Christian Osgood scaled from one small property to 850+ multifamily units in under five years. He targets underperforming assets in smaller markets, secured his first deal with seller financing on a 38-unit property without capital upfront, and focuses on lease-up execution to create value. His framework: become the obvious buyer, get the deal first, then find the money.
Chapters
We are under contract for another 200 rentals. I'm going to walk this property while I explain to you the 3 things that you need to do to be able to scale to properties like this in less than 5 years in your investing career. Exactly what I did is exactly what you can do. By the way, this will put me at about 850 units when we close, and we're under contract for 3 other deals in Texas. How do we do this? Well, it all starts at the beginning. You need to become the most obvious buyer for any property. There's a few different skills that you need to pick up to do this, but the first thing you have to do is kind of obvious. The other 2 I will share on this video as well, but the first one— You need to buy the first darn deal. It will probably be the hardest. Here's what I would skip: single-family, duplex, triplex, fourplex. Do not do the residential. I started there. It was a waste of time. Did it cash flow a little bit? Yeah, kind of. But 8 years of buying those, I got a mighty $2,000 a month of cash flow, paid for my tiny mortgage on my tiny house in a place I didn't want to live. That's about as far as that goes. So if you're following BiggerPockets or whatever the— whatever your favorite source is, a lot of them will talk about the house hack. But so many people talk about the house hack being the way to financial freedom or single-family investment. And the reason they do it is because— It's cheap. It's easier to wrap your head around a smaller purchase price. What they don't teach you is that a bigger deal that makes more money is going to be easier to align more capital to. Your goal is not to buy the cheapest thing you can in any investment. It's to buy the best thing you can in the best area you can. I'm in Longview, Texas. This may not be the best area of all time, but it's an awesome little submarket out here in East Texas. This 200-unit is available because the current operations of this property are not allowing them to lease up. Now, all their neighbors are at high occupancy, but their management structure has some leasing issues that we are uniquely equipped to solve. How did we become the most obvious buyer for this property? Well, in Stephenville, Texas, about 180 units, a lot of them had leasing problems. We fixed it. That's a tertiary market. Abilene, Texas, out in West Texas, we own 244 units under contract for another 80. Some of those buildings had leasing problems. We fixed all the leasing problems. We specialize in doing lease-up in large multifamily properties. In tertiary markets. So when there's problems at large properties in tertiary markets, guess who the first call is? Me. Now, it all started with the first deal. There's a 38-plex on market. No one wanted it. And so we came in and we did the project. It was on market for $2 million, seller financeable. They wanted 15% down. I didn't have the $300,000, but what I did have was the deal, which is thing number 2. You don't need to find the money first. You don't need to find the debt first. Everyone focuses on where's the cash coming in. My question, the cash for what? If you have no opportunity, you will raise no capital. That is a hard and fast rule. There is no way to raise money for a deal that does not exist. Your mission in buying the first deal, believe it or not, is actually finding the first deal. It is not finding the money for the first deal. It is not earning the money for the deal. Here's the secret that no one taught me when I was trying to escape the 9 to 5. Every deal's purchased with cash. Every single deal is 100% purchased with cash. Now, it could be your cash, it could be someone else's cash, it could be the seller's cash, it could be the bank's cash. No matter how you're structuring it, Every deal is transacted with cash and the money's always made up. You need to make up the money to the deal you have. You have high cash flow, you're going to do it likely as debt. If you have a bunch of upside, you're going to bring on some equity partners who want a piece of that upside with you. But you do these deals to build your resume like you would any other job so you become the most obvious buyer for apartments like what's right behind me. Step 3 is the one that gets everyone. You actually have to have a very specific why on why you're doing everything. If you just want to go make more money, And buy more apartments. Uh, I see a lot of those guys, they come up all the time on the internet. I see them losing their apartments several years later all the time, and I see this again and again and again. More money, more scale, not a good motivator. I wanted to retire my wife, wanted to build our dream house, wanted to provide for my kiddos, and I wanted to leave Washington State. So for me to leave my job, for her to leave her job, for I to make this my career— Another thing you have to be able to do, and this is non-negotiable, you just need to be able to do some basic math. Cash flow is not hard to calculate. Building values are not hard to calculate. This is Algebra 1. Spend a little bit of time getting a community that underwrites deals, or learn how to do them and practice them weekly until you get good at this. If you know how to underwrite a deal and you transact a few times, you will get extremely good at doing numbers. If you understand how real estate works, you'll understand why you buy this. Now, yes, this thing is going to be a cash flow monster, and yes, it cash flows day one. Every deal has to. But the upside on this, we're buying this for a little under $13 million, which may sound like a lot, but for 200 units stabilized, this is worth $17 to $19 million depending on market conditions on exit. There is a ton of upside, millions and millions of dollars to be made. What is the actual job? Basic maintenance and leasing. One thing that motivated me to get into bigger apartments instead of buy the small stuff, think about the amount of work that goes into this. This will be a big project. It's going to be a hard project, but we will make millions of dollars doing it. Think how long it takes for an average person in their 9 to 5 to save up for millions of dollars. Then look at the actual hours that we'll work here. This is going to be a hard job. I am going to put in a lot of hours of work. I'll be compensated depending on where you're at, like 10 to 50 times what an average person makes depending on what your job is and where you're at in the country. I will make a lot more than some people make in their entire combined careers working Working a really hard couple years at this project. Better yet, this project will likely be done by the end of the 12-month cycle. All we have to do is fix up a few decks, fix up a few interiors, and do lease-up. Now, that's a lot harder than it sounds on YouTube, but it's not that hard for the amount of money we make. Scale is really important in real estate. Don't focus on unit count; focus on dollars. Bringing property from 13 million to 17 million. Million and say we hit the low end is a lot of money for a lot of people. That is a good enough goal to get you going, but you have to do the first deal, you have to understand the numbers, and you have to find the opportunity before you find the cash. If you can put all those things together, you're gonna do just fine.
