Christian Osgood grew from one 25-unit building in Stephenville, Texas to over 600 rental units by picking a hub market, driving 2 to 2.5 hours out to find deals, and writing one offer per week. He uses seller financing and local property managers to scale across Texas and Washington.
Chapters
Hey, it's Christian Osgood. I'm at a 25-unit property that started a 180+ unit portfolio here in Stephenville. And I've done the same thing in Abilene, Texas, in Washington State, in Moses Lake, and in Mason County. How do you do this model and why does it work in red states, blue states, big cities, small cities? I'm going to show you exactly how I did it. Here is the property that started it in Stephenville, Texas. So I'm going to go to a map of properties in my studio. I'm going to show you exactly how you choose the market, how you expand, and the activities that you need to take to consistently every time find hundreds of units of opportunities in any market in the country.
This is exactly what I did. And welcome back to the studio, guys. I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. I've done this in multiple markets, done Washington State, done it in Texas. This is how it usually works. If you want to build a large portfolio, you need to choose individual hubs, but don't get stuck there. I'm going to show you exactly what this looks like with the powers of screen share. So when I moved from Washington State to Dallas, I was looking at where to buy. And if you're trying to buy in major cities, it's really hard. There's a ton of competition. Your big outside companies want to try to dump tons of money in here. It's rare to find a deal that makes sense unless you're fixing a major problem, which is usually not where you wanna start. Now, if you expand a radius around a city, you can choose all these different submarkets. Now, in my opinion, I want to get there with a relatively easy drive, so I drew a 2.5-hour radius driving around DFW. Now, if you look on the map here on my screen, that's a huge radius that goes out to a little past Tyler, Texas, which is over here. On the east to the west, you can go out about as far as Abilene. This is about that 2.5-hour threshold. And you do the same things north and south. In fact, that's what I did. Of all the cities I wanted to start in, I started in the city of Waco, Texas. Now, why Waco? Consistent population growth. And my little sister went to school there, so I had the little advantage of, okay, I'm familiar with the area, I've been there, it has excellent fundamentals. I'm going to start there. So I move over here to the DFW area. We go to Waco. I look at Waco and we actually go under contract for a major deal in Waco. We get down there and turns out the foundation was absolutely destroyed. There was not a project that we were equipped to do. So we went ahead and canceled the contract. Now I found some other opportunities in Waco, but nothing that screamed we need to buy this. Where a lot of people get stuck is they go, hey, I decided this submarket and I'm just stuck. I'm not finding deals. All you do is you start going out in a radius from that area. Where I ended up was about an hour and a half out of DFW and about an hour and a half out of Waco in a little town called Stephenville. So I was just looking around the general areas. You're looking for these higher population. I don't want to like a town of 1,000 people, but Stephenville is 25,000. You can usually tell because there's a bunch of different roads going into it. It's these little central nodes is usually where you're looking for opportunity. So we choose Stephenville. I find a seller-financed 25-unit building and then next door, right after I close that, a 26-unit. So what you do is you close the deal and then you focus on that market. You say, okay, now I'm going to clean up everything that could be cleaned up here. You call the property neighbors after you close and let them know, hey, I'm your new property neighbor, would love to get coffee. You build the relationships. And over the course of a year and a half, we bought 4 deals in Stephenville, a 76-unit, a 44-unit, the 25, and the 26. We put together a nice little portfolio, a few little odds and ends properties that we added to that. But those are the major set pieces that we did establishing in that market. Each one came with their own little office. We're able to set up our property management, our systems, our contractors. We now have an independent business for the Stephenville market. It's perfect. There's nothing else right now available in Stephenville that I know that I want to buy. There's things that I'll buy in the future, but no one's ready to sell right now. We cleaned up what was available in that town to be cleaned up at that time. So what do you do next? Same thing. Do the little radius out. I checked Granbury, we checked Weatherford, we checked Dublin, almost did a deal in Dublin where I actually ended up one more time was about an hour and a half out in the city of Abilene. This is where they're building the Stargate project, the $500 billion data center. There's a ton of other business out there, though. 3 colleges, military base. Abilene's really cool and conveniently the very outer edge of my 2.5-hour driving radius. From where I live. We go into Abilene and the first deal that comes up is 144 units, biggest I've ever taken out. And it was an amazing deal, $8.5 million, built in the 2000s. We closed that deal 6 blocks down the street, 80-unit, 55+ community, one of my favorite, snagged it. Then there's another 80-unit, 55+ community that comes available right after that. I'm under contract for it right now. Abilene is about 180,000-person market. Stephenville's like 50,000 people. Abilene is a much bigger market. There's a lot more to clean up. We should be over 500 units in Abilene over the course of the next 2 years. The current project, we're not under contract yet, we're under LOI, but there's 2 deals over in Longview, Texas. It'll be a little over 300 rental units. There's a lot of opportunity over there. It's about an 85,000-person market for Longview. It's that same roughly 2.5-hour radius. This is the next major town that we plan on taking out. Now, will I definitely buy there? I don't know. And I'm also looking at Tyler, Texas. It's not for sure. We're under a letter of intent. There's a lot of due diligence to do. But as you're doing this, this is how you choose your hubs. You close in a market, you take out that market, build your systems, your contractors. When you try to go everywhere all at once, you end up with a disjointed business that's almost impossible to scale. And if you hyperfocus on a little teeny area for too long, you might take years to find a deal. This simple method of choose a hub, slowly expand out, just keep doing the activities that you need to keep deals flowing. For me, that's getting to a point where I can write one offer each week. I'm not trying to shotgun this. I don't want a grindy job. I'm doing one or two broker calls every single day till I feel like I know what the seller really wants to get it done. If I have a 33% chance or higher of getting my offer accepted, I'll go ahead and write the offer, or if it needs more negotiation, a letter of intent. That's all the activity that you need to build hundreds of units. I've done this in Washington State. I've done this in Texas. I have over 600 units today. By the end of the year, we'll be much closer to 1,000. And it's done exactly this method. 20 minutes a day. Choose your hub, slowly expand. Make sure you're always just making a few calls a day to get the momentum going. And you have one of the most lucrative part-time jobs you could ever have.
