Uncovering The Best Age To Explode Your Real Estate Empire! [Multifamily 101]

How do you buy? It's just a deal. And so you figure out what are the terms, how does it make money, and how I never lose it is how do I cash flow it in long-term fixed-rate debt. If you have those things, you will not lose real estate. Hello YouTube and welcome back. I'm Christian Osgood. I am here again with Brandon Osgood. We're in the studio. I took my cool colored light, so I apologize if we're a little bit dark, but very, very excited for this week's video. What we're going to be covering today: what is the best age to invest in real estate? And I know if you follow this channel, you see Cody started at 19, I started at 29. Brandon, when did you start?

Uh, I was 30.

Okay, so Brandon and I started about the same age, so we'll see if that's the perfect age. But we're going to cover all of this in today's video. By the way, if you have not yet, please like and subscribe. We launch videos like this every single Tuesday for the 101 on real estate. Bunch of other content on this channel, but These are the 101s. Kicking off today's video, Brandon, you started at 30 years old.

Yes.

Do you wish that you waited longer? Do you wish you invested earlier? What do you think personally for yourself? When do you wish you started investing?

I really wish I would have started like Cody right out of high school, college, whatever. As soon as I could get either funds together on my own or find partners to do it and dive in and not make that first leap to a first single-family residence, but house hack something. I think that's such a great way to go. And that's the soapbox I get on when I'm talking to new clients like House hack. House hack's a great way to first jump into something.

So what about the risk of you're so young, you don't have any experience yet, you haven't done the research or the books. I mean, is there some point where you have a baseline of knowledge that you need to get to, or do you just jump right in and figure it out as you go?

Take action. Get massive education just by taking action. You're young enough in your 20s, even in your early 30s like I was, to recover from huge mistakes, right? At that point, I wasn't married, didn't have kids and all that kind of stuff. And so you can take on a little more risk. Now at 50, that's how old I am, with 2 kids, I take a little less risk, but I still like to keep things moving forward, right? And never stop, 'cause I have plans where I want to be in the next 10 to 15 years. And so I'd say whenever the time is right for you.

That's fantastic advice. You have to learn as soon as you can, as much as you can. You're going to make mistakes early. However, the risk management is a fantastic point. When you have less to lose, it doesn't mean go ahead and make dumb decisions, but it means you have more grace to go learn. Now Cody did not fail. He came in at 19, bought a 12-plex that cash flowed really well. He learned what he needed to learn to do it. And as we get better and better, his properties get better and better. However, we bought everything where it cash flows on fixed rate debt. So you buy these deals, you accumulate them. Are you going to run them perfectly? Absolutely not. Are you going to run them as well as a 19-year-old as Brandon would at 30? Yeah. Also absolutely not. It's not going to happen. You're not going to do it perfectly, but to Brandon's point, you probably don't have the kids at 19 years old, hopefully. If you do, real estate is still a great investment. It's going to add stability. It's okay. But at 19, you probably have less responsibilities, less house, less to lose, right? You get in there and you just go, okay, well, what do I want to do? Let's set that goal. For me, it cost me about $10,000 a month to live the life I want to live. And let's just build a path there as fast as humanly possible.

My best friend and buddy investor that when we were getting into this, it was probably reckless, but we had a saying was like, it's just money. We can make more of it. Like, it's okay if we crash and burn. There is plenty of cash out there to be made. The world is our oyster, kind of the mentality. Like, so be it. You know, at least we're going to take some action and get some massive education from it too. Yeah.

Which is a good time to talk about how to actually protect yourself because it is one thing and you're totally right. The world's your oyster. You can lose it and you can make it back. And there are so many success stories online of people going like, oh, I built this and I did something wrong and I learned from it and I came back stronger. What's even cooler is when you don't have to do that. If you could learn online or in groups with mentors how they lost it so that you can apply those principles to not lose the real estate in the first place.

Yep.

If you just get to stack it forever, what you end up with is more time. Cody has a really cool advantage because he started at 19 and he doesn't have to do the comeback story of, oh, I got to 100 units and I messed up and I lost all of them and I had to restart. He just gets all that time back of having 100 units and keeping it and building that as a building block to springboard off of. By the time he's 29, I don't even know how many millions he'll be worth. Gosh, a lot, a lot more than we were.

And I'm so envious. I mean, these days there's so much information available, podcasts, YouTube videos, books. I mean, you name it, all these guru seminars.

Cody and Christian Osgood on themultifamilystrategy.com.

There you go.

I mean, link below.

They had, they had meetups and stuff when I was 30, right? But we didn't have the, the content that was available that you could just absorb daily. And, uh, I'm in it now, right? I love diving into all that stuff on a daily basis, and it does help. But man, what a— it propels you so much in a accelerate your, your knowledge and your learning.

Yeah, if I could have gone back and done anything at a younger age getting started, I would have looked for the online people who share their mistakes because there's a ton of stuff and it gets a lot more clicks and views when you have these big huge success stories. How I made $7 million this year in real estate. Grant Cardone straddling his jet. You know, those get a lot of clicks and a lot of views. If you can find the people who also share, this is what went wrong, this is where I crashed and burned, Those are the things that are going to save you from losing everything. There's tons of fun stuff on like how to build it. And to be completely honest, once you figure out the real estate thing, it's not a hard thing to buy. You do an analysis, does it cash flow, long-term fixed rate debt, where's the money coming from, close the deal.

If you want to know a couple failures, I've got them. I think I did a couple videos on them. One's about new construction speculation in Vegas and— Oh, I forgot about that. Panicking too quickly on a deal I had in West Seattle that probably cost me $1 million in equity loss that if, you know, if I would have just been patient for another year, 18 months, all would have worked out fine. But I panicked, so I won't do that again.

Okay, what was that? What was the lesson that you learned from the development project? Well, since we're sharing negatives and we're— yeah, we're here, what can people take away in this video from your experience?

Uh, to do better due diligence on the people you decide to work as your advisor. So I went with a realtor residential real estate agent.

Classy.

Classy. Who did not know about investing. She was doing what everybody else was doing at the time in that area. It was a sheep mentality, you know, hey, this— I heard this was working for somebody, so let's do this. And she didn't talk me into buying one new construction spec. She talked me into doing two. And that crashed and burned. Got exactly what we deserved. Greed and lack of experience and all that tied together. And I share that with a lot of people that reach out to me, Christian, who talk about like creative things and things I've done in the past. I tell them, don't do this.

One thing that reminds me of one thing that I do want to share here, as far as the, uh, the warning signs here, I have a very close friend who wanted to invest with Cody and I, but he was really impatient with his money. He was like, I got to get this placed. Cody and I don't partner with a lot of people. This was someone I wanted to partner with. So for him, I was like, I'm going to wait for the right opportunity, which means we're not diving into the first thing that comes up. He invested in 4 different syndications. All of them either went to zero, had additional capital calls, or are in litigation right now. He had $2 million. He invested $1.5 million. Gone. All just, all just in bad debt. Middle-aged, has kids, early 40s.

That'll sting.

Yeah, that will sting. That will sting. And then the rest of it was in crypto, which that is also gone. So the lesson there is don't rush into things that you don't understand, even though we absolutely encourage you to invest now and invest quickly and invest young.

Yeah, people are still doing it. I'm tracking closed deals every day. Yeah, in our area, people are still taking action.

Yeah, just get the information, feel confident on your deal, and all you really need to do to get started in real estate is find— you answer the questions: how do I buy it? How do I never lose it? We share it all the time on the channel. If you've watched any of our videos, I'm sure I say that at least 4 times throughout them. How do you buy? It's just the deal. And so you figure out what are the terms, how does it make money, and how I never lose it is how do I cash flow it in long-term fixed-rate debt. If you have those things, you will not lose real estate. And the more of those you buy, the more stability you get. So you're incentivized to scale. And the funny thing is you buy a bunch of real estate and every single time it makes money and then it goes up in value over time. Every single time you make the decision to buy real estate, you get better, you get smarter, And you have more wealth, which means more stability. And at the end of the day, that's what you want when you get into your 40s, 50s, when a lot of people actually start their investing journey. Cody and I are going to get together and Brandon, you get to be there where you have a great portfolio now.

I'm comfortable. Like, I admit that I missed out on all that stock market growth and Tesla stock that all my friends are bragging about, right? All their 401(k)s are doubling. I'm like, well, congratulations, good. Now they're kind of going, dang, my 401(k) is down, you know, this, and I wish I would have invested in real estate like you did years ago. And so, I mean, Isn't that funny?

You missed the huge boom of like, oh, you missed the huge ups and downs because real estate's consistent. But I think what most of us really want is consistency. You want some control over your time and your life, and consistency does that. Big ups and downs, you have to time the market just right, get in, get out, put your stop losses. Real estate, if it's not doing what you want to do, be a better manager. You can't do that if you don't acquire the real estate. So start with your acquisition. Buy the real estate, and then if you want to improve your condition— like Cody and I are doing a project right now, it's going to make us about $2 million, and we'll go into a way deeper video on this— just with maintenance in our portfolio. We're under market rent, we have some old buildings with bad heating. That's like the baseboard. Yeah, it's not, not sexy heating. We're doing mini splits ourselves over 100 units that are about $300 under market rent.. That's going to give them great heating, great air, lower the electric bill. Fantastic plan. And with that, on the next set of rent bumps, we're going to time these prior to rent bumps. We're only taking rent bumps up $100 throughout the portfolio. So we're starting with one, provide direct value to the tenant. And we're in a market where having good heating and air is actually not common. There's a lot of old buildings, a lot of baseboard heating. So we're offering a real amenity, a real upgrade. Instead of bringing them $300 up to market rate, we're increasing their rent $100. They're still staying under the rent of almost everyone else. What does this do? It adds $100 over 100 units in a 6-cap market. So you take all that new income.

That's good stuff.

You multiply by 12, you divide by 0.06, you just made $2 million in real estate by adding AC. Incredible. You can, once you own the assets, you can, it's not just the cash flow from the asset. You can improve them, you can control them, You can move things around. You can make multiple millions of dollars just running your portfolio better every year. However, you can't get there if you don't start buying the real estate. So buy the real estate.

And I'd say last little tidbit to those, those viewers over, say, 40, 45, because you guys are younger, don't kick yourself. Don't beat yourself up just because these guys are crushing it and they're 30 and younger, right? Uh, it's never too late. I've got a new client that's just reached out to me that she's in her, in her 50s, her husband, they've never bought anything. They want to get started. She feels like she's missed the boat, and I'm like, just get going now, right? Got plenty of time. Um, it's never too late.

Just do it. Yep. If you want a roadmap on how to do this for free, like and subscribe to the channel. If you want to expedite the process, themultifamilystrategy.com. We show everything that we did to get from 0 to 100 units course, you want to go a step deeper, we also have mentorship groups. Just reach out to me on Instagram @ChristianOsgood. Until next week, we will see you guys soon.