Christian Osgood advises a Canadian immigrant on buying multifamily property in the U.S. Skip pre-qualification and focus on negotiating the deal first. U.S. lenders care about deal value, not paperwork upfront, and the market has far more debt products than Canada's limited options.
starting to kind of practice calculator and everything, but I— because again, we are new to the country, so I need somebody to be very creative, um, in terms of a mortgage arranging for someone like us who are like only 2 years in the States.
Yeah, I wouldn't work as much at this phase. I wouldn't work as much on the pre-qualification. Usually that's not asked on a multi-family deal as much because I'm going to be bringing in capital partners. So if someone asks me, hey, do you have a lender who's interested in this? I'm like, well, let me figure out where the deal is first because they're gonna be interested based on the value of deal. And then I'll be putting together the team to take this out if we come to a negotiation. So I'll be working the deal completely separately than the debt. Once we have a deal negotiated, now I'm shopping an actual deal to lenders, which is much different.
Okay, so this, uh, person—
I've never had a pre-qualification, just, just to simplify it. I've never gone through and got pre-qualified to put in an offer in my entire ever. I've never done it.
Where we come from, Canada, He used to pre-qualify.
Canada, well, and some brokers will ask for it in the US, but Canada's lending is wild. Much more difficult, way less available products. So you have a way different lending market. US is much more debt friendly.
That was all for now.
Good question though. For all the Canadians in here, whenever doing the debt, like there's so many more options. Yes. Much, much better for, for debt.
Exactly. You think you cannot qualify because we come with the head so square about it that, you know, the— here the many lenders offer you much more. So that's why I was asking if you knew of someone that kind of can help us out there.
Yeah, I will, uh, it will depend on location and deal, but yes, I can absolutely help lining up that product. You're usually going to look for local banks and credit unions, and you'll keep it in the order of I do the analysis, negotiate the deal, then find the debt products once you have the deal. I would never send anything to Mark until I'm like, hey, we have the opportunity, and that's where I'll tag him in on my team and he'll size up the debt, is what they call it. He'll size up the deal and get back to me with what he thinks my options are going to be. But they jump to attention when you're like, I have a deal, it's packaged, it's ready to go, I need a quote. They're usually very fast once it's game time.
