In this Whiteboard Wednesday episode, Christian Osgood and Cody of Multifamily Strategy answer five viewer questions and announce a shift to live Q&A sessions. They discuss how partners can obtain a joint mortgage by forming an LLC and demonstrating collective net‑worth, emphasizing that the group’s financial backing is the key metric for lenders. The hosts stress that aspiring investors should focus on two core questions—how to buy a property and how to never lose it—rather than getting bogged down in detailed margins. They outline a simple financing hierarchy: secure debt (bank loan, seller financing, or unconventional financing up to 90% LTV), then add equity, and finally evaluate cash flow (income – expenses). They point viewers to a detailed cash‑flow math video but reiterate that cash flow positivity is the primary metric. For outreach, they advocate relationship‑based phone calls aimed at setting up in‑person meetings, treating the call as a networking effort rather than a sales pitch. When county assessor websites lack owner information, they advise either paying for data or shifting focus to counties with more accessible records. A case study of a recently acquired 10‑plex illustrates seller financing (80% seller‑financed) and the use of existing assets as down‑payment, highlighting the “base‑hit” mindset—favoring steady, cash‑flowing deals over rare “home runs.” Finally, they share strategies for investing in very small towns (populations under 10,000), stressing direct outreach to local owners, building relationships, and leveraging personal connections to uncover hidden multifamily opportunities. The episode ends with a teaser for future live streams.
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Hello YouTube and welcome back. It's Cody and Christian, Multifamily Strategy. This week we have 5 more questions for Whiteboard Wednesday and special announcement, we're gonna be doing these live moving forward. YouTube told us today that we have to wait 24 hours before we do that, so next week Wednesday, 3 o'clock Pacific time, we're gonna answer 5 questions and we're gonna go live. You can ask more questions in the chat live there. Cody, what are we starting with this week?
Question number 1 from Still Boomin'. Looking to grow my portfolio with a wife. My partners and I are going to pool funds together, and we're curious, can you get a joint mortgage together with other people?
Well, you absolutely can. Um, if you're doing a partnership with different couples, what you'll probably want to do is you'll form an LLC. You'll have an entity that lays out who's doing what, what everyone's roles are, contribution is. And ultimately, what you're going to look at on a larger property is you're probably going to be based and limited by your net worth. They'll want to know that you as a group have the net worth to back the loan. So it's a little bit different than residential. However, absolutely 100%, that is something you can do, and that's something we've done. Next question here, this is from Devin. You kids are great, but this is not how to buy rental properties quickly. Oh, this could be fun.
In reference, we're talking about our video on application versus information.
This is your own story sales pitch on committing. I've committed. I need to know how to buy rentals quickly. LOL. Watched 4 videos and all you've really talked about is making connections with people. Great, then what? Finances, percentages, margins, what type of lending? So many questions.
Yeah, so everyone goes out and they're focused on all the little minor details. That is not the thing to focus on. You shouldn't be focusing on, okay, what are the margins? Where's the financing come from? That's not the most important deal for buying a piece of real estate. There's only two questions when buying real estate. We've shared this before. How do you buy it? How do you never lose it? Well, how do you buy it? You need to get the debt because if you can't get debt, you don't need equity and then you don't even have a deal. So once you go out there, we do seller financing and we do that by making connections with people that are in the space. If you want to go use a bank loan, well then you can go get a bank loan and they're going to fund, you know, maybe up to 80%. Or if you go less conventional, maybe up to 90%, and then you're going to have to come up with the other 10. And you can do that as a form of a loan or equity, but don't overcomplicate it. Keep it simple. How do you buy it? How do you never lose it? You find the deal, then you find the debt, and then you find the equity.
And this is something that everyone wants to do. People want to complicate the deal. Do you need to know how to do the basic real estate math? Absolutely. And we have a video that's about an hour long on exactly how to do the math.
And if you don't want to watch that hour, income less expenses equals cash flow.
Super easy. Not that hard. Buy on cash flow. You can't go wrong. Learn. But the point of our— basically the point of our whole channel is you need to apply knowledge. Go learn it, but don't worry about the margin and the percentages and the—
stop gathering a whole bunch of info and just take a little bit of info and go do it. So our next question from Peter: I don't like calling people on the phone because I don't want to sound like a telemarketer. How do we go around that?
Well, first of all, no one wants to be a telemarketer. Telemarketers don't want to be telemarketers. It's not fun to call people to sell someone on something. Good news, relationship-based selling. You're just calling for a relationship. It's not a sales pitch and you're not going to be transactional. If it starts to feel transactional, it means you're doing something wrong or you want something from the other party. What you want to do is you want to get an in-person meeting, you want to start that relationship, and you want to learn. That simple. Your goal is to buy them coffee, period. So if it's feeling salesy, it's feeling telemarkety, just take a little bit more practice at it. It will become natural, and then it becomes fun. You're hoping to find a new friend, a new relationship. You're going to move them forward, they're going to move you forward.
Back to the application being more important than the info. Stop trying to study new info, just go out and do it. You'll get better at it over time.
Your first call, by the way, will be uncomfortable.
Then our next question from Smiley Face.
From Smiley Face, I'm on the Los Angeles County Assessor website, but nothing seems to show up under the owner's information. This is in response to our video, How to Contact Any Owner on Any Property.
All right, so not all counties are free. Some counties you gotta pay, it's pay to play. Some counties are just really hard to find information. If you don't wanna pay for the information and it's not readily accessible, well, it may make sense to start looking at a different county. There's not always just a clear answer for going out and finding everybody's info. The majority of everybody is free, and if you can find out what city they live in and you can find their full name, then yes, you can find anybody's phone number. But it, it's sometimes hard to find out where they live because county assessor websites don't give you that information. Certain counties are like that, and so if you just find a ton of difficulty, move to a different county when you're looking for investments. And then our last question, again from Peter: How did you fund/finance the 10-plex?
Ah, the one that we just picked up? Yes. So on the 10-plex, that was a seller finance transaction. This was actually really fun. We talk about application being more important than the information. Another thing that I say often on this channel is it's okay to get base hits. Not every deal needs to be a home run. People who wait for those tend to do very few albeit very good deals, but you go slowly. If you want to move quickly, you have an opportunity, that opportunity cash flows, you move forward. We did a base hit. We bought a little triplex, teeniest building we own. I mean, they're really, really small units. Excellent location, but a tiny triplex. A broker called us while we were in Texas. Cody spoke at an event called DealMaker Live. In that phone call, they brought up a 10-plex on Division Street. Now, that's not a place that we own yet. We knew the 10-plex. Cody actually knew the owner. And Cody, I'll let you take it from here.
Yeah, I knew of the owner. I've talked with them in the past. And so Christian was on the phone. I was like, just say his name. And he said it. He's like, oh my goodness, how the heck did you know that this was their 10-plex? I was like, well, we know the people. And it's good to know those folks. But when it comes out actually financing it, the fact that we knew the property, we knew the owner, instilled enough confidence to where we got a seller-financed opportunity. So when you're talking about financing, we had the seller finance 80% of the purchase, and Christian and I own some real estate today. The more pieces you have on the board, the easier it gets to go expand. We borrowed money against another asset, and that ended up being our down payment. So we got into this deal with nothing but a signature, and that is my signature move. We have one more question. I lied, we have a bonus question from MD. All right, small town America and beating the heat.
Yeah. So how do you find the right sellers and buyers in your market? I live in a small town where there's not much activity. Well, good news. We are small town investors.
Moses Lake, Quincy, and eventually, eventually Soap Lake. Soap Lake has maybe 2,000 people. I don't know how small you're looking, but my very first town had 7,600 people. Not exactly those main downtown metros. It's not super big. Not any of the real estate meetups that you can go to in the Seattle or Tacoma areas or downtown LA, they don't have that there. Turns out there's still apartment complexes, be it not as many, there are still apartments and people own those apartments. So the way that I ran that when I was first getting started is I called them up, learned how they got to where they're at. And we're doing that right now with a family over there who owns over 100 rentals in cash. And we're trying to buy those. So just came down to, hey, gotta call them up. They own real estate just like people in big cities, but we got to go connect with them, meet with them in person, go apply the skills that we've applied and just learned, go out there and learn how they got to where they're at so that we can improve upon the skills.
