In this live Whiteboard Wednesday session, Christian Osgood addresses viewer questions about acquiring and financing multifamily rehabs with little or no cash. He explains that his team finds deals by directly contacting property owners and primarily uses seller financing, illustrated by a recent 38‑unit, $2 million purchase in Moses Lake, Washington, which was acquired with $0 out‑of‑pocket and later quintupled its income. Osgood outlines how they structured the deal with three additional investors contributing 15% equity, and how they matched the seller’s retirement cash‑flow goal. He then describes their consulting venture, themultifamilystrategy.com, which offers step‑by‑step video courses and upcoming mentorship groups that meet three times a week, with live deal reviews and lectures. When asked about long‑term acquisition goals and buying in competitive markets, Osgood encourages investors to act during economic uncertainty, emphasizing a cash‑flow‑first mindset and a simple two‑question framework: “How do I buy it?” and “How do I never lose it?” His underwriting standard is a minimum of 8% day‑one cash‑on‑cash return, with higher upside expected. He reiterates that deal sourcing relies on building relationships with owners in target markets, a method they have applied across multiple Washington counties. Finally, he clarifies Washington State real‑estate licensing terminology, noting that the terms broker and agent are interchangeable there, unlike in other states. The session ends with a preview of upcoming software tools, scheduled live events, and a call to subscribe and join future sessions.
Chapters
Technical difficulties. So, bit of a bummer there. However, I'm in my office. I have live going on my phone. Our scheduled one refused to launch with our software, but that is okay. We're going to dive right in this week for Whiteboard Wednesday live. Cody is out buying some more real estate for us, so it's just me and you. So hopping in now. I have my screen behind me, so if I'm looking off into the distance, I apologize again. We're new to this and we're not perfect at everything that we do. Question number 1 for this week. Found this video on a playlist, came up under flipping properties, which is funny because we don't really do a whole lot of flips, though both Cody and I have done one. See here. Thanks for sharing. Like the video. How do you finance and purchase rehabs? In addition, where do you find them? Well, for our first question, where are we finding rehabs? We're finding rehabs just like we do everything. We talk to owners. How are we actually doing the purchase? Well, it's almost exclusively seller finance. The 38-plex, if you guys have ever heard that story, 38 units Cody and I purchased in Moses Lake, Washington. This was about, um, gosh, was it 8 months ago on that deal for rehab? Now that had a ton of rehab. We're talking homeless camp on the property. We had, uh, 7 septic tanks, only 5 failed drain fields there. So absolutely super rough property. Um, a few of the units were just completely vacant, some of them were unlivable. What we did is we came in there, we started renovating the whole thing. How did that deal come about? It was sitting on the MLS for 13 years. 13 years just waiting for someone to pick up the property. Found it on the MLS, bought it seller financed. To answer the question on how did we finance that, seller financed purchase. $0 out of pocket. We brought in 3 other investors, 15% down, $2 million purchase, picked up that property. It's now an awesome piece of our portfolio, our best performing property. We quintupled the income on that property in about 8 months. You find these just by meeting owners. You negotiate these by having a relationship with the owner and matching your offer to what they want. In this case, They wanted to retire on $10,000 a month. We were able to get that to them. Now if you just joined the live, we had a whole thing planned. My software didn't launch correctly, so I'm here from my phone. My computer screen's behind me. I apologize for the disorganization. However, the content is awesome. So our next question, I'm gonna read it over here. This is from Josh Southern. Whiteboard Wednesday question, can you explain more about your consultation business you guys started? Oh yeah, I can go into that really quick. So themultifamilystrategy.com, we basically, Cody and I picked up over 100 units in a 10-month period. Uh, just him and I and a few key partners. We did not syndicate, uh, we didn't do any wholesaling. We each did one small flip, uh, for liquidity, but outside of that, all buy and hold property, uh, Central Washington, a little bit in Seattle, Washington. So our course is exactly step by step how we did everything that we did. So we went through the purchase— how did we find owners? How did we actually do the networking? Making the phone calls. We put out step-by-step— the goal is anyone can watch that. It's all pre-recorded, 3, 4, maybe 5-minute videos. You can hop in that. Again, it's themultifamilystrategy.com and learn more. What we'll be launching here later next week are mentorship groups where we're going to start building out the community in that. 3 times a week, people can jump in and meet with us, go over deals live, ask your questions. And every Thursday, we're going to have a, uh, 45-minute lecture with a 15-minute room to break out, discuss, and further explore. But that is our consulting business. We actually started that after we bought that 38-plex I referenced in the last question. All right, question number 3. Again, I apologize, my screen is behind me. How many units do you guys plan to acquire long-term, and what are your thoughts on buying in a competitive market? I absolutely love that question. My thought on buying a competitive market is absolutely go for it, especially right now. You might have noticed the economy is pulling back, stocks down, gas is up, inflation's very high, and interest rates are on the rise. This causes uncertainty. When there's uncertainty, there's opportunity. This is where you get to go out and storm the field when everyone's hesitating and pausing, which is what a lot of the money is doing right now. That has been the best time in the history of ever to expand. As COVID first hit and people were sidelining money, trying to figure out what was happening, that's where we first started investing and picking up properties. If you do this, I promise you, you will make money through this. Everything we do is buy and hold real estate, and you need to have a strategy. If you are buying on cash flow, asking our two questions, how do I buy it and how do I never lose it? If you can answer those two questions, you're gonna be able to take the field and you have a strategy that works in every single market. So whether it's competitive, whether money's sidelined, whether everyone's trying to get into the market, makes absolutely no difference. Now, moving on, I'm going to go down to our fourth question. A question on calculating lender risk. We have a really good video for that. I'm actually just going to link that one below because that is a much longer explanation than I'm going to do here. What is your underwriting requirement for acquisition and how do you find properties? Okay. This plays off the first question, but I'm actually going to go deeper into the underwriting criteria. How we find properties, just to answer that really quick, we find properties by talking to the owners in our market. Turns out there is no one more qualified to show you how to buy in the market than the people who have already done it. Whatever strategy you have, whatever you've learned in the past, if you apply that to a different market, it's probably going to work. But there's going to be people in that market who are even better equipped to buy because they've already done it and they're going to show you how to buy the properties that they've acquired. I promise you this works. We've done this in multiple markets now. 3 different counties: King, Kitsap, and Grant County. So we do know how to play that one game. That's how we find them. As far as the question of underwriting requirement, so back to how do you find it, how do you never lose it, or sorry, how do you own it, how do you never lose it? How do you own it? It's the relationship. You learn what the deal is, what the opportunity is, and you talk to the owner. How do you never lose it is always answered by cash flow. I want to see a deal that cash flows. If I'm not bringing in other partners, my bare minimum is I want to see 8% cash flow day one. I want to see a lot more upside than that, but that's just the cash flow. That doesn't account for any appreciation, that doesn't account for any of the debt reduction, any of the tax benefits, any of the other reasons that you buy real estate. All I'm looking at to start with is, does it cash flow 8% day one? Now, if I'm bringing in other debt, I need to factor for that debt. I need to make sure that I am making 8% on any money that I have in the deal. Now, this is a lot easier to do if you follow this channel and you're learning how to buy zero-down real estate or very low-down real estate and you don't have any money in the game. Well, if your money is not on the table, it's an infinite return, right? If you're getting a return on a $0 investment, we're actually looking at a multimillion-dollar purchase where the seller wants zero down. Now, I have a lot more due diligence to do there, but that's the first thing I'm looking at in underwriting. I'm going to look at What is the day one cash flow? From what I've seen so far, it looks very, very promising. We will keep you posted here on this channel on that deal. And let's find question 5 here. Since my 4th question, I have a better video to share with you guys. Oh, this is actually a good one. This has come up a few times on the channel. This is from Christian Osgood. When you say broker, because we use that term a lot, Do you mean commercial real estate broker in particular? So this actually changes market to market. Cody and I are licensed real estate agents in Washington State. In Washington State, a real estate agent and a broker are the same thing. That is not true for every state. In some places, an agent works for a broker until they're a broker for a certain amount of time. In Washington, you start out as a broker, which is a real estate agent, and you can graduate to managing broker. So broker can be a commercial agent, it can be a residential agent. It can be someone who sells self-storage, office, multifamily, single-family. Broker in Washington is an all-encompassing term. So if you've been on this channel, you've seen us use that term. I apologize. I realize that we have a bit of a national audience and we don't always explicitly state that. So broker equals agent on this channel. Now, in the future, for next week, we're going to be working on our software. So when you see this come out starting next Wednesday, 3 PM Pacific time, we're going to be sharing on this channel in a scheduled event that'll go off without a hitch. We're going to be sharing exactly how we do everything we do. We're going to answer 5 questions from the comments, and then we're going to take the time to actually go through the live feed. If you have any other questions, we can also answer them there live. We're planning on allocating half an hour to an hour every week. So today is a little bit short because I'm reading through the text and my computer software just totally failed. So I'm here with you on the iPhone. Do me a favor, like, subscribe, share this. Join us next week. Both Cody and I will be here. I'm going to schedule it, create the thumbnail, everything is going to go without a hitch. I look forward to seeing you all and, uh, talk to y'all soon.
