In this YouTube conversation, Cody and real‑estate investor Christian Osgood argue that the traditional high‑volume cold‑calling grind—making hundreds of calls a day to chase immediate deals—is less effective than a relationship‑first approach. They explain that focusing on a few high‑quality contacts lets investors learn owners’ long‑term goals, gain trust, and uncover creative deal structures (e.g., low‑down‑payment or seller‑financed transactions) that would be unavailable through volume tactics. Real‑world anecdotes illustrate how genuine interactions can lead to referrals, mentorship, and even legacy connections that extend beyond any single transaction. The hosts stress that the value of these relationships is both financial (better deals, partnership opportunities) and personal (enjoyable day‑to‑day life, skill‑building, friendships). They conclude by urging viewers to prioritize genuine conversations over sheer call counts, promising that this mindset yields “massive opportunities” unavailable to those who merely chase numbers.
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Hey YouTube, this is Cody. I've got Christian back for this week's YouTube video. We are going to be chatting about building relationships through quality contacts instead of using a quantity approach where we are just trying to bang our heads against the wall getting so many leads through just making so many cold calls all day long. Now we've got friends who are in this business and they make 400 or 500 calls a day, call couple thousand calls a week, and that is not the approach we want to do because we cannot build that many relationships with that much of a success rate. So Christian, what do we do differently?
Everything is about forming a relationship with the right people. I've run into a lot of people who make the 500 calls a day, they knock on 100 doors every day, they're going volume, volume, volume. What they're looking for is deals. What we're looking for is relationships. I know people who've called the same people that Cody and I are looking at doing hundreds of units of transactions with, and they're buying a duplex from them. They have no idea what that relationship could be because they are looking for a deal, and that's what they're finding— a deal.
And they're capable of much more than a duplex, and they want to do much more than a duplex. It's not like that's just their goal, but they're getting one transaction because they're making it a transaction. Everything that we do is filtered off of a long-term relationship And so especially if you're a younger investor, you're looking to get into this game. If you're getting anything out of this video, make sure that you're targeting a relationship. You want to go for the long term. And we've shared this with folks and then they get into these weird situations. They get this opportunity where they make a call and they try and book a meeting, which is the right way to do it. You book a meeting, you grab coffee, you grab lunch, and you learn how they did it. And then the person offers to sell it to them almost as a test, but they don't know it's a test. They say, yeah, I want to buy it, and then they lose that relationship forever because they didn't stick true to their values and it came through that they weren't being genuine. So you got to be genuine in this process, but build a relationship.
And what do you know when you talk to a property owner? If you're going just after one property, you're going to learn about that one property. What you know about someone when you call an owner the first time you've ever called them, you know that they have made the decision to invest in real estate. They probably own other stuff. You're unlikely to call someone and it's their only property. You also know that they know other people who own real estate. Instead of looking at it as, where do I find my deal? How can I get this property? I want to get to know them. For the people that I've called and got to meet, I know their goals. I know where they want to be in 5 years, in 10 years. I know where they've been and how they've got there. This has done a lot. I have learned how they have built the portfolio they have, which we have applied to do deal— every deal we've done, we've learned that structure from someone else.
Yeah, and it's not designed to be transactional. You're not always going to get a property, and that is totally fine. Christian and I met up with a, a nice gentleman over in Central Washington who got started in the real estate space quite a long time ago, and he does it a little bit differently. He likes to pay cash for properties, and he got started as a landlord because he bought a house and he was living in it, and then his neighbor ended up getting kicked out because they were selling that house, and so they need a new place to rent. So he ended up buying a house for them— very nice guy— and rented it directly to them, and he became a landlord through that and started getting passive income and buying more and more and more. Now, This guy doesn't want to sell us anything. He doesn't want to sell. He wants to pass it on to his family as a legacy. However, he has referred tenants, great people, to rent our spaces. It's been a different type of value-add that we wouldn't have gotten if we just tried to keep hammering and buying his properties that we knew he wasn't going to sell. So there's a lot that can come out of building relationships as a byproduct. And at the end of the day, you get a great friend that is doing similar things that you want to be doing.
It just passively— that meeting, he introduced us to a family member who owns 40 properties in Texas. I don't know that we're going to do a deal there, but that is another level of connection. That's another market that we now know 40 properties that we don't know what they're doing with. The relationship is always worth more. Another thing to look at is what do you want your day to look like? If you want a job in real estate, there's a lot of them. You can be an analyst, a broker, a lender. If you want sustainable freedom, you need the relationships to do that. I want my day to be fun. If we meet with someone, they don't sell me a property, but I learned how they did it, what their goals are, I get to meet their granddaughter, we get coffee. If there's no transaction, I enjoyed my time. That was not a waste. I don't need a property from every conversation I have. I just want to learn and be around people in the space who enjoy doing what we do. And the ability to do that on the day-to-day, I live a way cooler life in my opinion than a lot of people that I meet in the real estate world because I'm not working a job. I am meeting people, I am listening to people, and I, I'm sharing my story while learning theirs. It's awesome.
And it's all relationship-based, more so than just any transactional property purchase. It's not just about the money. You get to build skills, you get to build relationships, new friendships. Business potential partnerships. We learned how to buy a 15-plex, zero money down, on the water from someone. And then later on in that transaction, they ended up selling us 3 duplexes. And so we got to learn how they built their portfolio. And as we progressed with that friendship, they ended up selling us stuff. But it wasn't about that in the beginning. It was solely about How do we add value to them? And one trick that we learned for adding value to people that have made it financially is if you think about it almost like the grandparent or the parent, eventually they get to a point where they have more money than they have life. If they're lucky and they were able to put away money. And so there's no amount of monetary value you can add to them anymore. But the value you can add, especially if you're a younger investor, whether it's younger in age or younger in experience, is apply the things that they share with you. They want to see you apply what they're trying to teach you. So if you learn how they did it, what they did, and go apply it, then they're gonna feel a little bit of gratification for that, and you're gonna be making that beneficial exchange as a friend and a potential business partner to them.
Now, another reason you look at quality versus quantity— when you have a quality relationship You gain trust. When you gain trust with someone, you can do deals that no one else can do. Someone who was just cold calling, the people who sold us the duplexes, they could have— if they asked for one of them, they probably would have sold one of them. And they would probably ask for 20-30% down, seller finance. You could go to a bank and do it 25% down. We're able to do these very, very low down, very creatively because they want to sell specifically to us. They know us, they know our goals. We know our missions are aligned. We have now better opportunities. I equate this to eating food. You can have a massive plate of nasty, nasty soggy fries, or you can just get a quality burger. I would rather eat a quality meal than eat a pile of crap. Don't go out— that might sound harsh because I know a lot of people are just like, I need to hammer, hammer, hammer deals, deals, deals. If I'm not asking for a sale, I'm not going to put food on the table. Eat quality food. Do better deals. And you're going to do that through relationships with the right people. Have a quality conversation with another human being. Listen and care about what they're actually saying, and everything will open up to you. And everyone who we've talked to and we're doing business with— I know people who are very far on the either wholesaling or syndication. There's nothing wrong with those things, but people whose whole job is, I need to grind to live. There is a level above that. And those people all say the same thing. It is about relationships and doing business with people who they want to do business with.
So stay tuned until our next video. If you've watched it all the way to the end, comment below, let us know what you think about this. Most people won't get this far in the video. However, if you cultivate relationships first, you will get opportunities that other people can't get and can't imagine are real. So we'll see you guys next time, and if you haven't subscribed, um, we'll see you then.
