Christian Osgood and Cody teach how to meet property owners in person: listen 80% of the time, ask about their real estate background and what drives them, and treat the relationship as more valuable than any single deal. Newcomers often sabotage themselves by chasing their first transaction instead of building a real network.
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Hello YouTube, welcome back. It's Christian, I'm here with Cody again, and today we are answering a specific question that we've gotten a couple times this week. In the past, we've talked pretty extensively about how to talk to owners over the phone, how to book a meeting. What we haven't done a lot of is talk about what you do when you're actually in the meeting in front of the individual that you booked the meeting with.
It's one of those moments where you're like, I didn't think I was gonna get that far. And now you finally made it. So what do you do? Well, the first thing you need to do, introductions. You always start out with the intro. You're going to share a little bit about yourself, and then our objective is to learn more about them. And there's an 80/20 rule that Christian's phenomenal at explaining, and it's actually how we try and engage with all interactions.
Yeah, this works when you're booking the meeting on the phone, and it is absolutely critical when you're in front of the person that you are speaking to. So, the 80/20 rule for conversations is you should be listening 80% of the time and talking 20%. Think of this like you are going on a date. You are not on this date to tell them everything awesome about you. And if you're doing that right now, you're probably doing that wrong as well. You are there to learn about the other individual. The value in these meetings is not, is this person going to do a deal with me and can they make me money today? That is where most people get this wrong in the industry. The goal is to learn how they did it. They have knowledge and they have done things differently than you or anyone else has done it. They have their own story. If you get to that, you would start to piece together new ways to do deals. You have 3 main objectives when you meet with anyone. When you're there, you want to— as far as communicating, you have 3 objectives, and that is you need to put forward your relatability, You need to put together your goal that you can clearly communicate to them, and you need to have significance behind that goal. They will buy into you, and they will help you get to the next step whether or not there's a deal at the end of this.
And a great way to build rapport with people and deeply connect with them, just on another level that most people never get to, is to ask about their 3 pieces. Now you're going to ask about, okay, what's their relatability? Obviously got some real estate if you reached out to them about their real estate. So it might be good to learn about what types of real estate they got started with. It could also make sense to ask what problems that they've faced. They're going to have stories on that. We've heard a lot of stories about people digging underneath their properties, chopping out pipes, wishing they didn't do it themselves and hired it out. They didn't end up hiring it out and they have a lot of stories now to share with us. And some of their lessons that they learned from that. They shared some of their targets, and they shared that they hit most, if not all, of their targets. And you get to learn, okay, prioritize this first, set small goals, or maybe you set big goals. People are going to have different experiences that they have faced in the real estate space, both through just what they've done and then what they aimed for, which allowed them to do what they've accomplished. And more so, you can ask about their why. Why did they get into real estate? What did it allow them to do that a job could not do? And you're going to get to connect with them, and that connection, more so than any deal that you could buy, any piece of real estate you could go acquire, the connection is what's going to allow them to be comfortable trusting you with some of the stuff that they don't tell others. It's that deeper connection. They are going to start sharing information with you not just information about the real estate, but some of the application pieces. How do you actually go apply some techniques that aren't all over the internet? A lot of the seller finance strategies that Christian and I have used are not on the internet. They're just not. Some of it we made up, some of it we learned from some of these folks who have 400 or 500 units that they own outright. And you wouldn't know that they had it. You wouldn't know that they had that much real estate. We had to cultivate a relationship with these folks. And we did that by sharing bits and pieces about what we've done, why it's important, and looking into and really deeply analyzing what they did, how they did it, and more importantly, why they got into the space.
Now, if you've never done your first deal and you're getting into these meetings, you're probably very, very, very hungry to get a deal done. You want a transaction out of this. If you go for the transaction on this first meeting like everyone else in our industry is doing, You are dead. You could get a deal.
You're playing in a red ocean.
You will miss out on the rest of the opportunity. You will not learn what you need to learn. If you are meeting with someone worth meeting in your space, they probably have a lot more real estate. If you get through the meeting and they offer you their one duplex and you buy that one duplex, you could have missed out on hundreds of units. They could have introduced you to the next person who had thousands of units. You don't know what you missed out on. The relationship is always more valuable than the real estate they own. Every single time.
Yeah. And at the end of the day, when you're focused on this, do not be transactional. It is hard, and I get it. If you are younger in the space— I'm not talking about age right now, but in experience— you want to do your first deal because you're seeing a lot of people online on the social media space that are flaunting their deals. And understand that social media is the highlight reel. I've said this before and I'm going to keep on saying it over and over. It's the highlight reel. To get there, you have to cultivate relationships. Some folks want to be self-made. I don't want to be self-made. I want to get as much help as possible because that gives me a lift up. It gives me a competitive advantage because I'm cultivating relationships with people who have already played the game at or near the highest level possible.
Super important.
Mm-hmm.
And once you develop relationships at one level, you'll find people at the next level and the next level. One thing that Cody says all the time that I absolutely love is that whatever got you to the level you're at is probably not what's going to get you to the next level. Each time there's more figuring out. So if you've done your first 10 deals, that doesn't mean you can skip steps now and start asking people to transact with you. There are bigger people than you've last transacted with. There's different people than you've last transacted with. You always go into the meeting asking how did they get to where they are at? What are their goals? In a lot of our markets, we know a lot of the players because we're very involved. Because we have a lot of relationships, I don't just know what one group wants. I know what multiple people want, and they know what I want. And when we get together, it's a meeting of the minds. We're all working for each other, trying to get to our goals. It's collaborative. And it's a lot bigger than, hey, I found a duplex. Hey, I found one 12-plex. It's an ocean of deals.
And then the last piece, when you're booking meetings, when you're going into that meeting, you need to walk in with a clear objective. It should not be buying a piece of real estate. You need an objective that is going to further your cause, whatever that is, whatever your why is. It's different for every single person watching this. Have an objective going in, and when you walk away from that meeting, you need a takeaway. Mm-hmm. 100% of the time. My first question to Christian always is, what was your takeaway from that meeting? No matter what it is, or what was your takeaway from that video? You can get stuff out of every interaction that you have if you're being intentional. And at the end of the day, that is really, really important. Mm-hmm.
The difference between people who are stagnant and really active, because there's a lot of people who do a lot of activities, When you're stuck and you feel like you've plateaued and you're not moving forward, you're probably not getting takeaways from what you're doing. You need to grow from every interaction. When we watch a YouTube video, we end that with, Cody, what did you take away from this? Christian, what did you take away from this?
Even recording this, I get out of this recording and I'm like, okay, what did I take away from this? Because I'm always trying to improve, and I know my YouTube videos are not where they could be. So we are always trying to take away ideas, and whether it's with a meeting, with a YouTube video that we're recording or watching, we go to a Grant Cardone seminar. There's all these different things, but if you're being intentional, you're going to start scaling. And it's not just about the information that you see on YouTube. How do you actually go apply that? That's it for today.
As always, please like and subscribe. If you have any questions, we are answering those every Wednesday. We're going to select 5 of the top questions from the week and answer them. So if you have any questions regarding to this or anything else, comment on any of our videos. We will read through them and we'll get to your questions as soon as we can.
