In this solo presentation, Christian Osgood outlines the two most repeatable, scalable methods for acquiring real‑estate assets with little or no cash: (1) debt‑based financing and (2) equity partnerships. He begins with a personal backstory, contrasting a decade‑long “save‑and‑buy” approach (duplexes) with the rapid growth he achieved after mastering creative financing, now owning over 200 units and achieving financial freedom. Osgood explains how to evaluate a deal—emphasizing price, day‑one cash flow, and cash‑on‑cash return—as the foundation for choosing a financing path. He details debt options: conventional fixed‑rate loans, hard‑money loans (10‑14% short‑term, flexible), and seller financing (creative, up to 85% of purchase price). He then discusses equity partnerships, stressing clear goals, minimal partners, joint‑venture structures, and buy‑out mechanics (e.g., 5‑year double‑money promise). A concrete case study of a 38‑unit property illustrates blending 85% seller financing with a $300k equity raise, refinancing after value uplift, and exiting investors profitably. Osgood shares additional student success stories (Logan Pritchett, Caleb Hommel) to reinforce that mastering basic creative finance and joint‑venture basics can rapidly scale portfolios. He concludes with a call to action: join his Multifamily Strategy community, watch more videos, or subscribe for free content.
Chapters
Now there are about 100 ways to buy deals with or without money, and we've seen all of them. However, there are 2 ways that stand out as the simplest and most repeatable way to do it. And if it's simple, it's repeatable. If it's repeatable, it's scalable. And a scalable business is how I want to build financial freedom. Here are the 2 ways that you need to know if you want to buy real estate with or without money. Now, welcome back to the channel. My name's Christian Osgood. I am your host of Multifamily Strategy. Please like, follow, and subscribe for more. 'Cause here we go, 2 ways that you can buy any piece of real estate with or without money. It's always going to be a blend of debt or equity. How do you negotiate them? How do you control the deal? We're going to follow the basic rules. We're going back to the 101 level. Now, a little backstory here. I started by saving my way up to real estate. I worked a job for 8 years, saving and saving, getting into real estate, eventually bought 2 duplexes and my house. Those 4 units paid enough rent to cover the mortgage on my house. Now, is that cool? Yeah, absolutely. I moved forward. I made good financial decisions. That's not wealthy in real estate. I spent almost a decade working very, very hard to move forward a very little bit. Now, if you're someone who wants to work a 40, 50-year career and retire comfortably, you can follow that. You can save and buy something, save and buy something to buy small real estate. What I found is when I went out and learned how to buy real estate without having money, I scaled over 200 units. I have financial freedom. I retired my wife from teaching. I'm building my dream house in Texas right now. A whole lot happened for me when I learned how to do this. Now, we've done a bunch of deal structures. There are two ways that stand out as the best. One is debt. One is equity. I'm going to talk about both right now. So let's start with that. First, you need to find a deal. Your deal contains everything. You know, the debt, the equity, the partners, the— everything is contained within the opportunity. If you find a deal where you win on price and you have very high day one cash flow, so this is usually a property you got in excellent pricing, it's relatively stable, closer to market rate, you can take this out with only debt, which is technically the best way to do it. Now, cash on cash return is a metric that we're looking at here. That's the return on the amount of cash that you have in. So if I put in $100,000 and that $100,000 in is making an 18% return per year, I'm very comfortably able to afford expensive debt. I can go get hard money or private money at 12% and still make a 6% spread. I can make money on other money just by servicing that debt. Now, how do we control this? Because there's a few controls that you have here with debt. You can borrow less money for more cash flow, or you can borrow cheaper money. Now, hard money is usually going to come from a hard money lender. That is someone who professionally lends. It's usually going to be somewhere between 10% and 14%. I've seen it higher. I've seen it lower., but you're usually in that realm. It's expensive money, but there's someone who can lend on things that a bank would not lend on. They're usually a little bit more flexible, they're more creative, and it's usually shorter-term debt. Now, we don't want a lot of short-term debt, but it is a way to get into a project, especially if it has some upside, or we won on price by a ton where we know we're going to refinance later before the end of that debt. If we are comfortable with where that deal is, debt is a way where you get 100% of the ownership. If you can get fixed-rate debt, you control your variables and you don't have to introduce other people to your deal. And trust me, people are a variable. We're going to talk about that next. If you want to borrow cheaper money, the best way to do it that we found is to just have a basic mastery of seller financing, which by the way isn't all that hard. Seller financing or creative finance in general is just anything out of the bank box. So it's something that's going to be a little bit creative, something that can be tailor-made. In our case, we do a lot of seller finance. You can finance anything that you own. So if I find someone with a high equity position in their property, they can finance to us up to their equity in the property. They own it in cash, they can finance 100% of the deal. Our first deal was a 38-plex. The seller financed 85% of the transaction. If you can jump into any transaction, you don't have money, but you started by figuring out 85% of the money, you are off to a fantastic start. Now, what happens if you don't have this cash flow to take on the debt? Be it expensive debt, inexpensive debt, if you just do not have enough day one cash flow, or for otherwise, like, say it's a bigger deal and you're not going to qualify for a refinance to get into long-term debt, you may need to bring on a more liquid equity partner. Now, disclaimer, partners are variables. You need to have some rules to this. If you're partnering, set a clear goal for that partnership with that partner. Don't trade or renegotiate things until you reach that point. You're going to find your partner or partners, as few as humanly possible. You're going to negotiate your deal first. So figure out the deal, figure out the debt. It could be seller financed. It could be conventional. You could just buy it with a bank loan and the rest of the money comes from a partner. But find that person whose goals align with your goals and align with the goals specific to that deal. They can bring in the capital. Your target is to find a way to get them a return that they want and buy the property from them either refinance or out of cash flow from other properties. Basically, you're going to use future money to buy them out of that deal. They close it, you operate it, you find the deal, they fund it, and they get some multiple. On our first deal, we blended the two. We did seller financing for the 85%. 15% was a $300,000 capital raise, which paid off all of the prior owner's debt, which allowed them to seller finance the rest of the transaction. Now, we had about 4% debt on that deal, which is fantastic. However, it was an underperforming property. We needed to take on partners to close it, to get the value up of the property, to have enough equity to go ahead and refinance that and pay off the partners. We gave them a deal that said, hey, in 5 years we're going to double your money. If you put in $300,000 now, we'll pay you $600,000 out in the future. We had a target to get to $3.5 million. We eventually got the property up to $4 million in value. But 11 months in, We hit a target, we were able to refinance, buy out all of the investors, cashed out money on the property. We had a completely successful 38-unit transaction. The difference between that and saving for duplexes, astronomical. Way more money, way more cash flow, happier investors. A lot of them invested again with us on future deals because we paid them out way too much money very early. That is a deal structure that works. Seller financing as a basic construct, you should have a pretty good mastery on very early when you're buying with or without money. Equity partners, just people who join you on a deal, you should have a basic mastery of what it looks like and what they're going to expect. Something to remember, if you use equity, it's usually more expensive. Now on a deal that just doesn't have a lot of day one cash flow and has a ton of potential, that may be the way to do it. But no, it's usually more expensive to buy someone out in the future than it is to take on debt on the front end. If you have the opportunity to close out a property with only debt and 100% finance it where it cash flows on long-term fixed rate debt, I highly recommend that that is your preferred method to do so. We've had so many success stories in Multifamily Strategy, both the course, the mentorship, but people in our community. Uh, Logan Pritchett was just on this channel. He started with literally nothing about a year and a half ago. He has 79 rental properties today, 79 units in his portfolio, because he kept it super simple. Creative finance, the right partners, very few partners, got him to where he's at. Another great example Caleb Hommel, he's on this channel all the time. He started with $300. He lived in San Diego. He found a deal in McAllen, Texas, 10 units, seller financed, didn't have enough cash flow, negotiated seller financing where the payment started 6 months in, which gave him time to save up capital reserves and to increase the rents, which then serviced the debt, which bought him the property. He did the same thing in Laredo, Texas. He bought a deal in Houston and then he bought the best deal we've ever seen to date in our entire mentorship group, a 25-unit deal in Stephenville, Texas, where he more than doubled the rents in 6 months. Fantastic negotiator. He learned all of it by keeping it ridiculously simple. Is Caleb smarter than everyone else? Absolutely not. Neither am I. If you are someone who isn't just a genius who can put together crazy deals and advanced legal, just learn basic creative financing and the basics of a joint venture, which is the partnerships that we use often in an LLC. This is something that can be learned in a very short period of time. If you follow the rules of find the deal first and then negotiate long-term cash-flowing fixed-rate debt, if you don't sacrifice those things, you can close any deal with or without money. If you want to learn more how, join Multifamily Strategy. Check out multifamilystrategy.com. Or if you want to do a lot of this for free, like, subscribe, follow, set that notification button, and watch the videos we share here on Multifamily Strategy. Again, I'm Christian Osgood. This is Multifamily Strategy. We will see you on the next episode.
