In this instructional video Christian Osgood shares the negotiation playbook he has refined over 30+ multifamily deals. He argues that most investors lose hundreds of thousands—or even millions—by mishandling the negotiation phase, and he outlines a concrete five‑step process to capture value: (1) Map the deal by aligning seller and buyer priorities in a Venn diagram to locate the sweet‑spot; (2) Let the seller anchor the price and avoid offering first, then counter modestly; (3) Ask for exactly the terms you need—price, financing, or creative structures—without compromising to the seller’s initial ask; (4) Get the agreement in writing immediately via a Letter of Intent or Purchase & Sale Agreement; (5) Prove your assumptions and only renegotiate when a material issue is uncovered. Osgood also warns against two high‑cost mistakes: offering multiple options up front (which cedes control) and volunteering unnecessary financial details (e.g., down‑payment expectations) that empower the seller. He illustrates each point with real‑world cases—a multifamily office purchase where hidden expenses forced a renegotiation, a duplex where missing appliances were non‑material, and the Robinhood Village Resort where revealing a $1 M capital raise led to an inflated down‑payment demand. Finally, he presents an advanced, post‑contract “multiple‑option” tactic for genuine material changes, showing how to frame a 1‑2‑3 choice set to steer the seller toward the desired outcome while preserving leverage. The video concludes by urging investors to internalize the five steps, avoid the two pitfalls, and apply the advanced option technique only during due‑diligence renegotiations.
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You know what's worse than never buying a property? Losing money in the negotiation. I see hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars lost in the negotiation phase, and it's actually simpler than a lot of people think. After 30-some-odd deals and hundreds and hundreds of multifamily units, I have some perspective on exactly how to win your negotiations and more importantly, what you should avoid when negotiating. Now, a lot of these I've personally been hammered on, so I've made a lot of the mistakes for you. I've also done a few things right that I'm gonna share here, but I'm gonna break this into 5 tangible steps and 2 things that you need to avoid. So let's head over to the whiteboard and check it out. When you are entering negotiation, there are 5 steps that you need to follow. If you follow these simple steps, you're gonna get a lot more deals accepted at the terms you want. Now, if you do this correctly, this can actually make you hundreds thousands, if not millions of dollars when you win the negotiation phase. First and foremost, we want to make sure that we map the deal first. Don't just write an offer before you've identified what the seller actually wants and what you actually need. This is easy to do in a Venn diagram, so you're gonna go ahead and put together a list of what you need and what the seller needs. Where those two intersect, this area here, that is the sweet spot. That is where you have the deal. That is what you negotiate negotiate. Rule number 2, they give the price. When you are buying a property and they are willing to sell it, you need to figure out what they want. This ties right into number 1. You need to make sure that they drop price first. If you anchor incorrectly, they're going to just accept it. It's too often I see people be like, hey, I'll offer $1.5 million for this. So I was like, yep, that works. The only thing you know when they accept with no pushback is that you could have offered less. They might have accepted $1.2 million. You just lost $300,000 immediately. Always, always, always, always, always let the other party anchor with price. If they are playing the same game as you and it's going back and forth, just don't drop a price. You need to know what it is that they want to get through step 1 anyway, so make sure that they anchor the price. Now it is in your control to counter it or accept it. In most cases, you're going to counter by a little bit because we're going to assume the number that they give you is a little bit higher than what they would accept. Easy enough. Number 3, ask for exactly what you want. The worst they can say is no. If you underwrite the deal and you find it's worth unbelievably less than what they want, it's okay. Let them know, this is where I am at. If you need specific terms or creative finance, you're going into the seller finance, give them the exact seller finance terms that you need to make the deal work. It is okay if they counter and you can either negotiate back and forth with them or you can say, no, this is exactly what I need. But either way, you need to come in with a strong ask for exactly what it is that you want. Do not take into account the price that they wanted. Don't take into account the terms that they wanted. Your ask is what you want and what makes the deal work for you, especially if you're raising capital This is how you open up enough room to give a return to your investors. Know what you want and ask for it. 4, agree in writing. Once you finally get this done, as soon as possible, you want to get everyone to sign on the agreement before anyone has time to change their mind or to stew on it. Give it a day or so, but you need to have this in writing. This could be done in either a letter of intent where both parties sign, hey, this is what we agreed on and we like it. We're going to go ahead and draft the PSA, but let's get some documentation in place. Or if the deal is 100% ready to go, just write the purchase and sale agreement. Skip the letter of intent if it's a simple contract. The LOI is going to be preferred if there's some complicated steps or unique clauses you're adding. It's nice to make sure everyone agrees on those in writing prior to drafting the PSA so we have a template to go off of. And 5, prove your assumptions and only renegotiate as necessary. Once we get everything that we wanted, we go under contract. Now, I just had this happen with an office deal. We went under contract for $4.1 million. They had listed for $4.95 million. So on paper, we took $850,000 off of the deal. Great deal, right? Well, no. What we find out is that their expenses were $80,000 higher per year than they were actually listed for. And we had done a ton of verification of, hey, are these accurate expenses? Are there going to be any surprises? They're like, nope, this is exactly what we spend. I get 3 years of P&Ls. They have not spent anywhere close to the tiny amount that they sent us for the expenses. It's actually like way, way, way higher. They said it was $143,000. They're spending about $225,000 on operating, and that is your baseline, like taxes, insurance, HOA fees, utilities. Like the baseline, baseline expense load is unbelievably higher. That is a material need to renegotiate. Now, we're going to head back to the main studio, and I'm going to share some of the tools that I use to renegotiate. I'm actually going to share something that I use that I would never use in a negotiation, which is multiple options. But I'm going to share how you use that to reframe a deal when it gets off track. But stick with this. If it's not material— like, I've had deals when I was buying duplexes when I started my career The contract said they come with washers and dryers. 3 days before close, we do a walkthrough of the building. There's no washers and dryers. The sellers go, oh yeah, no, the tenants owned those. It's like, well, you probably shouldn't have signed in the contract that this comes with washers and dryers. That was a huge sticking point for them where they're like, well, you know what, I'm not replacing them. You have to ask, is it material? Are the washers and dryers what made this a good deal? No. Does it cost me a few thousand dollars? Yes. Am I right? Yes. Do I need to renegotiate? No. With an office, $80,000 a year, that's worth well over $1 million. In a 7-cap market, that's a huge hit to your net operating income. If I'm missing $80,000 a year, we have to come back to the table and adjust. So renegotiate as necessary. Again, the big 5: map the deal first, make sure they give you the price that they want before you offer a price, Ask for exactly what you want when you make your offer. Make sure that it is all signed and in writing exactly the way that you negotiated it. And only renegotiate when it is material to the deal and absolutely required to make your deal work. Okay, that's our structure here for doing the deals. You want to go through those 5 steps. You want to identify what they need, and it's so important that you actually ask for what it is that you want. Which brings me to mistake number 1, and I see this way too often. People do a multiple option. They give up control of the sale and they say, hey, I have a couple options for you, seller. I can give you this price and this is gonna be bank financed. So with conventional financing, you can have a lower price and we'll go with this financing package. Or if you want a little higher price, I can offer you this much with these creative terms. Now people think that this might get them the creative finance terms they want, but what you're doing is is you're giving them options hoping that they pick the one that you want. Just ask for what you want. Here's the call that I get every single time someone does this. They give them an option, 1, 2, and 3. Here's the 3 structures that work for me. First of all, again, you're giving up control of the sale, never do that. But second of all, they always call me and say, "Oh, they chose the one I was hoping they wouldn't choose." Why would you give them an option that you don't want them to choose? Ask for what you want. If you want creative finance and that is what you are targeting and you believe it is possible in this deal, send them the offer offer with just that. If they say no, now you can counter with the next thing, but don't give up the control of the sale and don't ask for something that you're hoping they don't select. If you write down 3 options, my question to you every single time is gonna be the same. Which one do you hope they choose? Send them that one. The worst they could say is no, and now you can go to your other options, but only put in front of them things that you want them to accept. Don't give them options. Tell them what it is that you want. That is the most critical part of every negotiation. I see people botch all the time. Second big mistake that's gonna cost you a lot of money. This is an actual direct story. This happened to me. Robin Hood Village Resort. We're in their office talking about, okay, here's the price that we're good with. We've negotiated seller finance terms. We're doing an interest rate of 4%. It's an 8-year note. They go, okay, well, how much do you have to put down? We screwed this up. We gave them a piece that we shouldn't have given them yet. We said, well, we are looking at putting $1 million down on another deal. So we're in the middle of a capital raise for this. That was true. However, magically, the next day the seller got back to us and guess what number they wanted us to put down on this? $1 million. We slipped up and gave them a piece that we didn't want. Now what I really wanted to do on this resort is I wanted to go 10% down. We're buying for $4.5 million. I wanted to put down $450,000. When they asked, we immediately answered honestly, well, there's this other deal that we're looking at, and so they were really asking how much money can you get your hands on? No surprise to anyone, that's exactly what they asked for, and that ended up being what we did on that deal. It was a difficult raise, it was an expensive raise, and in the future I had to buy partners out. It was unbelievably more expensive because everyone had unbelievably more money in the deal than we really wanted to put in. We suggested something unrelated to the deal that gave them a critical piece. Just tell them what they need to know. I'm not saying be secretive or manipulative, but I'm just saying if you're negotiating, make sure that they drop the price, let them anchor what they're looking for. You can counter off that or accept it. Sometimes, they even suggest a price that's lower than what you're looking for. There's a deal I wanted to buy for $1 million. I let them give me the price. They're like, well, we're hoping for $900,000. I'm like, boy, you know, that's gonna be tough, but we're gonna make it happen. Got $100,000 off, made $100,000 instantly by letting them go first. In the same way, don't volunteer information that they don't need. It almost always works against you. Have a great conversation, be open, honest, just not too open. If you can avoid those two things, dropping price or anchoring the wrong down payment, or even worse, just giving them options you don't want them to accept, you're going to do so much better in this negotiation game. Just ask for what you need, make sure that it matches somewhat what they're looking to get and move through the order of operations. I'm going to give you guys one piece of bonus content here. There is actually a time to use the multiple options for negotiation. So we're going to get a little bit more advanced here. After you are under contract for a deal, when you're doing your due diligence, if you find there's a material issue with the deal, you can give them a 1-2-3 step as long as You're using it to direct them to the answer that you want. So this is not a 101 level. This is if you have some experience negotiating. I just did this with an office. We found $80,000 of expenses more than the property was listed for. Now, in a 7-cap market, that's over $1 million less value than we were originally told that it was worth. That's a huge material change. So, the deal still works, $400,000 off the price. It actually works quite well and cash flows quite well. So I told them, hey, there is over $1 million less value in this. However, if you reduce the price by $400,000, I'm willing to play ball. Asked for exactly what I wanted. They countered with, no, we're willing to meet you in the middle at $395,000. Well, it doesn't work at $395,000. We're under contract for $4.1 million. We found it's worth $1 million less today than we thought it was. We're going to need to get 100% of what we're asking for. I gave them options knowing they're not going to accept two of them. Option A, we can just rescind. Like, I can't do this, so we can not waste anyone's time and we can go ahead and terminate the contract now. A. B, you guys can accept the $3.7 and I'm your buyer and we're gonna close this. That's the one I want them to accept. C, we haven't discussed creative finance, but if you wanted to hold a contract, it would have to be long-term, at least 5 years, and lower than market interest. We haven't discussed this, but if you're open to it, we can open that conversation. Now, if they actually said yes to that, I can absolutely work that equation, and the upside on the deal is there. If I got 4% interest, fantastic. I don't think they're gonna accept that, though, and if they did, I'm 100% okay with it. This is a best and final, they've already rejected my offer, I'm giving them multiple offers to reframe the exact same offer. So, I don't wanna say the multiple offers is completely useless, but never use that on the front end of your negotiation. And only use it in a renegotiation after you've already asked for exactly what you're looking for with no options attached. Hope this was helpful. This can save you, as it did with me and the Robinhood. This could save you $1 million or more. Apply these correctly, get under contract for your deals, and I'll see you on the next episode.
