the right book. When I wrote the book on creative real estate, I, I basically took all the books that I've read on real estate and said, what was missing? And they only did one of two things. They either were only practical application, but didn't teach me the concept to get there. So I was like, hey, this is what you could do, but it doesn't really give you how. Or it only gives you concepts without actual examples. So like I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, tons of great concepts. You get pumped on that book. You're like, oh my gosh, we gotta create assets outta nothing. There's no path to do it in that book. It just says what you have to do. I wanted to put together a book that did both. So every single chapter we go through a concept. A lot of it's creative finance, deal structuring, negotiation. And then I go into the deal that I first learned it and applied it on. So the only things that I teach, there's no made-up stories. There's no like, hey, this is just the concept. It is a concept. And then it's, this is how the concept was actually applied in real life by me in my portfolio. So I believe it is the most practical book ever written on creative real estate because it was actually designed based on reading a whole ton of other books on real estate and trying to identify what is missing. So You guys can check that out. That's on Amazon, uh, the book on creative real estate. Uh, love getting to share this with you. And Sean, thank you for the, uh, thank you for the endorsement. I really appreciate you having the opportunity to read that. Other than that, I hope everyone has a fantastic week. Again, we go live every Wednesday, so if you have questions, you can bring these to these. I'll answer them till the— till this, uh, video— those questions stop coming. Uh, but we have new concepts every single week. I look forward to seeing you guys on the next episode. Talk to y'all soon. Bye.