In this conversational YouTube episode, Christian Osgood and Cody dismantle several common real‑estate myths that circulate online. They begin by refuting the claim that seller financing is illegal, explaining that contracts for seller‑financed sales have existed throughout history and are perfectly lawful. They then tackle the belief that no viable deals exist on MLS, LoopNet, or CREXi, showing how focusing on cash‑flow and structuring favorable debt can turn seemingly dead listings into profitable purchases. The hosts share concrete examples of zero‑down or low‑down acquisitions—including a tiny‑house deal with no money down and a $1.1 million property bought with only 4.5 % down—to prove that such transactions are possible. They address the age objection, arguing that young investors can succeed by building relationships and offering win‑win scenarios, and they recount their own experience of securing a first bank loan after using seller financing, illustrating how lenders can be convinced when the deal is structured correctly. Throughout, they emphasize a simple, legal, win‑win framework for overcoming objections, and they close by promoting their live Q&A series (Whiteboard Wednesday Live) and the educational site multifamilystrategy.com.
Chapters
All right everyone, we just learned some horrible news. Apparently seller financing is absolutely illegal. We've been informed this from a reliable source. This was from Instagram, someone in Texas where I currently have 2 seller-financed properties with Buddy. Apparently just totally against the law and we're wrong, as are every lawyer and about half the transactions that I've seen happen in the last year in Texas.
Yeah, watch out for user 79. Welcome back to the channel. My name is Cody, this Christian Osgood. Today we're talking about real estate myths, including user 79 that said seller financing is illegal.
Yeah, now what the media team told us to do is leave the hook later in the video so people have to watch your video. However, we're gonna make this video fun enough so you watch the whole thing anyway. And if you do, drop us a like and subscribe. On— let's start with myth number 1. The, the actual topic of the video, seller financing being illegal. Let's talk about the legality, what you can and can't do. Let's, let's debunk this really quick.
Well, turns out you have a right to contract things.
Yes, you do. In fact, for all of human history, this is how it was done before the banking system. You want something that someone else has, they can either give it to you for a price, or you can make payments over time for said item. And if you buy time, it's usually done With interest.
And with a contract.
Wow, that sounds an awful lot like seller financing.
Imagine that.
Anything that you have equity for, you can finance to someone else.
User 79, strike one.
You can do this in every country, you can do this everywhere in the world. This is how humans trade items. If you don't have the money, you finance it. That's just how it works. You don't need a bank to buy a property. Just absolutely wrong.
Financing.
Yep, 0% true. Another myth that we've heard a lot of is you cannot find deals on the MLS, cannot find a deal on LoopNet, can't find a deal on CREXi. False. Only dead deals there. Absolutely false. How do you find deals? At least how have we found deals that other people have passed up on those sites?
Well, instead of just focusing on the price, we focus on how we could make the deal work. How could we get it to cash flow with excellent terms? Price is only an issue in the absence of value. And when you understand that truly, You could buy any piece of property that you want as long as it's income-producing. You just have to underwrite the debt to be cheaper than the dividends it produces. So when we look at the MLS, we look at LoopNet, there's tons of deals there. They're just bad until you line up the correct debt product. So if you negotiate the debt right after you find the opportunity you want to buy and you make it cash flow because the debt payments are so little for long periods of time, you can buy whatever the heck you want from the MLS. Mm-hmm.
Now the next one— sorry, we're getting attacked by a cat here.
That is a bowling ball.
You have made the video. You can hang out here. But the next one that comes to mind, this just happened on one of our videos. They said it's absolutely impossible to buy anything zero down. No seller would ever sell something without any down payment.
False.
False. And I know this because we've done this. So we did this on— first time we did it was on a tiny tiny house.
Yep.
They said, hey, I have this asset, I have had trouble selling it at the price I want, but I can make the payments very affordable. We had a resort that could use an extra unit, and we had the hookups for it. We're like, we can just park this right here, plug and play. Now, we ended up not really using it, and we'll probably end up offloading that, but we picked it up zero down for a signature. That was it. No money traded hands. The note started the next month. And away you go. You can do that on just about anything. One of the first deals we did was 4.5% down. I know that's not zero down, but we bought an asset for $1.1 million, $50,000 down. I mean, you can do this stuff anywhere with or without money, just period. Absolutely incorrect. Yeah, those are the 3 that I wrote down that are at the top of my head, but I really wanted to share some of those because we keep getting the same darn things in every video. Cody, you have any that jump to mind for the myths that we see all the time?
You can't do this at a young age.
Oh gosh, I've heard that all the time. Why would they trust you at—
Yeah, why would they trust me?
You started at 19, yeah, talk about that.
Well, I've got more time to learn than any of y'all, so that was my excuse. But you don't have to be super old to play the game. In fact, the younger you start, the wiser you'll be when you're everyone else's age. That's the reason that they should work with you. They've got the longest period of time to work with you. It's not transactional, it's relationship-based. And the younger you are, the longer you have to build a relationship with those people.
Well, on that first deal too, I mean, why did— let's take the private capital piece. Let's not even do the seller piece. You had to raise some money for that deal, right?
I was likely to fail and not be able to pay them back. And I structured a great piece of real estate with a phenomenal debt product, 30-year fixed rate mortgage, no balloon. That's hard to get on a 12-plex. So if I failed to pay back the hard money lender, they would just take the asset with a great debt product and cash flow a ton. Yep.
When you're getting started, you're trying to figure out how do I get people to say yes? You create a win-win scenario. Your best case scenario is I fail, and I'm likely to because I'm 19 years old and have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, right?
That's what you tell to the lender.
You just explain, hey, look, if I fail, you win. If I succeed, you win. You get exactly what you asked for and we both win. But we've structured several deals like that. We had a— one of the first deals we did together was side-by-side duplexes. I love those duplexes. Yeah. The investor who came in, no payments for the first 5 years to the investor, but we have an obligation to buy them out at double their investment.
They probably lose the real estate.
Yep. In which he gets a fantastic deal at a fantastic price and he's happy. If we fail, he gets the real estate. If we succeed, he doubles his money. Super simple. Doesn't— your age is not a factor there. No, you just have to put together a good deal. And you can do that at absolutely any age. Cody's not even the youngest one in our immediate friend group who's bought a piece of multifamily real estate or a bunch of real estate. Yeah, you— anyone can do this, any state, anywhere, any age. Those are all irrelevant objections.
Yeah, absolutely. And they're only irrelevant if you say they're irrelevant. If you make it material, it will be material for you, and that will stop you from buying deals.
Mm-hmm. The last one that I see all the time, which has some merit, but it's overall, it is incorrect, is when you buy all these things seller financed, no bank is going to look at you for lendability. Like, you can't just buy these things zero down and put them into bank financing.
False.
False.
I would know.
Yeah. Now, was it super easy to do when we had no bank loans to go out and get a first bank loan?
No, but getting a first bank loan on a commercial property is sucky anyway.
Yeah, commercial debt is a little bit difficult, and that was a legitimate objection— that was an illegitimate objection, but one that actually happened. We're on one of our first bank loans, the day of signing, when we were going to get it pulled into permanent financing with a bank at real low interest. Yeah, rates had just gone up and the bank looked at it and their reason for declining us was, well, we're not comfortable with the amount of seller finance that you have and the fact that no other bank has lent to you yet. Well, it's like, well, yeah, you're the first one. It's kind of like getting your first job, right? We want 3 years of experience. I'm like, well, how the heck does someone new get their first 3 years of experience? They have to get a first job. Go figure it out. Yeah, it's doable. You might actually have some struggles if you buy a ton of real estate and you try to navigate your first bank loan. It might be harder than your other bank loans.
If you go too quick.
But it's absolutely doable. We grew really quick and we got our first, second, third, and fourth bank loans in our first few years.
Yeah, I mean, as of yesterday, we had our 2 years in business together.
Yes, that's right. Happy second anniversary, buddy.
We did it.
We did it. Yeah, that was, uh, that was yesterday.
That was yesterday.
Yeah, our first company hit 2 years old.
A couple yesterdays by the time you see this.
That is also true. But yeah, I mean, it doesn't take that long to build some of this. Things like bank debt or your age or what you can and can't do. General rules that apply to each of these objections: for the most part, there is a way to do just about everything you want to do, and everything that you want, someone else has. There are legal ways to do just about everything as long as you keep everything relatively simple. As you try to get too complicated or too sneaky or play in the gray area, that's where you run into problems. But on a really basic level, it's like, you want to buy something, figure out what the other party wants, offer that, and talk to a lawyer about how to put it onto paper.
And that's it.
Yeah, that solves all your problems. Ta-da! If you have an idea and everyone's legal team says yes, you can do it. And that's true for the age objection, the price objection, the availability objection, uh, pretty much all of them. Uh, the answers are yes, you can do all these things. It's how we built our business. We made millions of dollars over the last 2 years of partnership doing exactly this.
If you want to solve more of your problems, make sure you check out Whiteboard Wednesday Live, where we go over your creative finance questions every Wednesday at 3 Pacific.
Yes, sir.
3 PM Pacific.
And don't be there in the AM. That's going to be a little early for me.
We won't be there, I promise. But we'll go over your questions live. Check it out. Also, if you have more questions that you want in-depth training on, multifamilystrategy.com is the place to get your answers.
