Christian Osgood says the first step in closing real-estate deals is setting up a centralized digital repository like Google Drive for every document. He uses Obsidian and Claude AI to index files so he can search across his 30+ LLCs and saves about 100 hours a year. Careful coordination between partners on LLC credit-card applications prevents rejections that can delay deals.
Chapters
When you close a deal, or when you're in the process of closing a deal, the first thing you do is set up a Drive or a Dropbox or whatever your preferred platform is. Just dump every single paper in there. The best thing that you can possibly do for yourself in all of real estate is just be organized with the files. If there's one thing that will save you hours, if you just have a file that has the historic rent roll, the utility bills, your due diligence, your closing docs, your tax parcel data, all in one little bundle that you can just click on and send to your CPA or to your investors, or just for your own records. Oh my goodness, it makes bookkeeping so much easier. We went through all of that. The one other thing that we did not do, and this was coordination between Caleb and I— LLCs tend to get credit cards rejected when you have multiple applicants on the card. So Caleb and I will often trade off on who applies on behalf of the LLC. Caleb apparently did not send our CPAs any of his credit cards, so I was looking through every single— and it's usually low balance stuff, but sometimes it's like new LLC, we paid the property tax on a zero interest credit card. We had like 4 LLCs where I got my P&Ls and I'm like, oh, we're missing one credit card. And so we have to go back and it stalls everything thing one week. It's— is it a world ender? No, but all of it is a pain in the butt. The more organized you can be, uh, this is a, this is a business that like exponentially benefits for being organized. 5 years into this, we're really good at keeping our physical files. I'm really good at keeping the digital files. Over 30 LLCs, every single little doc that somehow goes missing is always a rigmarole. And you do it enough times over enough LLCs, it wastes a ton of time. So super, super clean digital records, uh, they will save your life. And the last thing I'll say on this topic if you want to get crazy with it. Obsidian is a free AI that will remember everything. Caleb and I update every single business doc into that so that I can hook it to our Claude and I can query anything. So I can query without having to pull the documents what was tax, what was my net income on this, what was our utility expense. I can query on this capital raise for Riverwalk. We didn't finish out the capital raise because we tried to do it with less total investors. I can query how much money can I still raise for this deal if I want to do additional projects. Project without doing a new filing, and it will store it and it will be searchable. That is the benefit of having really clean docs, and that probably saves Caleb and I 100 hours of work a year, uh, being able to have every document in one place at one time. I find it stupidly valuable. Uh, that's Obsidian. Um, it's the coolest AI and it's completely free. It makes my life a million times easier.
