In this conversational YouTube video, Christian Osgood and his business partner Cody outline a four‑phase framework for mastering real‑estate investing (and business in general). They begin with the Build phase, describing how they set an aggressive goal at a Grant Cardone conference to acquire 100 multifamily rentals in two years and actually achieved it in 11 months by aggressively buying properties. The Stabilization phase focuses on ensuring each asset is cash‑flowing, well‑maintained, and fully or near‑fully leased without major capital improvements. The Optimization phase (inspired by “Matt the Lumberjack Landlord”) pushes properties toward their highest‑and‑best‑use through rent upgrades, interior enhancements, and leveraging excess land, while also minimizing expenses via low‑interest debt and in‑house property management. Finally, the Debt Hammer phase contrasts with Dave Ramsey’s snowball: instead of incremental payments, they accumulate cash flow in a side account and then pay off an entire loan in one lump‑sum, reducing risk and freeing capital for further growth. Throughout, they emphasize consistency, the importance of a solid foundation, and promote their deeper‑dive video series and paid course at MultifamilyStrategy.com.
Chapters
There's how do you own it, and then how do you own it. And you own it when you don't owe anyone a thing. It is yours. Hello and welcome back to the channel. Today we're talking about our 4 phases for real estate mastery.
Welcome back to the channel. My name is Cody and I'm here with my business partner on One Less Company Now, Christian Osgood. But today we are talking about the simplest way to play the real estate game. And really, beyond real estate, we're talking business. There's 4 stages to any business and we love real estate. So we'll talk about that today. When you're going out, the first step, and you ought to always keep it really simple, is you have to go build it. Got to go build the portfolio. So in real estate, we set out a goal. We were in Florida at Grant Cardone's Growth Conference and we said, we're going to get to 100 rentals and we're going to do it in 2 years or less. So what do we have to do? Well, we need to go build a portfolio. So we go out, we play offense and we don't play defense until we've played enough offense and scored enough goals. So what do we do? We bought 100 rentals. And we celebrated with the resort.
And we actually did that in 11 months too, which is a lot faster than we had originally planned.
More better.
Bonus.
However, all that to be said, we went out and we played offense. We have to go build the business now. So in real estate, got to go buy a bunch of buildings. If I said, "Hey, Christian, I found a 38-plex. It's going to be a lot of work, but it'll get us closer to our goal." What's the answer? Yes. Can we figure out a buy and how to never lose it? Let's do it. So we go out and we actually buy the real estate that we found, a 12 and a 10, and we bought a whole bunch of properties together. Relatively quickly. Within a year, we went from zero together to over 100. From there, we have to go into stage number 2, which is what?
Stage number 2 is stabilization. And by the way, we're going to do a video on each one of these individually as a deeper dive. So we're going to recap here and then we will launch into a series over the next few weeks. So stabilize. When you have a property, there may be things that are just not done. Let's say major maintenance things. You have bad water heaters, a bad roof, So the first thing is the condition of the building, and the second one is your actual rental base. Are all the units leased or close to all the units leased? Are you close or at market rent? Stabilize is basically saying, what do we have and is it performing the way it should be? We're not doing major, major improvements. We're not doing anything crazy. We're just saying with the pieces that we bought today, is it doing what I would expect it to do without major changes? And is maintenance generally up to par. If you can get it there, you should be in a better position than when you bought it. You're now stable, it's performing, it's cash flowing, it's predictable, and you have no ticking time bombs. That is what I call a stable building. To do that in your portfolio, self-explanatory, you do that on all the buildings that are in that portfolio, and now you are stabilized. You know what you make every month, you can count on it coming in every month, and outside of the fact that buildings do just have things happen, you don't have anything that is imminent that you're expecting to happen.
And the key word there is consistency. That's why you were really hitting home on that. Yes. From there though, that's not the final step. You still got another 2 more, so stay tuned because you're halfway there. Now you got to move into optimization. Now it's cool to be stable. It's cool to have consistent income, consistent expenses. However, we want to go for something called highest and best use, meaning we're going from I know I'm cash flowing $3,000 a month. I know I got a little bit of equity too. I'm getting to $10,000 a month. If that's the goal with the property, I'm going to get the most amount of income, the least amount of expenses, and I'm going to get all the CapEx done so that in the future I have absolutely no issues with this asset. And that is the big goal with step number 3. Now, we didn't used to have this step. Then we met a guy named Matt, the Lumberjack Landlord, and he taught us a thing or two about a thing or two. And he is really good. At optimization. That is his thing. He optimizes debt products. So all of his mortgages are like sub-4%. It is absolutely ridiculous, but he's very good at what he does with the assets as well. It's the highest rents that he needs to, and he has the lowest expenses because he has this whole insourcing thing with PM. Very good at what he does. You can also check out his channel, but this is stage number 3, highest and best use of the asset and the most amount of income and the least amount of expenses.
And it also includes things like interiors of units. Like, it could be, this will be a nicer asset with stone countertops. Did we need that to stabilize the building? Absolutely not. Is it time to go in when someone moves out and say, hey, we're going to go stainless steel appliances and nicer interiors beyond what we need, but this will maximize rent? That's an optimization phase thing. If you have— and we've done this on multiple properties, we're in the process— do I have excess land attached to my building? Is the highest and best use for this campus building a whole nother building on site? These are all optimization things. How do I make the absolute most of what I have?
Now, after you get the maximum output, you put in your input, now you're getting the maximum output, we move into stage number 4. And a lot of people don't agree with us on this, but that's okay, they're wrong. What is stage number 4?
This is the debt hammer. Now, like Dave Ramsey's snowball, it's paying off all the debts over time. The difference between the hammer And the snowball is the snowball goes, hey, every month we're going to pay this down, pay it down, pay it down. Problem with that in real estate is if you are paying down a property and you miss a payment, you can still lose the property. Now, when— let's say you went 10% down. When the lender has 90% of the risk, they have more risk than you. You only have 10% of the money in the deal. If you keep putting money into that deal, you have more money to lose if you lose the property. That's just basic common sense. So what the hammer does is say, we're going to sideline the cash flow in a side account and we're going to hold it in cash. It's going to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. We're not paying down anything extra until I have enough cash to pay a debt off in full. This could be your smallest debt, could be your most expensive debt. It is up to you how you want to manage it. But what you do is when you have enough in that account, you whack one debt in its entirety, you hammer it. You now owe less every single month and you have more capital to build a bigger hammer because now your income's up.
Yep. And so example, we've got a little triplex and we owe $191,000 on it. That is our smallest loan on a piece of real estate. So if we wanted to save up cash, we're almost to debt hammer phase. We stack cash flow and within a few months we'll have enough cash and then we whack the debt. We don't pay it down little by little because if something happens and we lose the asset, We want to have as little money in it until the very last second where we can hit the nail and it goes in in one swing.
So we'll dive more into all of these in future videos, but that is our 4 steps of success in real estate and really any business. You need to set a firm foundation, which is your build phase. And the more time you spend there, by the way, the bigger you can go. The larger the foundation, the bigger building you can build on it. You just be aware. The bigger you go, the more pain you're going to go through.
Stabilization and optimization can be very difficult.
Yes. And we've seen that firsthand. We'll share more about that in the future videos. But you build, you stabilize, you optimize, and in our opinion, you pay off all the debt. There's how do you own it? And then how do you own it? And you own it when you don't owe anyone a thing. It is yours.
I like that.
Yeah, I'm going to keep that. That's on the channel now. If you guys want to learn more about this, we go into it in depth in our course. Multifamilystrategy.com. We would love to see you there. Let me know if you have any questions about that. You can reach me on Instagram @ChristianOsgood, or Cody is @DoingCodyThings. But we will see you guys soon for the next installment.
