In this video Christian Osgood explains why residential real estate is a reliable asset class and walks viewers through the decision of starting with single‑family homes versus larger multifamily properties. He references common advice from BiggerPockets to begin small (single‑family, duplexes, four‑plexes) but argues that if an investor’s ultimate goal is to own many doors, adding incremental steps can delay progress. Osgood shares his own path—from buying a condo, to a duplex, to a 38‑unit deal—highlighting the challenges of managing small units and the efficiency of scaling to larger properties. He stresses the importance of market research, mastering the numbers for each property type, and comparing which approach reaches cash‑flow and unit goals faster. He also outlines a learning method: write down takeaways after each book or conversation and apply them immediately. Finally, he emphasizes defining a compelling personal “why” to fuel growth, noting how his expanded purpose led him from 30 units to 67 units and beyond. The video ends with a call for comments, questions for the weekly Whiteboard Wednesday, and encouragement to like, subscribe, and engage.
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Hey YouTube, it's Christian Osgood and I am back today to talk about single-family versus multifamily investment. Before I dive into this, residential as a whole is an asset class that we do really, really like. People will always need somewhere to live. When you're looking at real estate investment, especially during COVID you've seen office and retail take really strange turns. Industrial is getting its day in the sun with a lot of distribution, and you see data centers going up everywhere, but those all go in cycles. While there's ups and downs in every market, people will, at the end of the day, always need somewhere to live, which is why we look at residential. Now, when we're dividing this up, one of the main questions we get is, where do I start when I'm buying investment properties? If you follow BiggerPockets, which I recommend— we love BiggerPockets— you will find a lot of people in there who recommend starting small. Buy a bunch of single-family houses, buy duplex through fourplex, and those are all just fine investments. You can make money in houses. You buy a fourplex— house hacking's become very popular, it's a great strategy, but it shouldn't be your only strategy. You can scale slowly there, but if you want to build a portfolio of any significant size you want to look at larger multifamily. And I really do recommend this if your end goal is, I want to own multifamily buildings and I want to have a lot of doors. It doesn't make sense to add steps. I got lost on this personally. My first property, I did a live and flip. I bought a duplex— I'm sorry, not duplex, I bought a condo in Renton, Washington, 2-bed, 2-bath, rented it to a roommate. My wife and I lived in there. Lived there for 2 years while I renovated the entire inside. When I moved out, converted it into a rental for 6 months and hated it. It was terrible to manage even though it was right next to the house I bought. It was really, really rough for me. Ended up selling it. Stopped the landlord thing for a whole year and then came in and bought a duplex. I was like, "Oh, let's try something multi-unit so I can make sense of property management." Then I bought another duplex. At 4 units a few years into trying to be an investor, it was pretty cool. The, the rental income was paying for the mortgage on my house. I got to a point where my real estate was buying my real estate, and that felt really good. But I looked back and I was like, oh my gosh, this took me years to get here. I can't live on the cash flow. It's just covering some of my living expenses. My goal was always to get enough doors to provide for my family, to give my wife all my time, to work when I wanted to, eventually to move to a warmer state. Washington's a little bit too cold for me. And I wasn't there. It wasn't until Cody came into my office and asked me to buy a 38-unit with him. I told him I had this goal of 30 units by 30. I was 29. He's like, well, by 38, you're way past that. And that's when it hit me. When you add steps like, hey, I need a house before I can buy a duplex, I need a duplex before I can buy a fourplex, I need a four before 12, etc. When you put all these steps in, it takes you further away from your goal. Now, I'm not saying go out and buy a 100-unit building and you're going to be ready to go. That might be a big jump for your first step, but a 12-plex isn't much harder to manage than the duplexes. I've managed both. 38's a little harder than a 12, but it's not apples to apples. It's a lot of units in one spot. If you buy a fairly stable property, there's more margin to afford property management. You can factor this into your numbers. The takeaway here: if you're starting, focus on education before you decide, hey, I need to buy a house. Research your market. Master the math for both. Master single-family. Look what you need to do to make the numbers work for a house and compare it to a duplex in your area. Compare it to a 12-plex in your area. Be really, really comfortable with the numbers and figure out what gets you to your goal faster. If your goal is to get 25 units, $10,000 a month cash flow, is it going to be easier for you to stack a bunch of houses or is it going to be easier for you to find one or two transactions. We have a lot of videos on how to form relationships and how to do the numbers, so I won't go into that here. But that's what you need to do. Absorb the content, master the numbers, and then don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. Learn and apply. Application's always better than education. A trick that Cody and I use all the time when learning is when you read a book, every time you shut the book, what was my takeaway? Write it down. It can just be one thing, it can be a few things. When you get out of a car ride or a conversation with another investor, a coffee meeting, sit down. What was my takeaway? Write these down. That's where you're going to learn. Take those takeaways and apply them. Go out and actually buy the real estate. Do your first deal. If it needs to be a house, go ahead and do that. If a fourplex is as much as you can do, and still sleep at night, push yourself. Do a fourplex. If you really want to scale in this and you want to accelerate your earnings, your potential, your cash flow, your appreciation, all of it, the faster you can go bigger to where you want to be, the easier it's going to be on you and the more you're going to push yourself. Last thing I'll add for today, if you haven't defined your why, you're only going to get as big as your goal. My original motivation was just, I want my multifamily property to pay for my mortgage so I can go buy nicer things. I wanted a nicer guitar, I wanted a nicer fishing pole. These are things that were important to me, and I got there. That's not a big enough why to go out and buy a huge portfolio. When I accelerated that why to, hey, I want to provide for my future kids and for my wife the way my Dad provided for my family, but not sacrifice all the time he sacrificed to get there. When I set that goal, it took me less than a year to pick up another 55 units. Today I'm at 67 units. In a couple months, I'll be over 80. When you define the why behind everything and follow it up with education and follow that education with application, you can accomplish anything. Don't get caught up on small multifamily or single-family houses if that's not your end goal. If you want to buy multifamily, go buy multifamily. Hope this was helpful. If you like this content or want to learn more about how to creatively finance the larger multifamily, how to build relationships or network with brokers, or really anything, let us know in the comments. We try to cover all of it here, and if there's something that we miss, let us know. We're going to answer it on Wednesdays. We do 5 questions, for our Whiteboard Wednesday. We'll come right out of the comments, answer your questions here. Please like and subscribe, follow us for more, and I'll see you guys soon.
