Christian Osgood scaled from a 9-to-5 job to over 100 rental units in seven years by committing fully to each deal and acting on what he learned. He targets multifamily properties, builds relationships with owners instead of chasing listings, and moves up from duplexes to larger units like 16 or 38-unit buildings.
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Hello YouTube, it's Christian Osgood and I am back this week for our rules of real estate. Application is more important than the information. This may be the most important video that I'll share in all of these rules, so stick around. This is going to apply to you if you're newer to real estate or if you have less than 100 units today. I'm going to start by briefly sharing a little of my journey. If you have not followed this channel for a long time, this may be new to you, but I worked 7 years in a 9-to-5 saving up to buy real estate. My dream was to own real estate. It took me 7 years to buy my first duplex. Quickly after that, I bought a second one and I was out of money completely. I spent what I had and put it in real estate. I had a choice then. Do I save up another 7 years to move forward again, or do I start getting creative and play with the pieces I have? I don't have money anymore, so how do we leverage time, relationships, and knowledge to move forward faster. 12 months later, I'll be crossing 100 units here in the next few months. So, first off, you may be stuck on the education loop. So this is where you watch BiggerPockets, which is an awesome channel, and then you watch Dion talk, and you watch whoever you're gonna watch on YouTube, and then you read a book, and then you go to a convention, and every time you get motivated You get that intentionality, you get excited, you start putting together your plan, and at the end of the day, you may not own real estate, or you don't own as much as you want. First thing you need to do is you need to make a full commitment. When I started my journey, I did not have a large enough commitment to real estate, and I lost 7 years of time. Now, you only get so many chunks of 7 years through your life, so my first recommendation is when you get information and you decide, hey, I'm gonna apply this and I'm gonna do something with it, 100% commit in that moment. The next thing you want to do is you want to set up a timeline. For Cody and I, about a year and a half ago, we met at Grant Cardone's GrowthCon, 10X GrowthCon, and we set this crazy goal of, hey, I'm gonna scale myself from 4 units to 50 units in 1 year. That timeline gave me the motivation to push. It really helped that my next building was a 38-unit building. However, that only got me to 42 units, so I had to keep pushing. We blew that goal way out of the water, and the reason being is we applied the information as we got it, which brings me to my next point. And this is where Cody and I move as fast as we do. I don't know that everyone does this, and if you want a secret to move very, very quickly This is the one thing. When you learn new information or you have any meeting, you go to an event, you read a book, whatever, you need to have a clear takeaway. So, you're going to sit down and you go to an event, find a buddy, a friend, a family member, a spouse. It doesn't matter who, but you need to recap, "Hey, what were my takeaways?" Put them into words. If you're someone who likes to journal, this is a great way to do this. Write them down. At this event, I learned this. Then write how you're going to apply that. Cody and I do this in every single meeting, every single coffee meeting, every phone call. We look at each other and say, what were your takeaways? Right now, I'm solo this week because Cody is in Belize. Every day we have a phone call going over Cody's takeaways. I'm running a whole bunch of admin back here. I'm sharing all my takeaways every day. Hey, I learned we should be doing this, or have you heard this idea? Cody's calling me, "Hey, I learned something new about the economy. How do you think this applies to our business?" If you have that level of intentionality and combine that with a timeline to perform, you will start surpassing all of your goals. You will be able to move forward faster than anyone else. If you notice behind me, I have a lot of books. Now, some of these are comic books, and that is just for my own entertainment. A lot of these are books on real estate, tax strategies, property management, brokerage. It's all about real estate. Every time I read a chapter, I pause, I take the time to figure out how am I going to apply this. So practical application for you, if you're just starting and you're at the beginning of your journey, buy a piece of multifamily property. That is your target. The first deal is always the hardest. And once you clear that hurdle, you're going to be able to move faster. You're going to have a bunch of takeaways that you apply to the next transaction, the next transaction, the next transaction. If you are not there yet, how do you find this first deal? You need to start connecting with owners. Don't go after their properties. Don't look for transactions. That's not how you play the game. You need to go out and meet with owners, and from those owners, they're going to introduce you to other people. And as you form connections in your market, deals will start to come in front of you. Your mission is to close one of those. You set your timeline. At this point, it's a great place to pause the video. Think about how fast do I want to move? What are the pieces I have and what am I comfortable with? How can I challenge what I'm comfortable with to take it to the next level? If today you are just comfortable taking down the duplex, Great place to start. If you want to push yourself, push it to 4 units. It's roughly the same, barely more expensive, still falls in the residential rules. However you're going to take that down is going to be very similar to a duplex. If you're looking at 10 units, why not push for a 16-plex or a 20-plex? Set your goal, push it a little out of your comfort zone, and then set your timeline on when am I going to accomplish it. As you absorb information, just make sure you continue to apply it relentlessly. If you can do that, you're going to move forward faster than anyone else in your space, I absolutely promise you. One story I'm going to share here is the 38-plex that Cody and I purchased. So this was October of last year, 2021. There's a 38-plex that's been on the market For 13 years. Cody was 8 years old when this thing first came on market. Now, at the time, I had just purchased my second duplex. It was a heavy renovation project. So I had done, in the city, 2 units renovation. I had an idea what the cost would be. No idea what it looks like to take on 38 of those at the same time, but I at least had a team, I had some connections. Cody had purchased 30 units. A lot of them originally were in a little rougher shape, and he had helped manage them and bring those buildings up. He elevated the buildings. Now, if we wanted to keep doing what we already knew how to do, we could keep buying 12-plexes and duplexes, do small renovation projects, and we could stay relatively small. Or we can apply the information we've learned to expand. 38 units was bigger than any of us. However, I knew that Cody knew how to handle management of 30 units. Rougher units in the same market. I knew that I had the connections and the experience to at least begin to quote and start doing renovations. We combined our knowledge, committed to moving forward towards that original goal of mine of, hey, let's push to 30 units by 30, and GrowthCon pushed that to, hey, let's just push to 50. This was a big enough project to move me towards my goals. It was a big enough project for Cody to more than double his portfolio. We worked together on it, and that was the beginning of our partnership. That's where we're at today. So again, the application is always more important than the information. Now, we share all these rules on our website, themultifamilystrategy.com. If you're not part of the squad, I recommend you join. Other than that, Like, subscribe. We're going to share all of our rules here over the next several weeks. We have 35 of them. They're all going to be available to you. If you have any questions, post below for Whiteboard Wednesday. We will see you in 2 days.
