How to Scale your Rental Portfolio in 2025 - Getting Unstuck in Real Estate

Hello and welcome to another episode of Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian, your channel host. Today we're going to help you get unstuck. If you're trying to buy your first rental, you're trying to buy your second or third rental, you're trying to scale and you're feeling stuck. There are a few common threads that happen to almost everyone who comes through Multifamily Strategy, and we're going to help you skip right through those. A lot of people get stuck on these for years. I myself was stuck on one of these for 8 years before I really started advancing in my career and buying more real estate. If you are trying to scale beyond where you're at today, you're likely going to be stuck in one of these places. We're going to help speed you right on through. By the way, if you're new to the channel, my name is Christian Osgood. I bought hundreds of rentals. I started with virtually no money, and I did most of this through creative finance. Of the last 20 deals I purchased, the last 17 utilized seller financing. But there are many, many methods to buy deals with or without money, which brings me to number 1. We're going to breeze through this one because we cover this a lot on the channel. Do you actually need the money? Everyone gets stuck on, oh, I don't have the money yet. I don't have the people who have the money. Neither did I. Neither did almost anyone else in multifamily strategy. In fact, one of my good friends, Ethan Wilson, he was in an entry-level sales job. He had one house when he got started, no family or friends with money that he can go out and borrow. He came out and just found a deal. He partnered with a buddy on an 8-plex, and then he found a 24-plex, did not have the money to close it. He found the investor because it was a great deal. They funded the deal. They actually overfunded the deal. So he had a very healthy reserve. He had very healthy cash flow. He got through that 24-unit deal. All he had to do though was look at the opportunity. You start with the opportunity, you look at what debt is available. Could be seller financing, often it is. Could be bank financing, then you just need to find someone who qualifies for the bank to help you fund the deal. You can even have the deal buy them back out later at refinance. The real estate can buy the real estate. But if you're stuck on money, I'm going to tell you right now, throw that out. You, you're not stuck on money, you're stuck on not having an opportunity. Find an opportunity that either cash flows heavily day one or Cash flows a little bit day one but has a lot of operational or rental upside so you can improve the asset. Either way, both methods, the real estate can buy the real estate. You do not have a money problem. I promise you have an opportunity problem. Learn how to identify and find opportunities. The money will always follow. That is a fact. The next thing people get stuck on, and this happens all the time, you're not writing an offer because you don't know what to negotiate on. You see a deal, you see lots of deals, you're exposed to real estate you could buy, but you never pull the trigger. If you write no offers, you buy no real estate. That is a fact. I am not a fan of the methods online that tell you like, hey, just write LOIs, letters of intent to buy real estate today. Don't do that. Write an offer to buy a piece of real estate. I hate it when people write me an LOI, letter of intent. Hey, I would like to buy your property for this price. I intend— I don't care what you intend to do. If you intend to buy it, write me a contract. If I like it, I'll sign it. Super easy. You need to look— actually write offers. So what do you negotiate on first? The most valuable thing you can win on is price. Now, if you're like, hey, I thought these were the creative finance guys, we make terms worth— terms over price. No, price gives you the most flexibility. You can negotiate new terms, you can refinance. When you buy it at an excellent price, it's the most powerful thing you can do. The problem with price is everyone is competing on price because that's the piece that's most powerful to negotiate. So how do you do deals that other people cannot? You learn how to negotiate terms. If you can get a deal where it cash flows on long-term fixed-rate debt, the interest rate is the next thing to negotiate. However, interest rate has no value if it's short-term debt. If I get 2% interest on a deal and it cash flows like crazy and I have a 2-year balloon, that means that debt comes due in 2 years, that's not very valuable. I've bought myself a short-term amount of cash flow and then I lose my deal or I'm forced to refinance into a more expensive debt product. If the debt was all the value, it needs to be long-term. However, you can overpay for a deal on long-term debt. Properties are worth more over time, but over the long-term, it's market resistance if you wait long enough. 5 years isn't long enough. I'm thinking 7 to 10 years. Most of my deals are 10 to 30-year debt. That is a long time. We'll go through multiple market cycles. We'll have opportunities to change the debt product. We buy them on long-term cash-flowing fixed-rate debt. The third thing you can negotiate is if you're having trouble getting the cash flow. So you have a deal with a bunch of upside. This is a real deal. My buddy Caleb did this, got a good price for what you were buying, but the deal didn't cash flow. He couldn't negotiate the interest rate any lower than he did even on a seller finance deal. The seller had a set price and a minimum term which they'll sell, and the deal just didn't cash flow. But if you could operate it a little bit better, the cash flow could be amazing. If you can get rents up a little bit, if you could build back utilities. So what he did is he said, "Hey, how about this? We'll do the down payment, but a special clause. I'm going to write this so that I have no payments for the first 6 months, and that gives me time to renovate a couple of units, lease them up, increase rent a little bit, or build back utilities." And that's exactly what he did. The third thing you can negotiate is a special clause that makes the deal work. So first, go after the price. If you can't do the price, go after the interest rate on a long term. If you can't get the interest rate, ask yourself, what would make this deal cash flow for me and allow me to buy it and never lose the deal? If you can fit the underwriting criteria, how do we buy it? How do we never lose it? You've answered the question, how do we buy and hold? If you can do this again and again and again, congratulations, you can now start writing offers. Buy, Buy real estate that makes sense where you're winning on price or you're winning on terms or you're winning on both, or you have a special clause in place that allows you to adjust the first two pieces of the equation to get to cash flow. The third thing people get stuck on, and this is a silly one and it's a lot of people, you're just nervous. You're like, well, what if this happens and what if that happens? This is the easiest one to get over. Are you at where you want to be today? Usually if you're stuck here, you don't have clarity in your goal. You need to write down where do I actually want to be in life and what is the real estate for? If it's for I would like to have more money, you're probably not going to hit that goal. You're probably not going to buy much. If it's, hey, I want to own my time, I read a book that said this is a great thing, you're very unlikely to get there. What are you going to do with the time when you have it? That is significance. For me, it was retire my wife, it was build my dream home, it was start my family in a position where I could provide for my family as a single income. I could be in real estate and provide for my family with kids, growing family, beautiful house, and I could spend time with them when it mattered. I could invest time into my family in a way that I never had growing up. My father provided for me amazingly. It means the world to me to provide for my family, but he didn't have the time to spend with me because he spent it all providing. Can I have both? Can I have time with my family and provide for them like I was provided for growing up? If I could do those two things, that'd mean the world. That is a goal that means something. It is personal. You have a reason to hit it. And guess what? I wrote down that goal and I went out and I actually did the thing. And now if you're not at that goal, You allow yourself to take measured, calculated risks. And don't get me wrong, if you use debt at any point, it is risk, but you learn the math. You take calculated risks because you go, I'm not where I want to be. Well, then get there and then start playing defense. Then you can get more conservative and then you can put more structures in place and you can do all the things you worry about. You can worry about defending once you get there. The easiest analogy I can give you You cannot win any game in any sport without scoring first. Defense is super important. Defense is very, very important. But if you never get out and score, what are you defending? The best you could possibly do is tie, which is not hitting your goal. So if you want to win in real estate or personal finance, get to your goal, score some points, and once you're there, then we can start worrying about the defense and the things that you were originally worried about. They're a lot easier when you have a whole bunch of cash flow. I can tell you that from experience. So hope this helps. These are the main things that people get stuck on. They seem really simple, but it's either they don't know what to offer on a deal, so we dispelled that. It's, hey, I'm just straight up nervous. I have some anxiety around taking on debt for the first time or taking on more debt than I can just work through. I remember that was a hurdle for me. I was like, man, if everyone stopped paying, I can't outearn this anymore. The real estate does in fact have to buy the real estate. Whatever it is that you're stuck on though, it's usually something common. It's usually something small., and you can use these tips to push forward and to expand your portfolio. If you found this helpful, you found this encouraging, I hope you enjoyed it. I'm launching this here, filming the day before Thanksgiving. So I, I am personally grateful that I took these steps that I've been able to advance. I know we have a lot of people in the mentorship group and multifamily strategy that have gone really, really far because they overcame one or more of these hurdles. If you want a free course on how we do this, what the actual structure looks like, how this creative finance thing works. There's like a 16-minute free video. You can click the link in the description and check that out. Otherwise, I'll watch this video as many times as you need to, to give yourself a little kick in the butt. Get out there and go buy some real estate. Like, subscribe. See you guys on the next episode.