In this live Multifamily Strategy session, Christian Osgood teaches how to negotiate creative real‑estate financing by treating it as a deal‑closing tool rather than a sales pitch. He argues that leading with financing signals weakness, so the focus should first be on the property’s fundamentals, seller motivations, and deal terms. Osgood outlines a step‑by‑step script for conversations with brokers and owners, emphasizing questions about performance, headaches, and market activity before any financing discussion. He demonstrates the approach with two real examples: a 25‑unit seller‑financed acquisition in Stephenville, Texas, where financing was introduced only after the price and terms were agreed, and a 38‑unit deal where a deferred‑payment, fixed‑rate structure satisfied a seller’s retirement income goal while giving the buyer immediate cash‑flow upside. Throughout, he stresses matching seller needs with investor goals, creating win‑win structures, and using creative terms only when they naturally solve a problem. The session also promotes Osgood’s upcoming webinar, a free SKOOL community, calculators, and tools for ongoing learning. By the end, viewers should understand how to position themselves as serious buyers, identify the optimal moment to propose creative finance, and craft mutually beneficial deal structures that increase cash‑flow and raise their income year over year.
Chapters
All right, there we go. Welcome to Multifamily Strategy Live. You're like, what is this background? I'm back in Washington State. I'm gonna be hosting an event here at the Robin Hood, but I'm here for Thanksgiving. My family needed some help smoking the turkey, so I am back in my hometown just outside of Seattle, staying at the parent-in-law's house and in a, uh, in a quarter, a corner of their playroom. So welcome to Multifamily Strategy, the Washington State version. Uh, by the way, uh, hosting a webinar tonight, so if you guys want to join that at any point, uh, let me know. They'll be in about an hour from right now. So if you're watching this live, uh, you can at any point— you want to learn creative finance, I'm hosting a webinar specifically on creative real estate, not just the financing, but how to do seller financing, zero-down bank financing, get paid to buy deals. But I basically distilled my entire business model into one presentation. If you guys have a desire to learn how to do the deals, I'm going to put together 90 minutes. It's going to be live. It's going to be awesome. I will see you there on that from my— try to put together a little bit more official studio. I brought most of my materials, so I should be seeing you guys there. Link is multifamilystrategy.com/workshop for that. And join our free school community if you're already here on a free YouTube video. We have a whole community and a ton of free tools for you. You can go to school, S-K-O-O-L. And type in Multifamily Strategy Community. 2,500 people there doing deals. We had multiple deals in that community close last week, so— and we do every week. So join us there for more fun. But let's dive into today's lesson. I'm talking negotiating creative finance. So my goal is that by the end of this video, if you're watching this right now, day before Thanksgiving, you're sitting here being like, okay, so you likely you, you've run into, hey, I've brought up multi— or I brought creative finance, I got rejected. Or you've never pitched it and you're like, how do I even start? By the end of this video, I hope that I've changed your perception on how you approach these. What it's actually going to do is going to tie really well into this webinar, but it's not actually about negotiating creative finance. The less you bring it up, the more likely you are to get it, and I'll explain what I mean by that. It's simpler than you think, but if you're going for creative finance, it's not actually the goal. It's about the deal negotiation. So I'll break it down here and then we'll go into our normal Q&A. So if you have any questions, feel free to ask away. Um, I'll post the questions here on the screen as they come in. So if you guys have any comments, please let me know. Questions. It's the day before a holiday, so either we'll have a lot of people or not very many people on this live. We will find out, but let's get started. First of all, the way that you negotiate creative finance, if you open with, hey, are they— is the seller open to creative finance? Are they open to holding a contract? What are your thoughts on creative finance? If you open with that, you're putting a big sticker on your head that says, hey, I'm broke and I have no idea what I'm doing. That is where you get the brokers who are like, hey, I need to see proof of funds. I need to see your— I need to see your investor list. I need to check your credit score. You do not need these things in your universe. Now, What should happen is with or without creative finance, brokers should know, hey, I'm talking to a serious buyer. I am— they should be selling you on the deal. You are not selling them. You come in knowing, hey, I am the prize here. They're trying to pitch me. Let's confidently run through our script. And same with sellers. You sit down. I have a relationship with them. We're talking about the deal. I want to talk about business. I don't want to talk about creative finance. I want to talk about a deal. So when you're talking about a deal, what do you need to discuss first? Okay, well, if you're calling a broker, is the property available? If you're calling an owner, tell me about the property. Tell me how you bought the property. Let's get into an actual normal person conversation. If they're trying to sell a property, so this is on— assume the deal is listed. Instead of asking about the financing, how's the property been performing? Do you have any headaches? Are there any major projects that investors are going to need to do? How's activity been on this? Have you talked to other people about this? Are people generally interested? Are you expecting offers? Oftentimes I see deals have been around for 200 days on market. I want to know what happened in that first 200 days. We're talking deal questions. We're talking actual, like, what is it that I'm buying questions. You should be shopping the deal, not discussing financing. Financing's a closing question. How am I going to fund it is when you've decided to buy something. When people open with that, It's the, it's the dumbest thing I've seen in real estate. It doesn't make logical sense. I don't know why people do it. It seems to be something that people consistently do. So if you are trying to ask for creative finance and you're not getting yes, really sit down and think, when am I introducing this into this, into our conversation? And does it make sense? Have I established myself as a ready, able, and willing buyer for this deal at all? Or are we just stuck? A perfect example, when I came in, uh, the seller finance deal in Stephenville, Texas, this 25-unit that we did is how I entered Stephenville. We didn't talk financing. We actually didn't talk financing until we got an offer in. It worked with bank financing. We negotiated a full deal, and as I was writing the PSA, I'm like, hey, I, I have a couple of banks lined up for this. I like the deal. I think your price is fine. I'm going to run it past them. Um, should I reach out to the bank, or do you have any interest in holding a contract? We'd already negotiated the deal. We got our price, we got everything set up, and he's like, oh, I think it's easier if we don't involve the bank. I don't have any debt on this. And we got into the negotiations, and I'm like, well, here's what I'm looking to do. I'd actually really like about a 5% interest rate. I think banks are coming in a little higher on that. I also think banks might have me beat you up a little bit on your price if we just say $2 million works for this. 'Can you do 5% interest?' They said yes. It was the easiest negotiation of all time. The point is though, I had a deal negotiated. I knew what they were trying to do. I knew that he was trying to retire. I know that he owned a law firm, a lot of retail, and a lot of farmland. His kids want the law firm, the retail, the farmland. They don't want the multifamily. They're like, 'Yeah, we'll take all of the businesses with none of the tenants. That sounds fantastic.' Works pretty well for them. They all got what they want. Now his estate planning is, hey, how do I off the multifamily and get the price that I want? He's in his early 80s, he's in fantastic health, but he's like, I'm probably not going to live a ton longer because 80 is relatively old. So he's doing his estate planning, holding a contract, even a long-term contract, not a problem for him at all. By the time we got to pitching the financing, I had the pieces. I knew the price, I knew the property, I knew his goals. So now we're just tailoring like, hey, do you want me to go to 'Bank, I think they're going to have a little problem with your pricing today because your rents are a little low. We can ask, or do we want to just say yes to the price and work on the interest rate? Because if you get— if you can come in at 5%, I'm in and we can sign this right now.' He said yes. His only caveat was like, 'I really want to do business with people that I know. I'd like you to fly to Stephenville and meet me in person.' We booked a flight, we met him in person, we went under contract, we went in and closed that deal. And we went on to close 4 other deals in that market. That is what creative finance is. It's the easiest path to close the loop. You're a deal solver, not a deal finder. I'm not shopping deals, I'm building relationships, and I'm working deals. I'm working the equation, identify what they need, match what they need if it makes sense. I get this question fairly often, so I'm going to answer it directly, but people ask very common, hey, How do you convince someone to give you seller finance? You can't. If they're not interested, they're not going to do it. You don't sell someone on the idea. If it is a good fit for what they're trying to do, you can suggest it, and you can't suggest it or ask about it prior to establishing what they're actually trying to do with the deal. So just keep things in order, and you're going to find, yeah, you're going to get a yes on seller financing. For me, like 3, 4, 5 times a year. A great deal will come up that will be open to seller financing. They'll say yes. And if all you did was 3, 4, or 5 deals every single year and you bought based on cash flow, your income will go up every single year. That's the name of the game. That's how you play the creative finance. That's how you negotiate the creative finance. It's not about selling anyone on any idea. It's not forcing some deal to work. It's simply saying, what do they need and what do I want? Which I want long-term cash flowing fixed rate debt. You match it all up, you close the deal. I use this all the time, and I'll actually cover this in today's webinar here right after this. But an example that I often use, because it's when I figured this out, it was that 38-unit deal. Sellers wanted $2 million. Price, awesome. Half-priced real estate. Price, killer. Their income, terrible. So bank's not going to lend on it already. We know this going in. Great negotiation point. We worked the deal. Here's what they wanted that no one else could offer them is the easiest thing. They want to retire on $10,000 a month. I can't offer them $10,000 a month. It doesn't work because the property doesn't bring in $10,000 a month of cash flow. I, I need day one income. It doesn't give me a raise. I'm out. How do you make it give you a raise? I said, hey, how about no payments for 6 months, and at the 6-month mark, we'll start doing the $10K payments because it gives us tons of time to fix the rents, fix the collections. That a bunch of non-pays and they had a bunch of vacancies. Give me 6, 6 months to your management problems, $10K is nothing. And it was nothing. We got the project done, it cash flowed way more than $10,000. We paid them $10,000 a month at only 4% interest on this deal. Almost all of that payment was principal pay down, so we're rapidly paying down the loan and we're paying ourselves cash flowing. They got to retire on $10,000 a month after we paid them $300,000 down. Which, by the way, 3 investors paid them $300,000 because I had no money when I bought that deal. The solution to the deal— identify what they want first. Like, well, we either want to be cashed out for $2 million. Impossible. You have to buy it with cash, and no bank's going to lend on it in its current condition. So that's off the table. Can't give you $2 million cash. Well, if we finance, we want $10,000 a month. A lot of people would say no. We just said, how would we do that? So I said, yes, you can have $300,000 down. Yes, you can have $2 million. Yes, you can have $10,000 a month. Only difference from what you just presented is I'm going to give you $300,000 now, and you're going to wait 6 months for your $10,000 a month retirement to kick in. Can you see why they said yes to that? It's, it's not a crazy proposal. It's creative, right? Not paying your mortgage for 6 months, having no accrual of a mortgage. There's nothing accrues. Having that in place for 6 months is creative. It's not conventional, but it's not that creative. We didn't make this master plan. I'm not some real estate genius. It wasn't this one-of-one deal. It was like the stupidest, simplest thing of, hey, can I— is it possible if we map this out? I need day one cash flow forever. I need to give myself a raise for the rest of my life. That's all I need to do on every deal. And they need $10,000 a month. If that's the only thing we need to solve Can we close this deal to make 7 figures? And we did, and we did make over $1 million, and we've done it. I've done many other deals look very, very similar. It's finding what they need and the easiest way, the least creative way to creatively get from A to B. That's it. That's creative finance. That's how you negotiate it. Start by working the deal, insert the creativity if needed, propose something where they get 100% win, everything that they wanted You get everything that you want. Do this again. Well, it's multifamily. 3, 4, 5 times a year and your income will go up permanently. 3, 4, 5 times a year. Been doing this for 5 years. I've been sitting on like 25 raises. Actually, I've closed 31 transactions. One of them was cash flow negative, which is why I set my rule of never don't buy cash flow. So out of 31 transactions, I've given myself a raise 30 times. If you're trying to figure out the secret to cash flow, like, ta-da, you've seen it here on Multifamily Strategy. Um, this is a secret to real estate. So, uh, that's what I have here for today. It's a little bit quick. I, you know, I just got off an airplane, so I'm, you know, I'm setting up here in the office. I'm gonna go rebuild my studio here. But if you guys want to check out the webinar, you guys can check that out too. That's multifamilystrategy.com/webinar. Workshop. You guys are welcome to join that. That starts at the top of the hour, so in about 45 minutes. And if you guys have any questions, ask them in the chat. I'm checking Instagram and I'm checking here on YouTube, Facebook, and all the other places that we stream out to. I do see greetings from Orlando here from Happiness, so nice to see you here. If anyone has any questions, you are welcome to answer them, but I do recognize we are the day right before Thanksgiving, so I may or may not have any. Going once, going twice, going 3 times. Awesome. If you're here on YouTube or Instagram, you're watching this, the replay will live on YouTube so you guys can always reference this. If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments here. We'll address them on the next video. So I will have carryover on these. And if you, again, if you want to join a free school community, SKOOL, it is an awesome platform. I have free calculators in there for you, but more importantly, I am posting everything I learned there every single day. I'm in there answering questions personally. Uh, but if you really want to get connected, uh, there is no fee. I'll never charge a fee because we don't do subscriptions. So if you want to check out school, S-K-O-O-L, it's free there. Uh, learn everything that you want and more. And with that, everyone have an absolutely phenomenal Thanksgiving. I'll see you guys all soon.
