How To Confidently Write More Offers

Hello and welcome back to Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian Osgood, your channel host, right now signing the purchase and sale agreement for deal number 2 of the year, which is going to tie in right into our topic for the day, which is getting your offers accepted. So here we go into 2026. Oh my goodness, it's been a long day. I've taken 14 meetings, so if I say something crazy or a wrong number Uh, you guys are gonna have to forgive me, but you know what, it's live, it's okay. Uh, but welcome to Multifamily Strategy. I am so excited to break into today's topic. Now, in about 10 days— so to fill everyone in if you're just joining in for the first time this year, uh, we closed on a 144-unit apartment in Abilene, Texas on December 30th to round out last year. Now, on January 30th, right down the street, we are closing on Anson Park Senior. The capital is in, we are getting the final documents put together. We are going to be closing in just over a week on Anson Park Senior, which is an 81-unit. I'll have 225 rental units that I did not have in a town that I was previously not in. And I'm going to show you guys exactly how I get these things accepted. There's a key difference. I actually interviewed 50 of my students in Multifamily Strategy. We went through and tried to figure out what is the sticking point between people who've got offers accepted and people who have taken longer to get offers accepted. There is one key thing— there's actually two, but I'm going to focus on one of them today— that stands out from submitting offers that get accepted and offers that don't. And it's not what you would think. So I'm really excited to share this with you. It's such a simple thing, but this little difference is going to make a huge difference in each and every one of your deals. So as I go through, I'm going to continue signing this PSA for our new office building. So News from the field, 22,000 square feet. Now I'm only going to take 3,000 square feet of this actual building, but we are buying an office building 20 minutes from my house for multifamily strategy, for our PM company, for acquisitions, and for another project that I'll be announcing on this, this podcast soon. But we are officially at a size where we need more office space and larger office space. In addition to all these projects, we will have a podcast studio in office. You guys will see a brand new studio. Even cooler than the one, uh, right here upstairs in my house. So hit and finish. We are now officially, because the seller has already signed this, I am now— 3, 2, 1— I have signed. We are now officially under contract for the second deal of 2026. Let's go. Okay, so what is the difference? What is this secret method that I've been talking about on how to get more deals done and get your offers actually accepted? Well, the biggest piece of feedback that I received is when we just can't find good deals online. Now, owner meetings are the best way to do this, but they take more time. And the relationship game— while many of your best deals will be relationship-based, those owner meetings do take time to start growing. How do we keep buying on-market deals? Let me share a little bit about the deal that I went under contract for, uh, like 25 seconds ago. This office was listed for sale for $4.95 million, basically $5 million, just south of me. Now, The rents in some of the units are a little bit low. There's a large vacancy that of exactly the amount of size that I'm looking for for my company. So I have a solution for that one. But the building based on this financials is worth $4.1 million after I lease the building. To me, you could probably justify a price of about $4.4 million at the maximum. They listed a little bit high. What too many people are getting stuck on is they go, well, the seller wants this price. There is only one time that price matters, and you actually, surprisingly, it's when you have creative finance. In creative finance, you usually have to say yes to their price to get your terms. More often than not, you're trying to give a seller everything that they want. But in bank financing, the only thing that you really can negotiate is the price of the deal. Now, in this office thing, yes, I can manipulate the net operating income by putting my own companies in the building. So I do have a competitive advantage in this particular offer, but only for 15% of the building. I need to come in and do my own underwriting. The price does not come into play. Also, people are not calling on deals that are online and the price unlisted or undisclosed price. Who the heck cares? Underwrite the deal where it works. Get the financials you can, put together the deal. What do you want to pay for it? You need to get the basic fundamentals down so you can underwrite a deal without a base price. What people get stuck in is this stupid concept of Is it a good deal or a bad deal? Do you think this deal looks good? One of my least favorite emails that I get is when people email me a copy of a deal and they're like, hey, what do you think about this deal? And it's just a listing. I don't think anything about the deal. All I see on a listed property is an indication that a seller is willing to sell. We don't know what the negotiation is going to be. I don't know what the floor is on their price. Here's how it worked for our office deal. He wanted $4.95 million. I wanted $4.1 million. I submitted my offer. He countered with 4.4. I reached out to my lender and said, what are your thoughts at 4.4? I don't think we're going to get a very high loan-to-value unless I'm wrong. Lender got back and said, uh, no, you won't. We're looking at 55% loan-to-value. Still doesn't work for me there. Not interested. I got back to him. Hey, sorry, I'm not against negotiation, but the offer I sent you is the best that I can do. 4.1 is where I'm at. I'm happy to wait on it. Um, if you have any ideas, let me know. They got back to me same day. Okay, 4.1 is fine. That was the entire negotiation. I underwrote where it worked for me. I offered where it worked for me. They countered with what they wanted. I let them know, no, this is where it works for me. And like that, first try, under contract for an office. That took me from the time I decided I was going to buy an office, which was Christmas, December 25th of 2025, I started looking on January 1st. We are now under contract on January 21st. So in 3 weeks, I have looked through office deals, walked multiple offices. I submitted exactly one offer, and guess what? It's accepted exactly where I want it. Am I just amazing at negotiating? Abso-freaking-lutely not. I over-talk like crazy. I am not a master contract negotiator. I know how to write. And so in this video, I'm gonna actually share with you all screen share. I'm gonna share with you a tool that is completely free to you that you can just download. And this is how I do these really rapidly. So let me go into screen share mode here and let's make this happen. Entire screen share. All right. So what you should be seeing is the school community for Multifamily Strategy. Now, Multifamily Strategy community is completely free to join. As many of you know, my mission statement is that I want to kill every single real estate course out there. They don't need to exist. Information is free. It's already on the internet. Uh, now if you want direct mentorship, you can look into our mentorship program, but I don't sell information. Uh, it's completely free, which is included with our calculator. So if you were to go here right now and click the link and go into Multifamily Strategy, you can go to the classroom. You can join this community again for free. I have no ask for you. You don't need to buy anything. You just go right down to additional resources. This has our rapid analysis calculator and lo and behold, it has a video on how to use it, how to evaluate your deals. It's completely free. And if you click said video or said link, you actually go to a rapid analysis calculator. You can just plug in. I don't need the price. I plug in the details that we have. Or if you have the price, you can even beta test it in here. I'll show you how to do it. We're going to look at where's our deal day 1 and where is it when we finish our project. I'll literally show you how to do this as a sample property. So let's say there's a property. You don't know what it's priced. It's unlisted. It's a 12-plex. Let's start with the price of $1 million. Maybe it's worth $1 million. Maybe it's not. We'll determine as we go through our, our numbers here. Down payment, let's call it 25%. We'll stay with boring, simple bank financing. Nothing crazy, nothing all that interesting. Closing costs plus renovation. Let's go ahead and call these numbers. I'll say it's $50,000 to close. Loan interest rate. I'm actually getting in the high fives right now, but let's say it's an industry standard of 6.5 today. We're investing in a market with a cap rate of 7. Now we have some financials on the property. It may not be complete, but on our hypothetical deal, we don't actually have a price. We're doing a sample number here of $1 million just to see where the deal falls out. Property taxes, we're going to say, are $25,000 a year. Insurance will be $20,000 a year. Management fee will be 6%. Let's say that we're renting at $1,000 per month, so $1,200. Uh, there we go. $12,000 per month in total income, which will fill out our expenses here. Maintenance and repair. I like to allocate, if I don't have hard numbers, at $100 per door per month. This accounts for when your ovens go out or the one AC unit goes out. Uh, most months you don't have anything. Some months you have some big expenses. So let's just call it $1,200. I think this is very realistic. Landscape for our theoretical property will be $150 a month. Small bit of land and our utilities partially billed back to tenants. We have some common areas, so we'll call it $150 a month, uh, for our hypothetical deal. These are our numbers that we know and some made-up numbers. Now we can change our amortization in this calculator if we think we're going to get a different debt product, but let's stick with the standard 30-year debt product. Lo and behold, We can go to the analysis tab. This deal cash flows theoretically a mighty 2.76%. I would not offer $1 million for that income stream with these expenses. I'm not going to spend $250,000 for less than $700 a month of cash flow. It's just not quite there day one. Now you can back into this by figuring out what DSCR banks want to lend at around 1.25 or higher. So I can keep manipulating this. We can either borrow cheaper money or lower the price to fix this, but I'm just not interested in this percent. I like to see my deals, if they're fairly stable, cash flow at least 8% day one with upside to improve them. So to get a DSCR above 1.25 and to get cash flow above 8%, let's just keep playing with the numbers. If you're negotiating price, take $100,000 off it. It's 10% cheaper. How does this affect my numbers? This simple guess and check, you can do this very, very quickly. Look at that. DSCR works. The deal's not quite where I want it to be, but we're much, much closer. I know that I'm going to be right around the number at $800,000 to $850,000. Let's say $850,000. Specifically, $850,000. Okay, we're at 6.55% cash flow, a solid debt service coverage ratio. If this deal had rental upside, let's say for example we can get these to $1,200 per unit, well, we can actually add quite a bit of income if we can increase the unit count— or the, sorry, the, uh, the actual, uh, rental rate. So You can come in and you can manipulate these numbers however you want. And so let's say we get partially there and we get this thing to $16 a month. Well, at this new cash flow, well, now we're cash flowing 20%. This could be our future value. If we have a path for me to get these numbers and I am buying on the day one numbers we were just looking at, $8.50 is a tremendous price. In fact, I'm okay with $9 again. This is a quick way to go through and rapidly analyze deals. We don't need to overanalyze everything. Does it cash flow? Can it service its own debt with margin? If we just have those two pieces, I know this deal is going to work. It definitely works at $850,000. I could call someone on an unlisted property today and say, hey, I took a look at the numbers you posted and I'm interested in this deal. The number that I'm at right now is $850,000. I'm not sure if that's worth submitting or not. But let me know your thoughts. I can write this up today. They'll go back to you. This is how you negotiate price, though. You just reach out and you ask some questions about the property. You get to know about the project. You fill out any pieces of the calculator you don't have yet, and you figure out where does this work for me. Notice we don't have a real price on this hypothetical deal. We just keep plugging in the number until the number works. Now, if they're locked in on price, your price is now the constant. We're back to— let's call it they want $1 million. Okay, well, it doesn't work here. Does it work if we have a debt product at, let's call it, 5%, and they'll do seller financing at— for 7 years, interest only? This is— this is— this— I've seen this get accepted. This is— this is something that is very doable. That's what I thought. Let me fix that. Okay, so in this scenario, at 5% interest only, we still have insanely good cash flow because our monthly principal payments are much lower. Now let's go back to the day one income so we can actually match this one-to-one. I'm guessing this is actually probably going to be a pretty good deal, or close to a good deal. Cash flow at 9.22%. Debt service coverage ratio is well in check. We have long-term cash-flowing fixed-rate debt. This is green lights all the way across the board. I can give them their million dollars if we can negotiate the debt product that I need to do this deal. It's that simple. In fact, there's room to borrow a little bit more money with this type of margin. So I might see if they'll accept $150,000 down. We'll borrow more money at a higher loan-to-value at a 15% down payment. Cash-on-cash return goes even higher with less money in the deal. This is how you structure deals. This took me all of what, 5 minutes to explain how to do? Their price didn't matter until we could get creative on the finance. So you underwrite based off the price. If the price is locked, underwrite based on the terms. On a high level, this is how you're going to negotiate and come up with a price on 99% of deals. So if you don't know how to do this, play around with this calculator. Again, it's completely free and it is available on Skool. So hop in there. Uh, there's a link in YouTube, by the way, if you're watching this on YouTube right now, you can actually just scroll down, click our Skool community, join, or just go to skool.com and type in multifamily strategy community. So I hope that helps. That I have found, if you just do those steps and nothing else, you'll start writing some offers and you'll start actually negotiating deals. Again, without me being any sort of wizard— sorry, I almost lost my laptop there— without me being any sort of magical wizard of negotiating, I can come in and ask for what I need and get my offers accepted. And if you can get your offers accepted consistently, you can make a lot of money in real estate and you'll knock out a lot of deals. If your goal this year is to buy your first, second, third, or fourth deal, like if you're trying to stack a deal a quarter, a deal a year, a deal every other, you know, however you want to stack your pacing, these are the steps that I take. It took me a— shopping-wise, it took me about an hour on LoopNet to really narrow down which offices are listed that I'm interested in. It took the brokers 2 hours to get back to me. So when I made my calls, I had to wait a little while. It's the downside of still having a 425 area code, Seattle, while you're in Dallas, is most people ignore your call and they get back to you. They get back to me. I give them a— we talk about the deal. I give them a price. They kick it back. I went and toured the office. I could not be more excited for this office space. And we can so comfortably afford the space for my companies. I have 3, 4 companies. Sharing a little office space. The rest of the building pays for itself. It's a great model. It's super simple. It's the same way we negotiated for the, uh, 81-unit 55-plus, so senior living community that we're buying in Abilene, Texas. Not assisted living, just senior living. 100% occupied, over a 40-person waitlist to get into this property. Absolutely stable. We're buying it for $4.15 million. If you're doing the math going like, wait a second, you guys are paying Like $50,000, $55,000 a door for really nice 2006-built buildings with an office in Abilene, Texas? Yes. How? Same process. Even better, that amazing price is also seller finance with interest-only debt. How do we get it? We asked. It's what it comes down to. Do not focus on the price. And just freaking ask. Talk to the broker, talk to the owner. Once you get to a 50% chance where you believe they might accept your offer, that's where you write the offer. 2, 3, 4 offers a month at a 50% chance. Flip a coin over a 2-month period, over a 60-day period, flip a coin 8 times. Statistically, almost every time you'll get heads at least once. Follow this same logic you will go under contract at least once. This is a simple, easy flow. You do not have to grind it out in real estate to do this, but this is how you get offers accepted. And this is how you analyze deals really, really quickly. Um, now I just realized as I was doing this, I did this in my actual base set of the calculator. So if you log into my calculator right now today, it probably has my numbers in. I'll go ahead and clear that out. If you want to use it and you're realizing it's locked, just create a copy of it. So save it as a copy, use it freely. That's my gift to you. Thank you for watching. All right, let's answer some of the questions from the chat here. When acquiring a 24-unit apartment community, as I mentioned, or on Monday or Tuesday's call, near Charlotte, not in Charlotte, but drivable. Awesome location, by the way. Great market, has been for an extended period of time. Economy expenses, the highest priority, with 22 leases is economy of expenses. I'm actually, as I'm reading this, not 100% sure how to read that. Um, I will give you the highest priority though. Um, as far as economic variables, I am looking at overall population growth and job stability. So I don't want to invest in a small town in the middle of nowhere, which this is clearly not. Um, I'm just looking for great areas with lots of consistent growth, job stability, not one employer driving the entire growth of the region. You're near Charlotte, it's growing market, has been for a long time. Uh, that's the main thing I'm looking for. Now this, uh, 2 units are vacant being renovated, 22 units leased. I think that's fantastic. Um, I'm always fine doing some rental, and most of the buildings I do have some amount of renovation needed. It's not always a heavy value add, but we've turned— since we bought the 76-unit middle of last year, we've turned about 25% of the units. We had some tenants who just weren't a good fit for what we're trying to do. We were able to cycle some people through and around in the properties. Some people— we had a few evictions. If you guys saw my YouTube video from yesterday, one of them was the nastiest eviction we've had yet. Just poo just stained into the walls. It was It was unbelievably bad. Um, it was a full CPS investigation. It was rough. Uh, but as we come into some of these, yeah, we'll have some unit turns. Uh, they don't have to be a perfect building. 22 units vacant, being renovated, 22 units leased. That sounds like a really great starting point. So, okay. Oh, I understand this question. So thank you for rephrasing that. So the question is, do you try to keep expenses low while the units are, uh, leased or getting lower rents? No, my My priority is to rip through the project as soon as humanly possible. So on a couple of units renovation and a little bit to lease, my, my primary priority is like, let's just do it all at once. Start the leasing process, start renovating the units. You're sitting at, you know, roughly you're 10% vacant. You're not in a bad spot. Where you want to end up with your project is 95, 95. 95% of today's market rate and 95% occupancy averaged throughout the year. That's a fully stabilized apartment. That's all you're trying to do is stabilize. So if you have a long way to go on rents, start the rent increases now. If it's little increases, you can do those incrementally over time. So it's going to be a little bit project specific, but I'm not really worried as much about keeping costs low on a 22-unit. I'm worried about how fast can I get through the project. Can I get it to where it needs to be so that I can focus my attention on other projects while delivering an excellent product to my existing tenants and future tenants. I hope that helps. I'll dive back into some other questions too, as I see they're continuing to accrue. How do you explain carried interest and sweat equity to justify those two things and why you get equity in a deal? I understand if a potential investor doesn't understand. So I get equity in a deal because it's my deal. I'm under contract for the deal. That's the simple, that's the simple answer. If you're trying to raise before a deal, it's really tough to explain. You haven't done anything yet. You're just planning on doing something. And so the goals and the objectives are a little bit more murky. As you get into, hey, I've structured a deal, we're under contract. Well, now it's my deal. So why do I get equity? Because I control the deal. I've landed the debt product. I've put together the team. I'm going to be a— and then you can talk about the sweat equity. I'm going to also be an operator in the deal, but ultimately I crafted the opportunity and I control whether I let you into the deal or not. So if you would like to join me on this deal, this is what returns are going to look like for you. In the case of the 144-unit that we just closed, as an investor in this deal, I am going to own the GP. So that's actually me and Caleb. GPs own 30% of the deal, 70% is up for investors. That's the structure of that particular deal. Now, as an investor, you get a 6% preferred return. So the first 6% of cash flow goes directly to you, the investor. Deal's cash flowing about 10% cash on cash day one, and everything above 6%, we split 70/30 with the investors, which means you get 70% of the other 4% added to your 6%. You're cash flowing over 8.5% on a deal day one. There's no wait period, instant distributions, monthly distributions, and our plan is to double the equity. So if you put in $100,000, we anticipate at year 5 we'll pay you out $200,000 in addition to all of that cash flow that you got. Better yet, that cash flow grows every single year as our rental increase— our rental caps increase. I dictate the terms. If you want to be in on that deal and that sounds interesting to you, my equity is my equity. That's the deal package. It just is what it is. I use this example way too much, almost every live, but it's like, again, like buying a car. Do you want a Ferrari? Cool. Are you buying a Ferrari? Maybe. Yes. No. Depends on what you're going for, but you're going for the car that you're going to buy. I go in for a truck. Does it have everything I want? No, but it has most of the pieces. I have the truck that I have. It just is the vehicle that it is. Uh, so I don't worry too much about justifying the sweat equity. I never justify anything. Um, I offer a deal and people can accept or decline the offer. I just try to make the offer sweet enough where a lot of people want to say yes. I hope that helps. And then your returns are always going to be a blend of debt and— or sorry, of cash flow and of equity growth. So in that case, I have a 2x multiple and we're doing a preferred return of 6% with a 70/30 split of of that. Like, that's our, that's our full investment package. Uh, if your equity multiples are 1.7, you're probably offering something pretty similar. You're probably doing, uh, I'm gonna say an 8% preferred return would be a really great place to be for investors. And then a 1.7 equity multiple, I'm looking at that as an investor being like, okay, so I put in $100,000, you're gonna give me $70,000 at the end of this. I'm assuming it's maybe a 5-year hold. If it's less than 5 years, that equity multiple gets a lot sweeter., but let's say it's 5 years. Year 5, I give you 100, you give me 170 back. And throughout the life of the deal, I have a preferred return of 8%, and then we have some custom split of cash flow above that. I have decent cash flow. I got pretty strong cash flow. I'm getting an equity multiple in the deal. I love that deal as an investor. You're going to get a ton of people saying yes to that. That's a great return. Uh, back to Dave's— he could improve the unit, raise the rents to cycle through the, uh, higher rent payers. Um, what I typically do— I— so it depends on how you want to do your project. The, the short answer is, if you can't afford to rock the boat, don't. If you can't afford to get wet, don't rock the boat. That's the, the short answer. Um, if you can't afford to have a bunch of move-outs when you do the rent increases, don't do them yet. Uh, if you can, I like to put enough money in the account so I can just go ahead and at one time contractors are in there turning the units. We issue the rent raise if it's just something that has to happen. Rental increase goes, some tenants accept it, some tenants move out. Oh, I already have a reno crew on site doing work. I add more units to that renovation. We rip it out and go on the 144-unit. That's literally what we're doing right now. We came in, we're renovating. We had 3 vacancies out of 144 units. Amazing occupancy. We have some delinquencies. We're starting the eviction process on the few delinquencies. We're going to have a couple move-outs. Happens every time you buy a new building. Crews are already there. They're already familiar with the floor plan. We're going to add a few more units to it. We're going to keep ripping. We're going to lease those up at market rate, and as soon as we're leased up, we'll go through and we'll do whatever rental increases we need to do. It will depend on your project a little bit as you go from project to project. What are common mistakes you see in underwriting? Um, number one, I'll give you the number one by far, hands down. People take the existing tax that the owner is paying and they put that into their calculator. That is not the same property tax that you are going to pay. Property tax will reassess after the close. It is based on a percentage of your sale price, or purchase price in your case. All you have to do— I used to— there's a way that you can actually go into Zillow, look at their numbers data, and pull the exact multiple. Uh, now ChatGPT will do it for you. Just say, I'm buying a property at this price, this many units, in this area, at this address. What do we anticipate property tax will reassess to when it gets reassessed? Use that number. It's a great number. ChatGPT calculates it fantastically. Um, there's other ways to research it, but it will pull the right number. I've never seen a instance where it hasn't. So you can run in ChatGPT, it's going to be a specific multiple, and it is averaged and advertised for every single market around the country. That is the most important thing that I see people miss in their underwriting, is they have taxes too low, and then they are shocked when taxes go up to almost double what they put because they had some owner who's owned it for 30 years and they traded the property, they get reassessed, and they're like, oh my goodness. Fortunately, this exact same thing happened to Phil. He has a deal that's really high cash flow. I've had him on the YouTube channel before. He's one of the mentees in the mentorship program. He came through his first deal. He is cash flowing $6,000 a month. His taxes went up almost $12,000. $1,000 a month of cash flow gone. If you did a tight margin deal, that could have killed your deal. Fortunately, he was cash flowing so much, it's like, oh no, he only makes $60,000 more a year. He was able to survive it because he did a good deal and he did good underwriting. He anticipated this could happen. If you're not expecting it, that could be a deal killer. And yes, the second part of this, your dividend has to be higher than your cost. Yes, your dividend— this isn't quite right. So your dividend is not cap rate unless you bought the deal 100% in cash. If you bought a deal in cash, then your actual cash-on-cash return is exactly equal to your cap rate. If you're using leverage, you're going to factor this— I will not go into a whole lesson on this because it'll blow too many minds, but your cost of capital is called your loan factor rate. It is your cost of the money that you borrow and the returns that that yields compared to the cap rate. So your cap rate is the cash on cash, which means your down payment makes exactly whatever you put down. So in our hypothetical example from earlier, the $250,000 we put down, that will make exactly what the cap rate of the deal makes. The money we borrow will be a loan factor rate. It is a factor of our actual— it's our cost of debt. And so when I'm looking at our cost of debt, that is our principal plus interest divided by the loan amount. That's how much it costs for every dollar we borrow The difference between that and the cap rate is our spread that we make on every dollar borrowed. If that number's positive, like it was in our calculator, the more we borrow, the higher leverage, the higher our cash-on-cash return. If you were listening to this and you're like, I did not follow that at all, I cover this all the time in the mentorship. It is a complicated thing. It only really matters if you get to name your own interest rate and create a finance. Would you recommend to wholesale commercial properties in California? Do you have any members doing it there? Wholesaling, I do not, because we rarely wholesale unless we wholesale it to ourselves, which is a very common method that we love to do. I put it under contract in my name and/or signs as my office is, and as the 81-unit that I'm closing right now is. When we close, I assign it to an LLC with a few partners, so I retain equity in the deal. But if I'm bringing in partners, I give them a piece of the equity as well since we're assigning it to a new LLC and I did all the work and I created the opportunity and I've done the due diligence and I was there at the inspection and I'm going to help manage the property and the whole laundry list of reasons why I should be paid for all of my work. Um, as part of the thing, I get an assignment fee to wholesale it to the LLC, which I happen to be the managing member of. Everyone agrees on this, everyone signs off on it, it shows up on your final settlement statement, so you're not pulling a fast one on your investors. Uh, but I got paid $220,000 $25,000 last year from assigning deals, uh, from myself to LLCs that I also am an owner of. It's a great method. I would do that— own it and get paid. I wouldn't do and/or. I do have a lot of mentees out of California. Some invest out of state. Uh, Mark Hobshide just closed a 28-unit in San Diego. Awesome building, up-and-coming area of San Diego. I think he's going to knock this deal way out of the park, way out of the park. Um, but yeah, we absolutely— just the first one that comes to mind, we have active members in every state. We even saw deals close in the Dakotas last year. We finally filled out the multifamily property, uh, multifamily strategy property map. Uh, we've hit every single state. We were waiting on the Dakotas, it finally happened. Same person bought one in North Dakota, one in South Dakota. Uh, all 50 states we have investors who are buying deals. Officially it's all closed. 24 units similar sizes nearby are renting at higher rents than the ones we are acquiring and are likely nicer and have more amenities. Question: keep the expenses lower? Oh, I actually like this. So if they have more amenities— so this is great— if your competition has more amenities and higher pricing, you can fill your building really fast by having lower pricing and a little bit less amenities. The only time you really struggle to compete is if you're offering the exact same product at the exact same price that's on market, because now you're oversaturating the market for the exact same product. So there's two ways to offset this. My favorite one, make a very nice space. And we call this functional flipping. Make a really nice space without breaking the bank. There's going to be some amenities that I might just not add and a lower rent, and it will be the right place for different people. And so I won't spend all the CapEx. I have less invested. And so I'll actually hit a higher cash-on-cash return with lower rents. So instead of maximizing rents, I'm optimizing the property for what the market needs. Now, if you don't need lower income properties, if you don't need, uh, you know, or if you are trying to set yourself apart on the other end of the spectrum, how do you offer more amenities at the same price point as your competition? So now I would look at the same deal and say, okay, what amenities do they have? What is the standard? Let's renovate to that first. I don't want to have anything crazy different. And then what features can we add that would set us apart? If I find all my competition has nice new countertops, stainless steel appliances, uh, nice LVP click-together floors, it just looks really cohesive, cool, I'll renovate to that. What can I do different in my unit that's Class B that has great tenants I'm going to be the one in that market with stone countertops, and those countertops are going to set me apart for that unit mix. If you visit my place, it's that much nicer, it's that much cleaner. You're like, oh, I like this place, the kitchen just feels nicer, can't put my finger on it. Well, it's about differentiation. You can, you can come in and you can be— and this tends to be where I'm at, just honestly, I like being I was gonna say the Walmart, but we're such— we're such a higher quality. I like being the Buc-ee's. That's what I like being. I like being the Buc-ee's of, uh, of multifamily. It's not the highest cost, it's not for everyone, it's not hyper-premium, but it's a really great experience and you get so much more than you expect. That business model, you go in, you're like, this is technically a convenience store, but it's insane. I like being that. I'm not trying to be Target. I want to be Bucky's. I want to cater to a large amount of people. I don't want to be the most expensive. I do want to have the highest dollar per perceived value. And that's how you set yourself apart. If you copy what everyone else is doing, I think that's where you get the hardest, uh, that's where it's the most headwinds. You have to be the same price and nicer, or you have to be lower priced and still nicer than what they're paying for. And if you can hit that, you're in the money. Also, no, you can totally do the Dakotas. They cash flow like crazy. There's just not a ton of humans up there. So, uh, when, you know, if you compare the opportunities to invest in South Dakota to the opportunities to invest in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, you just have a ton more properties. There's just a lot of averages. There are less real estate investors overall investing in the Dakotas, and there aren't a lot of different markets. Dakotas historically actually are fairly high cash flow markets. You can actually do very well in them. Where do you include the assignment fee or the acquisition fee? Is it the operating agreement? Okay, so, um, an assignment fee is for a syndication. 95% of the time syndication is not the model. I've done a few. Most of my things are JV. And the reason that they're mostly joint ventures, because it is a cleaner, easier, less expensive, uh, lower liability contract, not regulated by the SEC. There's a whole bunch of reasons why JVs are superior to syndications. Now, if you're doing a large capital raise and you have more than 5 active members, you start to have to syndicate. You're actually creating a security. It's a passive investment, you need to file this with the SEC. It's just the law, how it works. So an assignment fee would go in your PPM in a syndication, a private placement memorandum, and would also show up in the operating agreement. Your investors would be signing multiple places showing, yep, this is the fee structure. It's really the PPM they're looking for, private placement memorandum. Um, we're all signing off on all the fees, and that's the management fees, the acquisition fees, disposition fees, the fee fees. You don't actually— I don't put any extraneous fees in mine, but if you go through, some of these things have a crazy amount of fees on them. On an assignment, it's the same thing as a wholesale. It is a real estate addenda to your purchase and sale agreement. So it's not in the operating agreement, it's just an addenda where there is a fee. This is submitted to title. It says, hey, I am transferring from Christian Osgood and/or assigns to 123 Main Street LLC. The assignment fee shall be— so for this consideration, we are transferring this contract from Christian into this LLC. So that'd be done as an addenda to the purchase and sale agreement, as an addenda to the PSA. It's sent to title, it shows up on your final settlement statement, but it doesn't show up anywhere in the operating agreement. Good question. I don't think everyone's actually asked me that, amazingly, and 5 years doing this, not a single person. Uh, checking the old Instagram here, see what we may find as far as questions. I'll make sure I haven't missed any there. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. That doesn't look right. All right guys, well, we have, uh, we have done it. Uh, if you are interested in this, you guys want to learn more about how to get into the creative real estate, uh, I'm running it again. We had the maximum— we actually maxed out our Zoom license last week for people on the creative finance webinar. So I'm going to run it again this week. I was going to take some time off on it, but I'm going to go live again from this room here at the top of the hour. So here in about 20 minutes, you can register below on YouTube. It's the— what is it? Multifamilystrategy.com/workshop. But you can actually click the link below, register there. And we're actually going to be going over not just creative finance. That's a piece of it. It's how I got started, but creative real estate. You can buy deals zero down with a bank. You can get paid to buy them. Like I just shared with the assignment fees. I'm going to go over more of that structure there as well. I'll do that on the backend. I'm going to spend about 90 minutes going through how you with or without money can get in totally for free, by the way, you can just register for it. How you with or without money can buy unlimited amounts of real estate. Literally just copy my strategy, but this is the entire creativity module. In 90 minutes or less. So would love to see you guys there. I'll be starting that again in about 20 minutes. And, uh, yeah, other than that, guys, make this a huge year. Write those offers. If you do nothing else, then talk to a few brokers and owners with the active deals in your market, and you stop worrying about the price, or is it a good deal or a bad deal. You just focus on at what price does this deal work, or at what terms does this deal work for me. You will write more offers. Use that free calculator that provided here. It's on the school community. You guys are more than welcome to go there. Use those resources, apply the knowledge. If you are taking that 50/50 shot, writing 2, 3, 4 offers a month— we're not shotgunning them out, we're just writing them where they work— you will go under contract for deals this year. You will buy real estate this year. Factually, law of averages, it's going to happen. Hope this was super helpful. Write those offers. I'll see you guys on the next episode.