In this solo instructional video, Christian Osgood explains how to identify the optimal U.S. markets for multifamily real‑estate investment. He begins by emphasizing the need to define personal investment goals—cash‑flow, appreciation, or a blend—before considering any market. He then stresses that the most critical factor is the investor’s own location, network, and competitive advantage, suggesting that investors start with their backyard and expand outward only when they have trusted contacts who can manage properties. Osgood outlines three high‑signal macro‑economic metrics for evaluating markets: consistent population growth, stable and diversified job bases, and rent‑growth trends, illustrated by the rent‑doubling timeframe. He uses Grant County, Washington (Moses Lake, Ephratah, Quincy) as a case study, highlighting its low power costs that attract data centers and major employers, strong population growth, and a 15‑17‑year rent‑doubling cycle. He advises viewers to use tools like worldpopulationreview.com to track population trends and to assess job stability and rent history. Finally, he promotes his website themultifamilystrategy.com for deeper market‑analysis courses and mentorship.
Chapters
Which markets in the US are the absolute best markets for you to invest in? Do you invest for cash flow, for appreciation? Is it an and/or question? Find out in today's video. Hey, welcome back. I'm Christian Osgood doing a solo video here. Cody's off to the side here, and today it is just me talking about markets. One of my favorite topics is where is the best place for you to invest and what is your actual target. Now, The first thing that you have to know for this is what is your actual goal before you even get to which market. What are you actually trying to accomplish? You need to have this mapped out typically on a cash flow basis. What does it cost me on a monthly basis to hit my goals? What real estate is going to get me there? Once we have that mapped out, we have plenty of videos on that. Once you have that goal mapped and you've assigned a monetary value to it, We now look at, okay, where the heck am I going to invest? So what market is the best market in the US? Factually, Grant County, Washington. Moses Lake, Ephratah, Quincy. Why? Because we own there. However, if that is not you, or that's not the market you want to invest in, what is actually the best market? What makes a good market? More than anything, there's no metric that is more important than this: where do you want to invest? Because Everywhere in the United States there is property. Now, there are places you don't want to invest. There are some markets that are much better than others. But the first and most important metric for you is where are you located, where do you want to invest, and where do you have a competitive advantage. The first place this usually means is in your own backyard. Is the market that you're in and the properties that you can drive to today, is that a market you want to invest in? And we're going to break out a whole bunch of basic metrics that you can follow But that's gonna be one of the first things you ask: where am I at, and is this a place I can invest? Next, you look at the areas around that. Say you're in downtown LA and you're not finding the right deals for you, or the politics don't align with you as a landlord. Well, are there markets outside of that that work? Cody and I live in Seattle. I only own 7 units in the greater Seattle area and my house, and I'm working on changing that, but we have a whole bunch right over the mountains. We looked, okay, is there anything around Seattle that makes sense? No, it's all about the same. Okay, let's go a little bit farther, a little bit farther, and we found Central Washington. Hit a bunch of metrics, the numbers started making sense, and we could actually come over and take over that market. Now, we have a lot of friends who also invest out of state. So if you're not in your own backyard, what are you looking for? And it's where do you have competitive advantage. The people who do the best have contacts in that market who they absolutely have 100% trust in, people who can manage their property, keep an eye on the property, and they can actually get out and compete in that market at a level that other people can't. That's the first and most important thing, is what are you capable of doing? What markets can you service, or do you have the network to service? That is more important than any individual market. However, the reason you're probably watching this video is, tell me how to find the right market. Okay, so we're gonna do this on basic economics 101, macroeconomics. Supply, demand. What are you doing with rental housing? You are providing housing for humans. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to check where do humans want to live. A great resource for this is, um, I think it's called worldpopulationreview.com. Whatever, you can just Google anywhere for population growth. What you're looking for is a graph. That goes up over time, year over year, consistently. Now you might see some dips in that chart, but if it's still going up again, your job is to go back into history and figure out why the population dipped then, and is that going to happen again? But that's the basics of it. You're going to look at, okay, population's going up. This is somewhere where people want to live. People want to live here. Those people need housing. That is about 90% of it, is finding markets that have excellent population growth year over year consistently. Because that means you're going to be looking at appreciation. Now you want to find deals that cash flow, and some markets are heavier towards those. But what you really want to do is you're going to find deals in any market that cash flow, because we want to answer the questions: how do we buy it? How do we never lose it? That's long-term fixed rate cash flowing debt. As long as we can find that, if you can buy that property and hold it and it's in a high appreciation market or a higher appreciation market, You get paid to wait for your money to multiply. If you're in a down market but you're cash flowing, you get paid. When it's an up market and a higher appreciation market, your money's now multiplying while you're getting paid every month for it to do so. So how do we find those markets? Typically those are going to be stable, higher paying jobs are going to be a higher paying, um, and higher appreciation area. So look around the country for places that have stable job growth, great employers. We're going to take Grant County, Washington as another excellent example. Why do Cody and I invest there? It has the lowest cost of power in the United States, which attracts a lot of the data centers, processing, manufacturing, and battery production. So you get companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing does manufacturing out there, but you have these major companies with high electric bills that build huge facilities there. They're not going to move from that area because they're all set up, the power's there, and they've built massive multi-billion dollar infrastructures. Love that market. And then we look at the population growth over time. It goes up and up and up and up every year. Now the third metric I look at, and this is really important, is you just want to see what rents are doing over time. The most important thing, hands down, Population growth, first thing we look at. Then we look at job stability and diversity, by the way. I needed to add that. If everything is just one type of job and that picks up and leaves, markets crash. Look at what happened to Detroit when the auto industry went down. So diverse, growing, stable jobs, second most important thing. Now when we get into the third thing, it's what's actually happening with rents over time. And a very simple metric is How many years in my market does it take rents to double? And you can go back in time as far as you want. I know for Grant County, Washington, roughly every 15 to 17 years rents double, and it's like clockwork. We actually got this metric from one of our early mentors in that market. He started documenting this, and every year he's like, wow, 15 to 17 years rents double. Now we just had a whole bunch of inflation, which is going to accelerate that. But when you have that trend, you can map out, okay, so if rents double in this amount of time, what does that do to values? How much more appreciation? How much more cash flow am I going to have in what period of time? And it helps you map out your game plan. If you have a 10, 15-year acquisition window, or if you're like Cody and you have another 50 years playing the game, you can go, how many doubles do I have in my career in this market? It's a really good thing to know. It's one of my favorite, um, less important, but it's probably my third favorite metric to look at. If you can map out those three things— best population growth areas, consistent high population in an area that I am able to either drive to or I have a network who can service my property, the jobs there are stable, good income, diverse jobs— we're not looking at a one-employer city. And lastly, rents consistently keep up with all the other metrics. Rents go up and up and up every year, and I know exactly how long it takes for rents to double. If you know these things and you love these things, you are good to go. Any market that hits those metrics, just make sure it's a market that is good for you and hits those big three. If you want to learn more about analyzing your markets, doing the math, analyzing, and really finding what's the right deal in the right market for you, check out themultifamilystrategy.com. Cody and I share everything there, both in our courses and mentorship group. Links down below. Thank you for watching. We'll see you guys next week.
