Liars and Leeches - Real Estate partnership rule #33

Hello YouTube, welcome back to the channel. I'm Christian Osgood, here to cover our next rule of real estate. We saved some of the harsher ones for last. This was a very hard-earned lesson. It goes hand in hand with partnership, which is actually what we just covered with David Greene on his live last week. If you haven't seen that episode, you should hop over to David Greene's channel after this and after you like and subscribe and take a watch, because we covered a lot of the real hard pieces of partnership, why we typically don't like to partner, and what's made Cody and my partnership really effective over the last year. Now, the rule is you gotta watch out for liars and leeches. They are the two most dangerous personality types that we have ever run across, which is why they go into our core rules of real estate. We will not violate this ever again. I'm gonna use a couple of examples, some stories from our past, and how to spot these personality types early so you do not lose time and money, which we have definitely done. So I'm gonna start with the liars. Liers are typically very charming people. Typically, they're usually well-liked. They usually lead a team of very, very loyal people until people find out that they're liars and leave. Then they'll tell you a story about, oh, the reason this person left my sphere was always— it's always someone else's fault. So the first thing that you find with liars, they are the first person to blame someone else. They never take accountability for their actions. I have never seen an exception to this. Liars will not, under any circumstance, be the one who is at fault for everything because it's just too easy to blame someone else. The first person they lie to is themselves. The other thing you're going to look for is little inconsistencies. If they overpromise consistently and then you find out, nope, they didn't do that, or you hear them telling someone else something and you're like, oh, I don't think that was true, Those are usually your first signs. Before you realize that they're lying to you about stuff, you'll see them tell lies to other people. If they have a high turnover rate in their organization, if it's an employer, it tends to go all the way back to the top. That tends to be the personality type. Either way, Liars are the one personality type that really, I rarely ever see them change. It's not that people can't get better, but it's very, very, very hard. For people to overcome. If you see liars, they're disingenuous. They will tell anyone anything to move forward, and they will typically never take accountability for their actions, which means they never actually get to a place mentally where they can change. If you see this behavior, run the other way. I don't share the story all the time, but the first thing I ever started was actually a church. It's a nonprofit organization. Built a team, got together. There was The person leading that ended up being a chronic liar. It took me about 10 months to identify that. It destroyed the entire group, uh, cost a lot of people a lot of money, and was just a generally horrible situation to be in. Fast forward to my intro to real estate, I found someone else who I absolutely trusted who ended up being dishonest. The signs there were the same as the signs for the last person. They tried to start stuff, they brought people into their orbit, they had a few people who they had major falling outs with, and somehow it's always the other person's fault. How did this happen? This is terrible. I can't believe they left. These are all things you need to be aware of and look out for because it's never good and you want to avoid that situation at all cost. Now let's talk about leeches. These are sneakier than the liars because you're not looking for little inconsistencies. They typically look like high-functioning people, they promise the world, but they're very, very good at getting other people to do stuff for them. It takes a while working with them to realize, oh my goodness, this person doesn't actually do anything ever. Now, it goes hand in hand with liars because they're gonna promise stuff and not deliver, but it's usually out of laziness. Most of the liars I've met are actually highly ambitious people. This is the opposite. They're going to be sneaky about never actually doing work. They over-delegate, they over-promise, and when they do stuff, it is the absolute bare minimum. Cody and I joined a brokerage a while back, and we've been at a few, so I'm not mentioning any names. This isn't— I don't want anyone tracking the specifics of everyone. Um, you know, that's— we're not a vindictive channel, but this is something we experienced that we really, really, really think you need to know with the leeches. As you start getting success, other people will be drawn to your success. When Cody and I got our 38-plex, our first 12 together, the 7-plex and the 6-plex, so I think we'd done 4 transactions together. I was somewhere in the ballpark of 55 units, Cody was at 81. We started getting a little bit of media attention. Cody's BiggerPockets episode became the biggest, uh, the biggest BiggerPockets podcast of all time. I think it's just about to cross a million views. That brought a lot of attention, and with that, people all of a sudden came out of nowhere and wanted to partner and wanted to do all this stuff with us, which early in our career was really exciting. We had someone fly in on their jet and say, hey, I have this business idea. They pitched it to us, we said no, and then we circled back because we really did need a business mentor, and it was the desire to have someone to guide us through mistakes and help us make less of our own. We really wanted to partner with this one person to move us forward. What they ended up doing was they had us sign a lease to rent one of their spaces in exchange for helping us start a company. They never helped at all. They never showed up to one meeting. They never spent a minute of time helping. They were late to anything that they scheduled. And at the end of all things, they asked us for money when the business venture failed, even though we were all in it completely evenly and we did all the work. Hundreds of hours of work later, I ended up just paying them to go away. Leeches will drain you. They have absolutely no value. It's another group that I've never seen change because they don't take accountability for their actions. It's funny how that theme comes up in this. But if you have any sign that the person that you're thinking about partnering with or have partnered with falls into that personality type, you need to go the other direction. Do not partner with them. Do not get within 100 feet of that partnership. Partnerships are hard. People are hard. Business is easy until you involve people. And if you're in real estate, I hate to break it to you, but you provide housing to humans. Everything you do is for people and with people. You want to expand, you're going to need the right people. Make sure they're not one of these two personality types. I do want to share some positive news. Here is what works for Cody and I. Cody has lied to me one time that I'm aware of. It was early in our relationship, and I know for a fact he's okay with me sharing this story because he shares it all the time. He told me something that was not true. He was not supposed to tell an employer that I was leaving, and he told the employer I was leaving. He made an excuse about it that wasn't true, and one hour later I got a call from Cody. Cody is not a very emotional person, and his voice was a little bit emotional. He's like, Christian, I'm so sorry. I hadn't eaten all day. I made a mistake and I didn't tell you the truth about it. That builds a lot of trust. That is the only time I have ever seen Cody be dishonest with me, and within 1 hour I got a call from him apologizing, owning up to, hey man, I messed up and I'm really sorry. That— and it was a really little thing, like he would have got away with it and he knows he would have got away with it. That level of honesty when you're building a partnership People will lie. No one is 100% honest, and if you think they are, then you're lying to yourself. There is a point for everyone where they will be dishonest. How they handle that matters. People like Cody take accountability for that, and that handles the issue of, okay, well, I'm not working with a liar. People lie. Being a liar is a condition, and in my experience, a very, very difficult to cure condition. Leeches, that's the one thing that Cody and I avoid. We both put 100% in all the time. There's no such thing as an even partnership because you bring different skills and your value will come out at different times in the partnership. It is impossible to quantify the exact value of everyone, which is why Cody and I are just 50/50. It's like, hey, when I'm pulling harder or my skill set is more valuable, I don't get more because I'm bringing more. I don't know how you quantify like, oh, well, Cody's better at sales, he brings in more money, but I have more hours of work and more stress with the operations. How do you quantify stress versus gross income? There's no way to do it. So Cody and I go, we're 50/50. We're not going to be greedy. It's going to be simple. What I do require is an equal level of effort, and Cody and I both go 100% all the time, as do the other members of my team and the very few people that I will partner with. We're all pulling the same direction 100%. Effort. And as long as the effort and direction are roughly the same, you can have a good partnership. With leeches, they will never put in the effort. There is nothing you can do to make a lazy person want to work. So avoid those two personality types. Best piece of advice I can give you— if you want more on the rules of real estate, we have it in our course on themultifamilystrategy.com. If you want to do a deep dive, there's mentorship options in there as well. But we are almost done with this series. Thank you so much for watching all the way through with us. Coming out soon in January, we will have a whole series with Sole Cayetano going over investing young, out-of-state investing. She invests in a couple markets out of state, and we want to talk more about how she's doing that. So until next week, we'll talk to you soon.