In this interview‑style video, Christian Osgood talks with real‑estate investor Cody about how a beginner can start buying property with little or no cash. They stress that the first rule is to only acquire cash‑flow‑positive deals; a negative‑cash‑flow property will quickly bankrupt a new investor. Cody recounts his own path, beginning at age 19 with $3,000, buying a 12‑plex through 90 % seller financing and 10 % private money at a 12 % interest rate, and later scaling to a 38‑plex partnership using a repeatable “deal → debt → equity” sequence. They describe creative financing tactics—seller financing, private investors, high‑interest short‑term loans, and equity partners—explaining how each piece fits together to cover down‑payments and later be refinanced out. The conversation also covers how to spot the right deal (e.g., long‑listed MLS properties that sit at the same price for years) and the importance of confidence in cash‑flow calculations. Christian shares his own experience of leveraging a high‑income job to acquire duplexes and a house, then reinvesting the cash flow to grow his portfolio. Throughout, the hosts emphasize that real‑estate can be entered without capital if one is disciplined about cash flow, willing to be creative with financing, and persistent in finding undervalued opportunities.
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If you don't have money, you're going to have to get creative. A bank's not going to lend to you if you have actually no money.
You're going to have to borrow money. Real estate investing for beginners when you got no money. Today we're talking about that because at 19 years old, when I was a beginner, I had no money and now I've got 110 apartments and a resort.
Welcome back to the channel. I'm Christian. This is Cody. Super excited to talk to you about how to begin with absolutely no money. Cody, you just mentioned You started at 19 years old with what, $3,000 to your name?
$3,000. And granted, if you're getting started, that may sound like a lot of money, but when you're buying millions and millions of real estate, you could blow 3 grand a day, if not an hour. You could blow through that money so fast. You gotta be really smart, but you can absolutely crush this game and you can absolutely buy real estate as a beginner with no money. I started with a 12-plex. You don't have to start there, but you definitely can. How do we start? Going about that?
Well, the first thing that you have to do, and the magic word is cash flow. You cannot afford to buy a cash negative deal. Now, when you get further, there's value-add plays and there's stuff that you can do. When you are starting, you cannot have your first deal lose money. If you have $3,000 to your name and your deal ends up losing $1,000 a month because you do bad math, I get to survive 3 months. Good luck, Cody. Not good. A lot of people get really stuck though on, I don't have enough money to invest in real estate. We're debunking that myth right now. So the first thing you have to do is you have to find a deal just a property that you want to buy, and you have to figure out how to buy it. Cody, you started with a 12-plex. What made that your first property?
Well, that was on the MLS. It was listed. It sat there with seller financing. And while some people say that's a unicorn, I did it again and again and again. Bought a lot of deals on the market. We're still buying deals on the market, and there's more and more of them because of interest rates. You can do this over and over again, but when you find the deal Not a deal. This isn't a property. This is the property that you want to buy. Then you line up the debt, and if you can't get 100% debt, then you line up the equity. When I bought my first deal, I got 100% debt. 90% of my purchase was from the seller, seller financing. The other 10% was private. Now, private just means from people, not banks. That's all that means. Some people have some ambiguity there. It's just from people. Private investors want a huge return, so I ended up paying 12% interest, which was really high. The first time I told my parents about that, they freaked out. However, it cost me more not to buy the deal than it did to pay the 12%, and the real estate paid the 12% and still cash flowed $800 a month. We talked about cash flow. You can have positive cash flow or negative cash flow. Opt for positive when you're getting started.
Now, I've shared a few times on this channel, but I actually had a high-income job when I first started investing. It wasn't huge, but I mean, I was working for CoStar, multiple 6-figure jobs, so I mean, I had income. Well, how do you know how to start with no money? Turns out, if you buy a bunch of real estate, you can in fact spend all the money, which is what I did. I bought a house for my wife and I. I bought a duplex, and then I bought a second duplex, and then I fixed up that duplex.
You didn't even get all the money from your job. I mean, you got some of it from an appreciating condo.
Yeah, that's true. I also had my, uh, the first place I ever lived actually made money, and so I started with a little bit. But I spent it all in my final portfolio when I was absolutely out of money.
I spent 8 years getting that money.
I spent 8 years getting the money and it got me to 2 excellently cash-flowing duplexes and 1 house. It actually mapped out to almost exactly the 2 duplexes covered my mortgage. Really cool place to get with money. However, I had bigger goals. I wanted to retire my wife from her teaching job because her school got super weird and she was like, I'm done doing this. Well, how do I do that if I have no more money to scale? I'm now at $0 and Cody goes, let's buy a 38-plex together. We figured out how to do that. I can tell you right now, this guy didn't have any money. I didn't have any money. We had to go out and figure out the deal first. So we found the property.
We didn't find a deal. We found the deal. This was the one we wanted to pursue. Then we lined up the debt, seller financing, and we didn't have the down payment. So we brought in an equity partner. Later, we bought out the equity partner with more debt. Debt could be supported with— well, the property really could be supported with new debt because we got the income up. But we didn't want to be super negative day one, so we brought in equity partners and cashed them out later with debt. You get to play the dance with debt and equity. However, the cool part about this is it all revolves around cash flow, and the more cash flow you build over time— that wasn't my first deal, wasn't your first deal. You get some cash flow, you can take on more debt, and you can buy more real estate. But it just goes deal, debt, equity.
And for those saying, hey, these deals are unicorns, Cody just said we do this all the time. That deal was on the market for 13 years at the same price.
Yep, bought it for the price they listed it for in 2008. Now if somebody bought in 2008, they would have lost it. Fact.
That would have been very difficult to do then. However, that deal was just there available listed online, anyone could have made this happen. Whenever I talk to people about this deal, they had some reason why it wasn't the deal for them. Everyone knew about it. I talked to investors all the time. Oh, you guys are the guys who bought that. I don't know how I would have made that work. Well, that deal is the one that made us millionaires. That was the first deal. We bought it for $2 million and appraised for—
We were not millionaires when we bought that, but we were close.
Nope. Uh, we were less than halfway there. That skyrocketed us. That deal by itself made $1 million. And it was just sitting there for the right person. So the main thing that I want people to hear is it has to be the right deal for you. It doesn't mean everyone in the market sees the opportunity.
It means— most won't.
Yeah, means you see it, you know how you're going to get there, you're confident in your numbers, and then you go out and you execute. But as far as how you buy it, if you don't have money, you're going to have to get creative. A bank's not going to lend to you if you have actually no money.
You're going to have to borrow money. If you're afraid of debt and you want to do the debt-free route, Well, no reason to get creative on your financing. Go get some money and finance it yourself.
Yeah, go out and get a paying job.
Yeah, if you're going to play the game like I did when I had no money, had no experience, had no real estate, had no family in real estate, I had to borrow a lot of money. And I had to borrow my down payment at 12% from basically like a loan shark. I mean, it's basically what it is. 1-year debt. That's kind of scary. You're maybe in a position where you could lose the real estate, but it cash flowed and I had a method to pay that off. So I went in with a plan, found the deal, then lined up the debt, and then lined up more debt because I didn't have an equity partner that would trust me.
And it all comes back to cash flow.
Positive cash flow.
Yes, positive cash flow. Negative cash flow, you will lose. Positive cash flow, you come in, you find the deal, you make sure it cash flows, and from that cash flow, the real estate can start to buy the real estate.
Negative cash flow is a level of cash flow.
It is. It's just a horrible level of cash flow that you're not allowed to get on. If you follow our principles.
Alrighty, well, that's it for today, but keep it simple. Buy based on cash-flowing real estate, long-term fixed-rate debt if you're using debt. If not, just write a check, and we'll see you next time.
