Scaling your Rental Property Business Quickly - Without Adding or Skipping Steps

All right, welcome to Multifamily Strategy Live, coming at you this Wednesday talking some business. Uh, really excited for today's topic. We're talking about one of the main things we talk about actually very often, but in a different light on why it's so important and how one would rapidly scale a multifamily business. Now, it's important as we do this not to add any additional steps. That's part of the efficiency here. What steps does one need to take? It's equally important not to skip any of the necessary steps. What I find for most people is that we have a massive habit of adding steps. So a little backstory on me before I had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of rentals like we do today. I started 9 to 5 Dave Ramsey method, slogging it out, saving up for rentals. This got me 2 duplexes. I think this is the speed that a lot of people go. Couple properties, a single family house, a duplex. You do your first flip, you look at— I look online and go, huh, should I be wholesaling? Should I become a broker? What does it mean to do property management? There's a lot of steps to build a business. And I'm going to start with the end. And this is one of the tips that I always give. Start with the end in mind. So if we are going to be building a business, what is the end goal? This is what mine looks like. Yours will look a little different. I have a property management company that allows me to rapidly fill and renovate units. This is extremely helpful. I like that measure of control. I wouldn't start out as a property management company. You should own the properties that you're managing. And if you get really good and your teams need extra work, you can branch out into third party and make an independently profitable company. I PM. We have the Multifamily Strategy YouTube channel, which is super fun. I get to talk about and share and grow a community around the fun stuff that we're learning together and see people all over the country do a bunch of deals. This is a great business to be in if you've actually done the thing that you're talking about, which is extremely important. So as we put everything together, step 1, lay out the businesses. So we got PM, we got multifamily strategy, we have the sales marketing org which helps me run the resort, which is another business that I wish wasn't in my universe. We're going to sideline that one right now. We'll talk about adding steps in a minute. And then you have the main company, the whole reason we got started, the company that just goes out and buys real estate. And that company is Christian— and today in Texas, Christian and Caleb and my wife Dani. 3 of us come in and we buy real estate all over the place. That is the main goal. We want to stack assets, but we also have a whole bunch of different companies and businesses that have revenue streams associated with real estate. This allows us to move even faster. And if you're looking to leave your job, you can do it just through acquisition. But if you have 1 or 2 other ways to run the business, you can do this through brokerage, through property management, or you can do it my favorite way, pay yourself to buy a bunch of deals. This was about 5 years ago. I sat in an office. Actually, it wasn't even an office, coffee shop next to an office with a gentleman named Zach Lazo. He's with Compass Real Estate, massive investor, excellent guy. In a 30-minute coffee meeting, I was thinking about getting— taking my broker's license, putting it with Compass, trying to figure out where to park it. I just left a job as a broker with no office. So I was like, okay, where do I hang my license? In that meeting, he's like, well, it looks like you have unlocked the ability to buy a lot of deals and buy them creatively. You should figure out how to make money actively doing the buying side as opposed to help other people buy real estate. Unless you want to be a broker, you should go in and make your money on the buy. And so that is exactly what we did through a model of wholesaling to ourselves, small fees up front, or just buying deals that had a lot of cash flow. I built financial freedom through the acquisition company, which was the main thing. Here's what I learned in this whole process. First of all, you don't need to be a broker to do any of this. You're not going to start your business to look exactly like my business. So here's what I would not do. Don't start the PM company, the education branch, the marketing branch, the resorts branch that you never should have started, the multifamily acquisitions branch all at the same time. That's just like buying a deal and trying to find your property manager and the contractor and the accountants and figure out your tax strategy and file your LLC and get the law firm. It's too much. You need to start with the end in mind, but start from the beginning. What steps do I need to go to the next space? Easiest way to do this is literally just whiteboard the darn thing. What does everything depend on? Most important thing, I need to go buy real estate. So what are the steps to buy real estate? Well, I need to find a deal. I need to find the debt. And then if I need additional money, we may need to bring in equity or additional debt. That's basically it. I mean, deal is only those 3 pieces, the deal, the debt, and the ownership. Deal debt equity, DDE. So we're going to master that piece and that piece alone, we're just going to isolate it. What do we need to buy a deal? I need to know how to underwrite a deal so that I know it's a deal. And I need to know enough about the closing process to get from A to B to own the property. Now, I can start thinking about management. Now, I can start thinking about accounting. Now, I can start going through all the pieces. You just keep everything in order. If you add all the steps at once, you end up with a whole bunch of companies that you suck at because you have no experience. The dumbest you will ever be is at the beginning of your business. So figure out what the goal is. For me to rapidly scale multifamily, there were a few steps. Number 1, where do you actually want to go with your portfolio? I didn't want to be just a 2-duplex investor. 8 years, bought 2 duplexes. Well, that's cool and more than a lot of people buy in their lifetime. It's not that impressive. You certainly can't live very well off of 2 duplexes. So what scale do I actually want to grow my business to? For most who want financial freedom through their real estate, it typically starts to kick in typically— there's exceptions— around 75 to 100 units. If you're doing a good job of buying based on cash flow and you lock that up, you usually have a pretty good base. That's around where freedom starts to exist for most people. Now, if you want to do this over a 10-and-a-half-year period, you can do this. I have a friend, Dion, who has done this very, very well. He did it in about a decade, maybe a little bit more. He did it in 16 units complete financial freedom. Takes a lot longer. So you need to know the timeline that you want to execute this in. You need to know the scale that you need to get to. What everyone who has ever played this game— I mean, every owner I've ever interviewed, every mentee I've ever had, this is my own experience and everyone's experience— you need to buy bigger. It doesn't mean that you can't buy a duplex. Doesn't mean you can't buy a single-family house, though I'd try to stay away from that. It means you're looking for deals. You're not looking for Hey, I decided that I want to house hack a fourplex and I'm only going to look at fourplexes in this one city that I want to live in. If you're like, man, I'm really struggling to find deals, way too specific. If instead, while you look for a fourplex to live in, you also go, okay, but a triplex or a duplex would be cool if I can do the same house hack rules and live for free or adjacent to free. That'd be a pretty good real estate investment. At the same time, I'm going to look at deals that are 5, 6, 7, maybe up to 25 units. All of a sudden, the field has grown. And if I, in the course of waiting for my house hack property, run into a 25-unit apartment building one town over from where I want to invest and the numbers are fantastic, well, guess what? My next step in business is very clear. Let's go buy this thing. Let's find the deal. Let's find the debt. Let's find the equity. And what most people find, this was true for my buddy Matthew, He did a house hack in a single-family house with 4 roommates, 5-bedroom house. While looking for his first duplex, he invested in a 44-unit apartment building. Right after closing on the duplex, he moved into that. He kept the house. He bought a 4-plex in Aberdeen, Washington. He's about to go under contract. He just submitted his offer for a 14-unit also in Aberdeen, Washington. Oh, and in the meantime, in his first year of going hard at this, he also bought 3 seller-financed properties in Central Washington. He took the opportunities and he looked beyond just, I want to do this one thing. He went, okay, I do have a goal and I am going to look for this and I would love to do this house hack strategy. But he started with what deals are available and how would I buy all of them? Rumor has it he's about to buy an RV park as well. More to be announced on that, but he is absolutely crushing it. It's not just, oh, he has this amazing job, he can afford all his real estate. He grasped the concept of you need to know where you're headed and you need to start looking for opportunities. As you find opportunities, you close on them. You can do this exact same thing. As you scale the business, so speed is the first thing. You have to scale fast, but you can't implode on the way. So keep it simple, be an excellent underwriter. Next step to scaling the business is what am I excellent at? Know your strengths. What are the strengths of the people around you? And are there ancillary systems and processes that have to be created that could be made into their own company. Perfect example. PM is a terrible business to be in. However, I have an accounting background. My entire career, all I have ever done is sell. So you want me in a pitching scenario. If only there was a business that managed and helped increase the value of properties, required accounting skill, And you could grow indefinitely if you had a good salesperson growing the company and bringing on new business. Wait a second, that's called property management. Is it for everyone? No. Is it unique to our set of skills and our needs? Absolutely. I need great management. I was having trouble finding it in Central Washington. I started my own company, and when I sold that company, I was very selective of who I seller-financed that company to. You can seller-finance companies the same way that you can real estate, by the way. This strategy moved from clear-cut path— where am I heading and are my goals too narrow? Know that we need to buy bigger, faster. And once we do that, what other ways are we going to add value and monetize our business? I'm already doing all of these projects. It is more— it's much easier for all the properties to build to one location and pay my PM or my property managers and my people out of that silo, the property management company, than it is for every single property to individually pay a property manager or an employee a little portion of their salary. That would be an accounting nightmare. Easy to say, hey, there's an automated PM fee. It all goes into one profit center. It goes out from this profit center, and that is how we pay our vendors, our property managers, our bookkeepers. The whole ecosystem in one space. Then you look at the other things and you can keep scaling and scaling and scaling and adding on companies. Many people buy a maintenance company and add it in as a bolt-on into their property management. And you can go from that to home services. You can go all these different directions, but it's about quickly and decisively scaling, understanding where you want to go, and then learning how to rapidly and accurately identify opportunity. This has changed an 8-year to buy 4 units into 4 years to buy 325 units, which will be 400-and-something units here shortly, going under contract for another 144 units. That's a pretty big portfolio. Am I a multi-thousand-unit titan? Absolutely not. But I've also been playing this game for like 4 and a half years from when this all started to click for me. Give me a decade, I'll have thousands of units. Does unit count matter? Abso-freaking-lutely not. What does matter is moving forward and growing your business. This is a core belief that I have, and I encourage you to adopt it. And then we'll open this up to Q&A. So if you have questions, start posting your comments here now. When you are growing, scaling, operating a company, The goal is to keep doing exactly that, growing, scaling, operating. There are only two modes of operation. You are growing or you are dying. It is okay for a company to be dying when you are done with it. And around that time before it starts declining too much, when you're like, hey, I'm on the end of what I'm going to do in this company, that is where you start looking for a buyer. Every company that you build at some point should be structured in a way where it is sellable to the next person. So even if, like me, you start out as a solopreneur and you grind, grind, grind to build these businesses, you're constantly wanting to add systems and functions to increase passivity so that you are not a key person in every entity. If you do this accurately and you remove the key man problem from every company, you end up with sellable pieces. You scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale until you are done. And when you are done, you sell it. This is what I'm doing in my resort business. It's not scaled to where it needs to be yet. I do not have the right level of income and passivity, but we're close. So what I'll be doing and announcing soon, I'm going to be taking on some partners to finish that project. There is some upside in that that is glorious. We're going to come into that project and we're going to take it to the next level. My goal is to retire from hospitality. We're still in growth mode, so we're going to finish growth mode and then I will retire from hospitality while keeping my other core businesses growing. And at some point, way off in the future, my property management company will grow to where I envisioned it would be, and I'll be able to phase myself out of the company with the correct layers of management and will sell it, likely seller-financed, to someone else. And then they will pay me in perpetuity to do my job. It's wonderful stuff. That is how you scale a company. That's how you skip adding steps. You don't try to do everything at once. You know where you're headed. You mark where you're headed and you realize speed is everything. I'll close on this before we answer questions. You will die at some point. That is a thing that you should be aware of. If you— if this is news to you, this may be shocking. If this is— but it shouldn't be new news. All of us will die at some point. So since your time is limited, the speed in which you get to your goals is paramount. So if you have a big goal or you're just trying to get to your first $10,000 a month passive income,, which does not take as long as you think. It will take you forever if you try to do it just one house at a time or just one duplex at a time. If you build a model that scales, I buy 3, maybe 4 transactions a year. I've done a 44 this year. I'm about to close 76. I'll do the 144. Probably I might do a— I'll probably do a fourth deal. I'll probably do one deal in Q4. About a deal a quarter. That's all it takes. To get hundreds and hundreds of units within a decade. I'll probably end up with a couple thousand units. It's a scalable business and everything scaled controllably. We're not sprinting to the finish. You can end up with a huge company with lots of revenues. This has made me millions of dollars and a six-figure monthly, multiple six-figure monthly income across all the companies. That gets really comfortable real fast. I was fortunate enough to be able to buy this house in in cash, which was really helpful, or technically financed it, then basically instantly paid it off in less than a year. And we're able to do that because we stacked these businesses and we really focused on how critical is it to hit our goals in a timely manner. It doesn't look like I have any comments for today. If anyone has any questions, comments, anything to add to today's on how to scale, awesome. If not, you are more than welcome to leave your like and subscribe and get out of here. I'll keep talking for a little bit though. I'll give you guys time if you guys want to do that because there is more to this for sure. But I always want to make sure that I give the time for the Q&A. And if you guys have any questions that I adequately and accurately answer them. Something that I found in scaling business, one of the biggest things that I ever ran into, the ability to hire and fire quickly. So when you're coming into a business, you need talent. It's about putting— because you don't want to be a solopreneur. I promise you, it's better to have a job working for someone else's awesome company than just work for yourself forever. I promise. It sounds great for a while, but you have 3 steps to freedom, at least what I found. Most of us start out working for someone else, getting skills, getting abilities. You have the dependency phase, which is fine. Get those skills. I don't regret a day at CoStar. Then you get to the control phase. Hey, I've been working for someone, someone for so long, I really want to control my universe. And that's where you get the solopreneur. I'm the key person in every company. I'm driving forward. I'm the sales, the marketing, the operating, the accounting. Maybe have a few vendors in here, but it's really you piloting the ship. Stage 3, we call this diversified competency. I should not be the best person in my business at any task. So we find people who we can depend on, who we can scale with, who we can grow with, and with them build a better company. So it's about getting the right people on the bus and then moving those people around the bus. And sometimes you outgrow people, or even better, this is my favorite, sometimes people outgrow you. Some of my favorite employees have become great friends who own their own companies, and there's a time when I've encouraged them, hey, you need to go out and do some of this on your own. You have scaled this as far as you can scale yourself in my company, and that is awesome. I want you to grow to the next step. It is okay to be a stepping stone. It's also okay to have people who suck in your business and get them out immediately. But if you're constantly editing the people in your universe, on the bus, in the business, and you're moving people around, promoting up and shifting places, you end up with highly competent people who are better than you at every aspect of your business. My accountants are better than me at accounting. My salespeople are catching up to me. Oh, I am still the key person there, but they're getting really good. They're getting really good. My marketers are better marketers than I am. My property managers are better property managers than I am. My leasing team is better at leasing than I am, and so on. And what you end up having is a sustainable and marketable business. You can start growing beyond yourself. Now, as I use my talents to bring in new capital, new investors, new deals into the universe alongside with Caleb Hommel, all of these different avenues are professionally managed and we get more and more excellent all the time. That's the next phase. We do finally have some comments and questions here, so I will start flashing them up on the screen and we're rocking on the Q&A. For giving out and sharing your knowledge with others. Oh, well, absolutely happy to do that. That is what this channel is all about. This is— YouTube is free and I love sharing the journey. I appreciate that we have people who actually watch this and enjoy the content that we put out. So, as long as we have any audience, I will continue to be here. Oscar, the real estate will buy the real estate, uh, whether we refinance or not. Please explain what you mean and how you do that. Okay, so if I buy it on long-term cash flowing fixed rate debt, uh, I will be paid to own it indefinitely. You can do, uh, some of my notes, uh, so for example, deal that I'm not refinancing, 30-year fixed rate fully amortized note, seller financed, cash flow day one, cash flow is $3,000 a month, $1,000 today. Why would I ever sell that? It will just pay itself off over 30 years. I don't have to touch it. I don't have to think about it. I get paid to own it. Rent increases. We've set them to like— I think we set it to 5% automatic, and then it'll jump to market whenever we do a lease-up, a new unit. But it just automatically goes up by 5%. I get a 5% raise on that property every year for the next 30 years. I've owned it for 3, 3.5, maybe 4 now. I've owned it for quite a while. Fully amortized debt. There's no reason to refinance that. It is totally fine. Sure, we can pull capital out of it. Why bother? It's doing fantastic. It does not need to be touched. The interest rate is 5%. Awesome product. That's what I mean by the real estate needs to buy the real estate. We do a purchase one time, raised capital, our own money. It doesn't matter what. Debt. We buy the property and we don't put more money into it. From the point that we do a down payment, the real estate will continue to buy the real estate. And if we are doing a refinance, often what it looks like is we'll bring new capital, either debt or partners, into a building. We'll do a refinance and everyone will get a huge return when we pull the money out, and I'll keep the building. Everyone makes money, but the real estate bought the real estate. The income from the real estate, the appreciation of the real estate, all of these can be spent back into the real estate. That is what buying the real estate, buying the real estate means. Hey, Chris. Note, my name is Christian. It's not Chris. It's okay. This is YouTube. We don't know each other really well, but Chris is technically not my name. I live in Northern Virginia. Which market around here would you say is cash flowing? Well, Virginia is interesting. You're a market that is— it's not the cheapest market in the country. It's also not the most expensive. Cash flow, you're kind of right in the mid-zone of higher appreciation, middle-of-the-road cash flow. You're kind of where high cash flow markets meet high appreciation markets. People do like living there. You have population growth all over the place. I know like outskirts of Richmond, Virginia traditionally do very well. If you go Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, you're gonna have trouble finding a deal. There's a companies love buying multifamily in Richmond proper. But I would say get within an hour and a half radius of that, you're looking pretty good. Other than that, uh, Virginia is not a market I personally invest in. We do have plenty of people in the mentorship group who invest in the, uh, Virginias and just all along the Southeast. And Oscar, Oh, oh, this is clarification of his previous, previous question. I think I might have just autocorrected in my mind when I read it because I read it the way that it was set here. That's what we have for questions on Q&A. It's a short and sweet one, which I'm totally fine with. We do this every single week at the same time, so mark your calendars. Great to see everyone here. In summary, or if you just dove in, Scale quickly. Speed is very important. Do not crash and burn. Don't try to do everything at once, but break everything into its parts. I see a question from Jesse. We're going to get to that one too, but break everything into its parts. Where am I headed? What steps would one need to get from A to B? What is critical? And then what is the next step? And let's spend 95% of our attention. Sure, you can do some business planning, but 95% of your attention is going to be on what is the next step and how am I going to get there efficiently. And then the other 5% of your time can be spent on the rest of the noise of here's the things that we need to put in place for the future and here's a couple of phone calls or relationships I need to build. Keep doing that, but that really should be about 5% of your time. 95% of my time, Kevin O'Leary says this all the time and I really like this. What is signal and what is noise? Signals like, okay, if we have 100 things to do in a day, what are the most critical, most important 5 things? Try to spend 80 to 95% of your time on those and nothing else. Everything else is noise. You can do stuff in the noise, and sometimes it's nice mentally to take a break from all signal, but most of what you should be doing is signal. So what is the most important thing, the most critical thing? If you are spending most of your time and, hey, I want to be good at marketing and legal, but you don't have any property, what's the marketing and the legal for? It's really easy to sit in those. I know for me, I struggle with when I am feeling overwhelmed or the tasks feel too big, or I'm just feeling a little bit of just like, I'm like, man, we pushed really hard. I tend to sit back into the marketing because I have fun with the content creation. So I can sit down and be like, hey, how do we, how do we grow the channels? How do we get more people to know about our deals? For me, The noise for me is I over— I overfocus on marketing because marketing is the easiest task that I have and it's the most relaxing task. Eliminate as much noise as you can. Don't get it out of your universe. There's a place for the future steps, but the things that get you to the next step now should be a vast majority of your time. All right. Jesse, new to real estate investing. What do you think about North Carolina? Both Carolinas. Tons of people moving in. They've been hot for 10 years and they're still hot, and you're still seeing rent growth beyond what a lot of the country is. Uh, people love moving to the Carolinas. At the end of the day, I think I say this on every live at least once, at the end of the day, what do we do? We love the people who rent from us. We want to provide great housing to great humans. But the end of the day, supply and demand curve is this: housing for humans. Do humans want to live here? Do people enjoy living here? If the answer is yes, which usually means just population steadily going up, probably a really good market. Hard to find a market in either Carolina where population is not increasing. Christian, thank you for that. Christian, what about markets around Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee? Okay, so we just covered Carolina conveniently. Tennessee. Lots of strong markets there. I have multiple friends and people in the mentorship group, I have both, who invest in Clarksville, Tennessee. It's about— I haven't been there in a while. A military town though. It's about an hour-ish, maybe less, north of Nashville. Really strong market. If you go to the farthest east side of the state in the Smoky Mountains, lots of population growth. If there was anywhere that I lived in the US outside of Dallas, I think my favorite place that I've been is Knoxville, Tennessee. I love the architecture there. I love the people there. I love the environment. I love the proximity to the— they call them mountains. I'm from Seattle. They're like the big hills that they call the Smoky Mountains. It's a really cool atmosphere. I really like it over there. And I'm not alone. People love living there. Great place to invest, lots of opportunity. And I've noticed not a lot of great property managers. If you have management skill or a management plan that you can execute on, I think someone could clean up the Knoxville market. What section of the LLC docs do you put the obligation to buy out? So that is actually the option to buy out is an option agreement. It is technically a separate document, but I usually, when we send everything for signature, I do it attached to the OA. So it's like an— it is not an actual addendum to the OA, but my operating agreement will reference the buyout agreement. And then I'll actually have a buyout option contract, which is just like any option to purchase. I have a fixed price and a fixed period of time to buy you out of this property for whatever we negotiated the price to be. That's all it is. So it is just a general option contract. Of course, get actual legal counsel. But ChatGPT can write an awesome option contract if you want to put it together and say, hey, I'm trying to buy someone out for this price in this period of time. What would this generally look like? ChatGPT will write you up a beautiful, a beautiful thing that will show you exactly what you're looking for. Are you getting good deals with the high interest and tariffs? Well, there's no tariffs on real estate, so that makes it pretty easy. The high interest, that is why we're getting a lot of the deals that we're getting actually. The higher interest rates, they've been high long enough where people who got too aggressive, they bought on variable rate debt or their debt's just coming due and they underwrote to a rosier scenario. They're out of extensions. I'm picking up some of the properties I'm picking up were purchased by large buying groups. They overpaid for them when they bought them. Assuming the market will magically save them. Since interest rates are up, I'm buying— there's one building I'm buying for $1.5 million less than the other person did, and they raised capital. $1.5 million less. Yeah, it's in Abilene, Texas, than they originally purchased for 4 years ago. The high interest rates have been an amazing gift. Especially if you're on the buy side. If you are on the selling side, gets a lot more difficult. But that's why it's a buyer's market. We're finding so many deals right now and actually being able to push the deal because there's real pain in the market, which is what you want as far as being a buyer. President Trump wants to lower rates. How will that affect the real estate market? When rates go down, real estate goes up and everyone refinances. I cash flow in— well, I mean, I have a couple renovation projects, so, you know, my vacant 9-plex is not cash flowing. That goes without saying. But generally speaking, I have a portfolio of hundreds of hundreds of units that cash flow on today's rates, or whatever rate I locked in years ago. If they drop rates, I refinance all of it and my income just goes up. Or we can pull a ton of money out and we can go buy a bunch more stuff. But Everyone's going to rush back into real estate, which also drives up— so demand to buy real estate goes up. People want to place capital at low interest rates. Tons of refinances come in. My income goes up. Your competition goes up. Recommendation: learn how to buy deals today. I think we have a 12 to 18 month window before we see significant drops in interest rates. The president doesn't control the interest rates, but he has a lot of influence over the Fed. If we get Jerome Powell out of there, It's a very good bet that we are going to see interest rates start dropping and potentially dropping substantially. I don't underwrite any of my deals to that. I underwrite them being the same as they are today. But there's a potential for me to— cap rates compress, real estate skyrockets, and real estate is due to skyrocket. We have had an elongated downturn, which is the best time to buy. I think we're going to have a slow and steady upturn, but if they rapidly drop rates, we'll see a big rush into real estate. When interest rates drop, will it be harder to buy creatively? You know what, when interest rates were 3%, I was doing a lot of seller finance deals. When they went to 8%, I'm still doing a lot of seller finance deals. I don't think so. I think the general buyer profiles, there's always going to be people scaling up and down. There's always going to want to be people who want to negotiate terms over price. I don't think so. It just looks a little bit different, but it's the same thing. I think it's roughly the same amount of people are going to be open to creative. I don't see huge swings in the number of creative finance deals regardless of the market. Personally, I see it be pretty consistent. That's a good one. Having trouble getting meetings with owners that are familiar or in favor of creative financing. I'm from a small town. How would you go about finding these? Always work the deal without the creativity. And here's what I mean. So someone brings a deal to me, I'm talking about the rent roll, we're talking about problems they've experienced with the property. What does the project actually look like? How is the bank going to be looking at this? Sometimes they'll bring up creative finance because they're like, oh, I don't know that they might need you to put 50% down because my books are bad, or we have some big maintenance things that really do need to be looked at. We want to get a full picture of the deal, and then it's just a natural question. When we get into financing, we talk about the bank financing, we just bring up like, okay, is there any room for creativity on this? The difference is if you open with like, hey, I'm trying to do something creative, you're just saying— this is like putting a sticker on your head that says I have no money. It's fine if you don't have any money, but you don't want to advertise that. You want to start with, hey, I'm a competent individual who asks good questions and will be able to buy real estate. Now that we're engaged in real estate, what are the options? That's usually for most people, that's the missing piece. Work the deal, not the debt. Once you have the deal put together, start with the bank financing, start with the general questions. And what you've done is you've positioned yourself from someone who knows what to ask, someone who's interested in the deal, someone who's capable of buying a deal, and now you're going through what options do we have and what makes the most sense. That is the biggest difference. Chris Lucas saw 7 bucks for sale, hasn't gone down in cost. I'm wondering if they overpaid. Kind of thinking about how to find— yeah, well, in some of these deals, they're going to be stuck until they start getting foreclosed on, and then they're going to look at how big of a loss can I take. There are some people who are just like, I can't lower my price because I'm going to lose money. There are going to be some people who lose money in real estate. It's just going to happen with the way that they bought years ago. If you bought and you forecasted rents are going to go up and up and up forever— rents do not always skyrocket up. There is a market, there are cycles. We're in a down cycle, which is the time to load up. If you ever looked at, uh, we'll compare it to stock. I mean, if you ever know, uh, you buy when it's low, you sell when it's high. That's the goal. If you're waiting for the market to be perfect to buy in, your prices are going to skyrocket when interest rates change. So Right now, it's about the hardest that has been in a long time to operate, find good deals, to negotiate them. It's the best time to buy. Every deal you buy in this market works in every market. All right, people getting deported. How will this affect the real estate market in Texas? Not very much at all. That is way overhyped online. We do not have this massive illegal workforce. That is not where most of the economy is. You're not allowed to have illegal employees. While some businesses utilize this, this is not most of the workforce. And to be honest, for most jobs outside of manual labor, most jobs, it's cheaper to use virtual assistants and other people overseas the correct way. It's not even cost effective to— not worth the risk, not worth the cost. It's not as widely spread as media would have you believe. I don't think it will have any significant impact. Act at all. Maybe if you're like on the border, on the border, the Laredo, Texas. But my rents have still gone up in Laredo. I have an 8-plex there that is absolutely crushing. Chris, to expand on the 7-plex, do you think they overpaid and are wishing— I have no idea what they've done. I haven't talked to them. Uh, it happens a lot though. Your likelihood is pretty high. Sometimes people just get set on a price they think their property's worth, and it's on market for thousands and thousands of days. Uh, the 38-plex that got me started was on market for 12 and a half years. They got the price though. They want $2 million, 12 and a half years ago, a lot of appreciation later. I bought it for the price they originally wanted. Can your equity partners and investors use their proof of funds pre-approval bank letter on your behalf for PFS? The answer is yes. Uh, very common. I always let people know if they're like, hey, can I see proof of funds? I don't know. Awesome. Yep. I have a couple partners I'm going to run this past. I'll be doing this with capital partners. Let me grab some proof of funds from one of them. Whoever's the most interested sends proof of funds. That does not have to be the person who ultimately funds the deal. I just want to bring someone who is legitimately interested. When they start the foreclosure or find foreclosed commercial 5 to 20 units— sorry, my camera's right here. If you see me jumping around, camera's right in front of my screen. I'm wondering How you are finding that info? I'm usually asking. I don't buy things pre-foreclosure, foreclosure. I'm not going after— there's all these niches where you're like, oh, I'm a foreclosure expert. I'm a deal-making expert. I meet people, so I don't care if they're about to be foreclosed on. Awesome. They'll tell me because I've talked to them. It's all relationships, 100% of my pipeline. I'm talking to owners, I'm talking to brokers. People are coming to me with the deal. I don't go after deals. I go after relationships. The deals come after me. And I don't mean that to sound arrogant at all. That is the model that I originally built because I don't want to have a full-time sales and marketing job. That's why I do 4 deals a year. And this is why I'm so consistent. It is easy and is sustainable. I meet some people for coffee every single week, about 100 people a year. I did 100 contacts. You know exactly what I'm trying to do in the markets that I'm trying to operate in. The deals do ultimately come to me. Appreciate you. Well, Chris, thank you very much. I appreciate you. Final question here. I'm interested in purchasing your real estate course. Oh, fun. Can you please tell me a little bit about it? Okay. This channel is not an ad for Multifamily Strategy, but I will absolutely share because what's happening there is amazing. As of yesterday, we have 4 people closing deals this month, not including me. Multi-Family Strategy and its mentees, just collectively, the whole group is probably going to close about 125 to 150 units this month. There'll be at least 5 people doing their first deal with some repeat business coming in for people getting their first, second, or third deals. So very exciting. We are— we have a course that is on demand. It's 5% of the value and it's still phenomenal. Beats any other course online. 350 or some odd videos. On everything from start to finish— scripting, calculators, downloads, owner meetings, call scripts, interviewing your property manager, finding the right legal team, going through accounting, cost segregation studies, renovations, you name it. The mentorship's 3 times a week. We do calls kind of like this, Q&A, every single Monday. Tuesday's deal deep dive— watch people from all over the country. We went 2.5 hours last week with 15 deals that we underwrote. So you're going to learn live on actual deals. And Thursday's a structured lesson. Also, kind of like I start these calls, I have one topic, we get deep in it, and then we get to actually engage. The big difference, you get a lot more time and it's actually me with you. Then I give out my personal phone number. I do one-on-ones all the time. The only goal and the sole purpose of the company is to make sure that everyone there buys real estate. So I have nothing else to sell you. There is no magical $50,000 upsell. And there are no subscriptions. You pay once and you are in until you have deemed yourself successful enough to move on. I don't want you in a 3 to 5 hour a week with me for the rest of your life. This isn't school. This is copy my business, replicate perfectly, buy your deal and move on. And we guarantee everyone who signs up will buy a deal that cash flows at least $1,000 a month. And we work with you indefinitely until you do. That is the entire program. I have nothing else to sell you. And no subscriptions. My only goal is that you buy real estate. That's Christian's pitch. Jesse, I will see you in mentorship. Oscar, is it a good time to invest in real estate? We're in a buyer's market. Yes. We got a businessman as president. Yes, we do. Good time opportunity. I know it varies a lot. I think this is the best time since I've been investing to buy real estate. You want to buy when it's hard because it's kind of all up from there. So if you get, if you get a good deal, that means cash flows, long-term fixed rate debt, and rates come down, you can refinance, you can pull more money out, your cash flows go up, but your deal worked when it was hard. It will definitely work when it's easy. Best, best time. And I know a bunch of people say this online. Seriously, this right now, this last quarter has been the best time I have seen ever to buy deals. Uh, this is an ad from someone on some platform. We will go ahead and skip, uh, this one and move over here. Is the course specific to multifamily? I have had people use it for RV and mobile home parks, which is a subset of multifamily. Uh, we had a student, Hayden, who bought a 180-unit mobile home park— or not mobile home park, I try that again— self-storage facility, and he's knocking it out of the park. I've had a few mentees come through and build hospitality businesses. It's on real estate and creative finance, which is applicable across the board. My focus is primarily multifamily, so there is a good chunk of it on property management and optimal operations and renovations that probably won't help you too much if you want to do self-storage, as an example. So no, it's not exclusively multifamily and you could be very successful, but multifamily strategy per its name, does have a very heavy focus on that, which is my core business. I am absolutely convinced that we put more time and I personally coach it. I do not outsource it. So you will always work with me. I put more time and energy into this than anyone else online. I absolutely guarantee that there is no one who puts more time and energy into the mentorship than I do, period, bar none. And there we go. We will end there, guys. Thanks for attending. Remember, scale the darn business. Don't be— not that you can't buy one rental at a time, but don't just focus on one rental house at a time. It's not just about one strategy, your next house hack, the next flip. Know what you want to build. And if you want to build a portfolio that takes care of you, you're going to need to scale again. If you want to do it relatively quickly, you're probably getting 75 to 100 units. Anyone can do this in a 3 to 5 year period. I did it in a 1 year period. It was really hard. But if you do it, you could do it in 1. More realistically, most people end of year 2, 3, 4, you acquire enough units, you stabilize them, you have that $10,000 to $15,000 a month in cash flow, and you can do it doing 4 deals a year. It is not a high volume game. It is a simple, repeatable strategy. Anyone can do it. I encourage you guys all to scale, keep it simple, do things one step at a time. And if you haven't yet, make sure that you map out what your pathing's going to be for this. Thank you guys for watching. This is Multifamily Strategy. I'm running a creative finance webinar right after this. So if you guys want to, you can check it out on my Instagram, Christian Osgood. Go to the Multifamily Strategy brand channel. I have a post in there where you can click that link, register for the webinar. So if you're looking at joining, might have, might have a little bonus for you in there. But if you are looking to join Multifamily Strategy, I encourage you to look through the methods that we are applying to buy real estate with or without money. I go through all of them—seller financing, bank financing, $0 out of pocket, how to use partners, private capital—and we're going to do it in 90 minutes. So if you guys want to check that out, that is here in about 15 minutes. Again, go to Christian Osgood on Instagram, join that Multifamily Strategy brand channel. It'll be right in there. I'll see you guys soon.