Cody and Christian Osgood argue that chasing every profitable opportunity kills focus. Christian left a high-earning CoStar role to build a vertically integrated real estate business instead, showing how aligned ventures reinforce each other. Skip the shiny objects—Airbnb, crypto, NFTs—and build a coherent strategy around clear cash-flow goals.
Chapters
Hey YouTube, this is Cody. I've got Christian back for this week's rule number 3 when looking at real estate investing: just because it makes money doesn't mean it makes sense.
And there are a lot of things out there that can make money, and if you try to do all of them, you're going to do a whole lot of nothing. For example, Airbnb. I know people who make a killing in Airbnb and short-term, mid-term rentals. There's all sorts of different strategies, even in as narrow a field as just the category of real estate. However, if you do a bit of everything, you're not going to be excellent at anything. And that is something that Cody and I have tried really hard to stay in our lane, come up with a strategy that works specifically for us that we know how to master and can consistently get results on.
Sometimes when you're getting started, there's a, there's a lot of noise. And regardless where you're at in your cycle, whether you're getting, you know, starting day one with one rental, no rentals, or you have a whole bunch of rentals there's a lot of distractions, the shiny object syndrome. I've got friends who are making money off of crypto pictures, and you know, I'm not all into that. You know, the digital salmon's cool and all, but at the end of the day, just because they can make a little bit of money doing that, or a lot of money doing that, that wouldn't make sense for me. And I like to think of everything as storytelling. You need to do things that build off of your story, not things that detract from where you're looking to actually go. And so while I could go make money doing what they're doing, go make a few thousand bucks, it's great. My story is more so in the real estate space, and I'm trying to build that. And so if you're seeing a whole bunch of people out there doing all these different things, think about the story you want to build for yourself, cultivate that, and don't do things that are going to pull away or detract from that vision.
And this is why goal setting is so important. You should know exactly what you're trying to accomplish and why you're trying to accomplish it. In addition to having a set timeline to do that. If you know where you're headed, you can quickly identify what things do and do not get you closer to that goal. For example, Cody and I have a specific cash flow goal for each of us that we are trying to attain. When we got started, I know for myself it was I wanted to replace my old income. I had a $20,000 a month target. Now, if we were going back to the Airbnb example, if we were trying to do $20,000 a month consistently every month where I know what's coming in, but I have an income stream that has variable income, I don't know that I'm gonna hit that every month. Or what if a law changes to Airbnb that throws that off? I'm gonna have to adjust. For me, what made sense are annual leases, recurring revenue that I can count on month by month. As we've expanded some of our businesses, we incorporated property management. Now, we have to identify, is that a shiny object, or is that directly complementary to what we are doing? In our case, it's a company with a consistent, calculable revenue stream. We know what's coming in, and we can help control our existing properties, which also bring in consistent monthly cash flow. Every target you have needs to serve your goal and your target.
And think about it as if it was vertically aligned. Everything we want to do and build, we want it to be aligned. And so when we're going out and buying real estate, that helps build the property management company. And that also helps build the consulting company. Everything works together. Christian used to make a bunch of money working at CoStar, but he didn't get the opportunity to do everything else. You had to be all in at CoStar and that, yeah, he could make $20,000 a month selling because he's really good at it. But that didn't give him the opportunity to actually go invest in real estate, build out other companies. He wasn't allowed to do that. So it didn't make sense even though it made money. Mm-hmm.
And this is exactly right. There are so many things, be it digital salmon, short-term rentals, and we're not equating those two. They're totally different. I don't know what happens on your YouTube feed, but I get hammered with ads for Amazon dropshipping. I don't know why, but there are so many gurus trying to get me to buy their course on, hey, this is the one thing that's going to make you rich. I'm like, wow, if everyone's doing the same thing, that sounds like there's a ton of competition. That being said, does that make sense and does that grow what we're trying to do? For me, I probably could make a lot of money because we have a decent grasp of how to market. We probably could do decent dropshipping. That's probably something we could do, and it wouldn't align with anything else we have going on. Vertical integration is really important. If you are dedicated to multifamily, what other things directly complement what you're doing and enhance each other? When Project A and Project B work in synergy, where this increases this, both of them are greater together than they are separate. That's what you're looking for on things that make sense and make money. If you try to stack a whole bunch of income streams and just pull income from over here and over here and way over here, wherever you're pulling income from, if they're not aligned with each other, you're just giving yourself more work and you're going to ultimately Slow yourself down.
That said, while you're going out and you're building your portfolio or building a business, you're going to college, focus on things that compound after each other. I mean, you want things to build off each other. If you're going out and you're just doing a whole bunch of different things to get a quick buck here, you're doing that little side hustle that doesn't actually fuel you for what you're looking to go accomplish, you probably shouldn't do it. And so keep that in mind. Do things that not only make money but make sense for where you're going and what you're trying to accomplish.
The last thing that I'll say in this section is you have to do a risk assessment every time you do something. There are opportunities that may come your way that just sound too good to be true. They're super lucrative, just this incredible opportunity. Cody and I have seen a few of these where it's just like, oh my gosh, I can make so much money if everything goes right. Take the time before you do something just because it could make money. It could absolutely not make sense. If you had a, you know, you run the numbers, you have a 5% chance of making $10 million, but if you're wrong, you lose $100,000, probably still wouldn't do it. Even if there's a chance out there, I'm like, well, odds are I'm pretty much gonna lose $100,000. That kinda sucks. The opportunity's big, it's shiny, do a risk assessment. Every time. Because again, if it could make money, it could absolutely also not make any sense at all. Keep these things in mind as you're moving forward creating your own set of rules. But this is our rule number 3: just because it makes money doesn't mean it makes sense.
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