How To Sell ANYTHING To ANYONE - Real Estate Secrets with Danni and Christian Osgood

The ability to get people on board with your vision is everything. If you're trying to buy a piece of real estate, getting owners to really buy into like, this is someone who I'm excited to work with, whose goals I resonate with. It matters. It matters in marriage. It matters in business. It matters in sales. It's the most important thing. Hello and welcome to another episode of Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian. This is the amazing Danny Osgood. Today we are talking about how to sell anything to anyone, including how to sell your spouse on letting you buy unlimited amounts of real estate with absolutely no money, and why that is a fantastic idea when you're basically broke. In Seattle in the middle of COVID which is where we started. By the way, welcome to the channel. My name is Christian. I've bought hundreds of rental properties alongside with the amazing Danny Osgood. Uh, we've bought hundreds of rentals securing financial freedom. Uh, yes, our deals actually cash flow. Yes, we're actually retired from the real estate that we bought. Really important distinction because there are a lot of people online who monetize anything but their real estate, and they're the people saying that cash flow is a myth. But when we started the business, we had this vision. Uh, I actually had a mentor who was absolute terrible businessmen with absolutely no ethics. However, we learned not only how not to do business, we did learn how to buy anything. Amazing with creative finance, uh, horrible with money. We learned how to buy anything, and we watched that, and I was like, if this guy could ethically find deals that cash flow and then hold them, he would be so wealthy. He would own so many buildings. And what— in a country that likes to print money like crazy, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate appreciates and you get appreciation on millions and millions of dollars of real estate, you would become so rich. We built a model on this, but when we started, we had what, 2 duplexes or 1? We had 1 duplex when we really got started. We had 1 duplex.

Do we have the condo at the same time?

Yeah, we had the condo. We bought the duplex. We bought the little house that we lived in. We sold that. We ended up selling the condo because we hated renting single family. That was an absolute nightmare. That was just awful. Trying to figure out one rental was never worth the money, even though it cash flowed a few hundred bucks and not worth it. We were small, small, small, small, small-time landlords, bigger pocket-sized landlords like the, you know, like, hey, we're learning how to do our first house hack, live and flip landlords. Yeah. How did I convince you to even let me buy a 38-plex that had people were breeding chickens in the units? There was cockroaches, there was mice. Coming through the ceiling of poor Unit 5. Uh, I mean, we had every problem you can have. I remember that the homeless camp on the back was stealing electric from our lights.

Oh my gosh.

Remember the extension cord?

Yes.

Yes.

They kept sparking.

Yes. Uh, mild fire hazard. How did I convince you that was a good idea? Not even why did it work? What— how did that even come into play?

I think It even goes before that. Like, you were— you as a spouse are very trustworthy. Like, I can trust what you are going to do.

Yeah.

And you're not going to mess it up. Like, you might mess it up, but you're not going to make a whole big mess out of everything. And so that was like, yes, 38 units is a huge jump. Absolutely nothing.

From 2?

From 2. But I knew that if you had messed it up, you would find a way to un-mess it up. Versus if you had come to me many times before, babe, I have this adventure I really want to go on. I have this, like, somebody told me about this and you just mess them up time and time and time again.

Oh my gosh, yes. There are so many people with harebrained ideas. That original mentor we talked about, I won't name-drop him. No, I will never do that. That'd be mean. But that first person who I worked for, harebrained ideas all the time and just had to act on them. And some of them would just end as a total dumpster fire. Sometimes they worked. He bought that one building downtown, excellent deal. He followed it up by spending— he bought a deal worth maybe $1 million, would still lose money at $1 million. He bought it for $3 million and raised all the money and lost everyone's money. Consistency and responsibility, I think, are really important. And so, if you are going to— I'm doing a video on how to convince anyone to do anything. I thought it was kind of a fun title because the ability to get people on board with your vision is everything. If you're trying to buy a piece of real estate, getting owners to really buy into like, "This is someone who I'm excited to work with, whose goals I resonate with, who I actually care." It matters. It matters in marriage. It matters in business. It matters in sales. It matters in marketing. It's the most important thing. You earn that through consistency. If you lack ethics, if you lack consistency, this is what we learned. You know, we got a perfect example of how not to do this, which was so valuable. If you are consistent in your marriage, you're consistent with your friends, you're consistent with your relationship, you do the things that you say you're going to do, you earn the right to be trusted. And it's an absolute privilege. It's not a right, it's a privilege. And that helps. The second thing, and I think this is really important in our marriage, I feel that we are very, very, very good at communicating with each other. We talk about everything all the time, every day, and we work together all the time, every day. We spend a lot of time together.

You are truly my best friend.

Thank you. You're also my best friend.

Well, good.

The way that you communicate your thoughts and ideas is so important. On that building, there was no basis and she didn't have any background in real estate where I would explain something where it's like, "Wow, this totally just makes sense." Other than I believe in the price. Like, I'm looking at the price of this. I'm like, "We are stealing this building." And I see it and I've done enough real estate. I worked at CoStar for 4 years. I do all sorts of analysis on properties. Look at this. I'm like, this is going to be hard. And there's no reasonable reason to think that we would be able to pull this off except that the price is so good. There is a path to buy this for $2 million and get it to be worth $3 million. And we have $1 million wiggle room here. By the way, we got it to $4.1 million on appraisal. I recently sold out of that building after a long journey on it and a lot of money made. I cashed out also a lot of money. Cody and a new partner are taking it even to a new level, and they're going to refinance it into the now lowering rates. Cody's going to take it to a new place. When we did that project, though, I looked at it and I said, there's $1 million here. And I think most people, if you are— if you don't have any money and you're looking at it, you're like, I absolutely believe that there's $1 million to be made. The deal will sell itself.

But you also have to know the numbers enough and all the details and stuff like that A fourth grader can do the math.

That's the beautiful thing about real estate. You have algebra where it's like x divided by y equals z. I mean, we're talking like basic, basic algebra and everything else is addition and subtraction. If you want to know if it's going to cash flow, add up the income, subtract out the expenses. What is left over is cash flow. Yeah, that includes your debt, by the way. If you're like, oh, well, what do banks care about? Debt service coverage ratio. Well, geez, that's a lot of, you know, that's a big acronym, DSCR. How much money do you have after you pay all your business expenses to pay your debt? Is it more or less than the amount that you owe for the debt? That, that's what a bank cares about. If I make 2 times what I owe after I pay all my bills, great. I pay the bank, say, $10,000, then I pay myself $10,000 because there's no one else to pay. We paid all the bills. It's a great cash flow metric. That's about all you have to learn in the real estate math, though. Is it going to cash flow? Will it continue to cash flow? And what is a building worth when we stabilize it? Is there more to it than that? I mean, sure, you, you're gonna need to learn renovation costs, but there's contractors you can quote that, and there's other people in the market who can help you find your inputs. The actual math though, it's not that hard. But yeah, you have to know it. You analyze a deal when you know you're looking at a deal though. Your ability to communicate The vision. I think it's everything. I'm not one— occasionally, if I get excited, of course, I'll throw these out. I'm not one who says a lot of ums and uhs. I don't like the word like. We'll use it conversationally, but if we're sharing a vision, it's directly stated. This is what I'm thinking and this is why I'm thinking it and I'm really excited about this. I think this is an amazing opportunity. The downside, I'm going to lever our house to close this thing. And so, Worst case scenario, we lose our home. Good news, we already know how to buy a home. We've done it twice. We bought a condo, we bought this house. We already know that we can save our way up to a house. We've done this before. This is not new.

I also did not understand what he was fully doing at the time versus which I think is actually it was good.

I did not mislead her. It was explained.

I just comprehension-wise, you know.

We have a HELOC, we buy the building. The nice thing is, though, on a technical basis, our basis in the building day one was really good. And so were we to default on the building, what would really happen is they take the building back. It'd be sufficient collateral. Our, our house really, really wasn't at risk because we bought the deal right. But any time you introduce leverage, you introduce risk. And I think it was really important to say, okay, here's what we're risking. But I do remember having the conversation in the kitchen of I think we should do this. And our worst case scenario is this is very expensive financially and we just absolutely get burned and I'm totally wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong. I really don't think I'm wrong. I want to have— I want us to have more than what we have right now. I want to get you out of teaching because that was right around the time that you had injured your back. We just come out of the COVID thing. Like, I'm like, I want to get you out of teaching. We were talking about possibly having kids at the time. We didn't know, but we're like, if we do, we definitely don't want to have them here because that was like the apex of political craziness in Washington State, Seattle area. We're like, we want to have a house somewhere else. We'd like to have a house that's bigger than 1,300 square feet. We want to be able to save more than— like, we had high-income jobs. I remember us doing the math, like, how could we save $2,000 a month, $24,000 a year? And I was like, I'm like, I don't want to have to struggle to save $2,000 a month.

That was our house rental budget for the year.

Yeah, I remember doing that, being like, we can do $24,000 if we, if we, if we budget right, we don't go to movies too often. I was like, what a lame freaking existence. You have a master's degree. I have a bachelor's degree, a high-paying sales job. I'm doing well in the job. And we're like, boy, if we're, if we're really good this year, we can do raised flower beds. Like we made the decision where it's like, I would rather add risk and reach for more. And I'm super glad we did. Someone asked last night, this is amazing. This 13-year-old girl actually attended the event and she was like, how did you know it was gonna work? I'm like, boy, I never, I never, never been asked that question.

We didn't.

I was just like, I didn't, I didn't know it would. Mm-hmm.

Through the drive to make it work.

If you want to increase your odds of success, you need to roll more dice, which means you just keep trying and trying and trying. And the nice thing is deals and money, that's not hard to do. Or you roll better dice, which means you increase your network, you increase your knowledge base. I did spend the 4 years at CoStar. And while you definitely don't need to do that, you don't need to become a real estate agent. I get that question all the time. You don't become an agent. You don't need to work for a data group. You don't need to become a property manager. You want to be an investor, buy an investment property. That's what you need to do. And by the way, do it now because interest rates are going down, which means prices are going to start going up. Oh, wow. There we go. See, teacher, how does she know these economics? I taught money is cheaper, prices go up. That is how the market's going to work. If you want to use creative terms, it's now going to get harder to buy real estate. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. So if you want your window, the best time to buy was before yesterday when the Fed dropped the rates. They're going to keep dropping rates. You need to get in now if you're trying to do this. But you're trying to build a business. It's like, okay, I believe in real estate. I believe that the government will keep printing money, which means we will have inflation. Rents will increase, unfortunately for people, because it seems to increase a lot faster than wages do. But if they're going to inflate the market, let's hedge against that. Let's bet against inflation and let's go ahead— or I guess bet against the government. Bet that they will keep inflation out of check and they'll keep printing money. And let's load up on real estate. Let's do this consistently and strategically based on cash flow. The principles made sense. And so we made a decision to do that. And yeah, if you want to learn how to sell anything to anyone, find an opportunity, find the deal, and let the deal carry the conversation. Let the deal sell itself. The deal will find the money. You don't raise money before a deal. Anyone who will tell you that is dead wrong. It is not the way that you play the game. It is not find capital, it is not find wealthy people, it is not get money. It's not earn money. That takes forever. And again, they're devaluing it as fast as you can bring it in. That's what we learned in high-paying jobs. Well, you were a teacher. I had a high-paying job. You had a stable job.

I had a high-paying job for a teacher.

As teachers go, Washington State pays pretty well.

I was making good money.

Yeah, not, not six figures, but close.

My best friend makes six figures as a teacher. It's insane.

Teachers make decent money in Washington, not in Texas. I was making great money and we could barely save anything. We were not getting ahead. We came with the principle of if you buy a deal and it cash flows, you now make more money than you did and you're closer to your goal. And sure, on one deal we went forward a few hundred bucks, and on our second duplex we went forward, you know, $1,000 a month. I was like, wait a second, if we're saving $24,000 a year, $1,000 a month, I'm like, wow, that's— we've got a 50% raise. That's the— from what we can actually save, that's amazing. First duplex, cash flow like $500. I'm like, okay, 25%, oh yeah. In conclusion, if you want to sell anyone on any vision, you need to have the vision, you need to earn the trust, you need to be able to communicate it without ums, uh, ands, likes, maybes, kind ofs. Clearly communicate a goal and then you find a deal first. You find the opportunity and then you pitch. You don't just pitch on like, one day I would like to buy these things and we can be rich. Like, that's stupid. Find a 38-plex, find your 12-plex, find your whatever, find your deal and go, I believe this deal will get us closer to this vision and share the vision. That's how I have the opportunity to take something that was in my head and communicate to my wife and how we became a team. And then later, as you guys have seen the story, she leaves her job and she joins me in the property management company. She joins me at the Robin Hood Village Resort. And we built the businesses together and we built something where it's like we live in the dream house that we built in Texas. It is incredible what we did in 3 years together is to me, it's still unbelievable. The fact that it worked isn't even the important part. The fact that we made the decision to leave a job and that we communicated, I was able to communicate an idea that she got fully behind and we were able to build this was amazing. If you want to sell anyone on any idea, earn the trust, learn how to communicate, find the opportunity. That is the way the game is played. Hope you enjoyed this episode. I don't always film with Dani, so I probably rambled way too much because I love hanging out with my wife. She's awesome. If you enjoyed this episode, or even if you didn't, but you like all the other episodes, like and subscribe. I appreciate it. Leave a comment below if you enjoyed the episode or if you have any questions for Dani or I. We answer every single comment. So ask your questions below. If you have more questions, we'll see you guys on, uh, Whiteboard Wednesday, 3:00 PM Pacific time, now 5:00 Central time. Ooh, yeah, we're in Texas now. We appreciate you all, and we'll see you all in the next episode.