In this solo instructional video, Christian Osgood walks viewers through his systematic approach to selecting profitable real‑estate markets, regardless of where they live. He begins by emphasizing the fundamental supply‑and‑demand dynamic: investors should target locations where population is growing and jobs are stable, because more people needing housing drives rent and price appreciation. Osgood demonstrates how to verify growth for free using worldpopulationreview.com and then deep‑dives into a real‑world example—Stephenville, Texas—highlighting its expanding university, dairy industry, Amazon distribution center, and steady population increase as signals of a healthy market. He warns against chasing “hot” markets that receive massive media attention, noting that rapid developer over‑building can create oversupply, higher vacancy, and falling rents. Instead, he advocates focusing on mid‑size or small towns within a 2‑ to 3‑hour drive from the investor’s home, where competition is lower and hands‑on management is feasible. Practical steps include driving the market, networking with existing landlords, and evaluating personal excitement about the area. Osgood also stresses the importance of cash‑flow positive properties to fund maintenance and avoid becoming a slumlord. The video concludes with a brief personal endorsement of Magic Mind, a no‑caffeine supplement that Osgood claims improves his creativity and energy for deal‑making.
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I bought in red states. I bought in blue states. I bought in small towns and large towns, in Seattle and Houston, and in Stephenville, Texas, and Union, Washington. Populations of 1,000 to populations of millions of people. What makes a good market? Why do certain markets work so well for investment and others don't? And why do so many people have such a narrow box for where to invest? I'm going to show you how to find properties in your area regardless of where you live. Find the right markets. In this video, I'm going to share with you the most important thing you need to look for. The pitfalls that you run into and how we've had so much success in so many markets. If you're feeling stuck on where do I invest, you have analysis paralysis, you're trying to make that decision. By the end of this video, I believe you're gonna be able to find a market very close to where you live. By the way, if you're new to the channel, my name's Christian Osgood. I have bought hundreds of rental properties starting with $0 because $0 was in fact the budget. I didn't have friends or family who were in real estate who had money, so I had to play this game from scratch. Why do we make so much money in so many different market types? Because there are simple rules you can follow in any environment to make money in real estate. Let's start with the most important piece: supply and demand. You're providing housing for humans. Now, there's a lot that goes into that, and of course we want to provide excellent housing for excellent people. We want to be great landlords, but taking it down just to the economics, humans need housing. You provide the housing, so you need more humans or less housing to drive up prices. So if we're providing housing for humans, we probably wanna look at places where there's more and more humans over time. If you're in a market where people are moving out, buildings aren't usually falling over at the same rate, which means either rents increase or more commonly there's just more vacancy in your market. If you wanna stay occupied, you wanna keep your income up, you want to grow over time, decreasing population is the one thing you wanna avoid. So how do we stack the deck in our favor? Let's look at markets in our area where people actually want to live. If your product is housing for humans, where do humans want to live? Look around you to, for areas that have stable jobs, that are exciting places, places where you could imagine living yourself. I'm not saying you have to move out there. I'm just saying, could you imagine living in that area and wanting to live in that area if you were in your tenant's shoes? There are markets that are just really, really rough. My buddy invests in a town called Gary, Indiana. For a long time, it was considered the murder capital of the world. I don't know that a lot of people are going to want to live there for a long period of time. Now, maybe it's looking better today. I haven't viewed that market in a while. The point is that would not be my first choice of market. I'm going to look at places where people want to move, which is going to drive up pricing. You can do this for free on a site called worldpopulationreview.com. Great example, city of Stephenville, Texas, where I own over 100 rentals. Look at that graph over time. Consistent, consistent growth. No points where this has ever declined. People like to live here. This is the first thing you wanna do. This is completely free. This takes you just a few seconds. Stephenville, Texas, Erath County. It's not a ton of population. We're sitting a little over 20,000 people, but steadily growing. The next thing we wanna know is why is it doing so well? Now I drove to this market and it is a beautiful town with lots of stuff happening and a ton of development. Well, that's really encouraging. When you drive around, you're like, I understand why people want to live here. That's a great first sign. Here's the other factors that we found doing a little bit more research. Their college, Tarleton University, went Division I. They are doubling the size that they were when I first found that city. They were a 15,000-person college moving towards 30,000 students. Now if you have 30,000 students in a population that has like 25,000 people, What does this mean? There's a lot more people than actually show up on worldpopulationreview.com. You have a whole bunch of students are going to be there through the year. Some of them live there full-time, some of them don't live there full-time, but your population is growing. You're going to have jobs. Students come in, they consume a bunch of food. So you see restaurants popping up everywhere. You have a whole bunch of cattle industry there that's been there historically for a very, very long time. It's the dairy capital of Texas. And Amazon's building a new distribution center right there. So when you're driving the market, you're seeing Amazon building buildings, you're seeing a well-established community with a long, long history and stable jobs. You're seeing a growing and exciting university that's doing very well in their sports programs. All of these come together to look like a very stable market. People want to live here. It's a beautiful place to live. It's a fun town. The college is going off, new buildings and new businesses are moving into town. When you look at a market like that, you go, huh, I wonder what will happen to housing over time here as population continues to grow. Answer: prices have to go up. There's not enough development going in right now to maintain the demand of the college. Students need more housing, and if students get more housing, that displaces some of the elderly tenants who also need a great place to live and a great landlord to offer it. If you want to provide great places for great people, go where there's high demand. It's going to make it easier. And for those who want to bash on landlords for like, wait a second, you're just going to raise the price on people. As a market appreciates, the prices will go up. If you have the cash flowing real estate, you need cash flow to keep the buildings nice. If you actually want to be a good landlord and not a slumlord, you need to actually optimize for a business that does make money so you have excess money to reinvest. Back into your properties. So that's number one. We look at population growth and we look at job stability. So what do we want to avoid? I want to avoid markets that are absolutely on fire hot all over the news. Very, very publicly, companies are coming in. Do you know what that means? All the big investors, all the pros already knew about all this and have scooped up most of the deals. They're usually inflated markets and they've been overbuilt. Remember supply and demand, the oversupply. When you learn, oh my gosh, all this development's coming in here, this is a super hot market. Developers go crazy and they build and they build and they build. And what happens? The market slows down at some point or it just stabilizes, but they kept building. So now we have an oversupply. Vacancy increases, and in extreme cases, rent will even begin to drop. If you have less people paying less money in your building, that's a huge bummer. So even in a hot market with population growth, if it is all over the news, if it's a prime market that everyone else is investing in, my recommendation, skip it. Move on to the next. It's the little towns like Stephenville, Union, Washington, Moses Lake, Washington, or even a little north in Ephrata, Washington. These towns I have made so much more money in so much more consistently, not just because they're small, Because not everyone's looking there. They have all the fundamentals, population growth, expanding economies, job expansion, but there's not a million people trying to invest in the same market. Have I made a lot of money in big cities? Absolutely. But those are few and far between and they're excellent individual deals. My focus and my strategy has been mostly on mid and small size markets. Maybe near the big cities, an easy drive. Stephenville, Texas is an hour and a half out of DFW, but it's off to the side. Other people aren't looking at it as aggressively, and as a result, you can come in and absolutely dominate your market. So what would your next step be? My next step would be look at where you're at. You're looking for competitive advantage. Sure, you can choose an out-of-state market, but how much easier is it to touch your property, to manage your property, to successfully be a landlord on a property that you can actually see, touch, and feel? That's why most of us invest in real estate because it's real. I would start where you're at, look around your market and go, okay, I live here within a 2-hour radius of myself, maybe even a 3-hour radius. Are there markets that I'm excited about that I think fit this metric that have consistent population growth that I could drive to that not every other person and their sister is building and developing in? Is there a market within 2 or 3 hours of me, maybe even less, Or there are people who own rentals that I don't yet own. Could I go out and network with people who own the rentals that I would one day like to own in a market that I am very, very excited about? This is how you choose your market. Get the place that you have the most advantage, great population growth, some fundamental job growth, and stop stressing about finding the perfect market or the perfect timing. If you invest in a place where population is going up, What will happen is over time, that population will push up rents. It, it will keep your occupancy very, very high. As a result, you'll make a ton of money on this exact strategy. If you replicate what I did and you keep it very, very simple, you can stop the analysis paralysis, move forward, choose that market, choose one or two, and start finding yourself some deals. By the way, update on the Magic Mind Journey I've been sharing with you guys. This stuff has helped me get more creative on deals than I could have ever imagined. You may notice this is empty. That's because I'm completely out. I have the next order on the way. I have finished my second set of the morning and nighttime routine. Here are my results. I am more creative and awake during the day. I do not have caffeine crashes anymore because I'm not drinking nearly as much caffeine, though I still do that coffee meeting I like to do on weekends. At night, I sleep deeply, I sleep consistently, and I wake up feeling rested without being groggy. Like so many other things make you feel just like absolutely just like a zombie in the morning. This doesn't do that. I wake up, I'm ready to just jump out of bed, grab the morning shot, grab my computer, get back to work. You guys want to check this out again? The discount link is below, www.magicmind.com/theownerjam. I'll see you all in the next episode.
