In this instructional video, Christian Osgood explains his systematic approach to selecting profitable multifamily real‑estate markets. He emphasizes that the core of successful investing is finding locations where demand for housing outpaces supply, which he gauges primarily through consistent population growth. Using worldpopulationreview.com, he looks for markets with at least 0.5% annual growth and a total population between 15,000 and 100,000 (ideally 30‑100k) where he can influence rents. He then examines the underlying drivers of that growth—diverse, stable employment sources such as colleges, manufacturing, agriculture, and tech hubs—citing Stephenville, Texas (college expansion, dairy/beef industry) and Moses Lake, Washington (Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon data centers, hydroelectric power, battery manufacturing, agriculture) as prime examples. Osgood also checks the renter‑owner split, preferring a roughly 50/50 balance and avoiding markets where homeownership dominates. A personal, on‑the‑ground assessment is crucial: he drives through potential towns, imagines living there, and only invests in properties he would be comfortable renting to himself. He illustrates this ethic by noting that his business partners actually live in buildings they co‑purchased. Finally, he advises viewers to identify local property owners and plan the acquisition of their first multifamily asset in the chosen market.
Chapters
What makes a market the right market to invest in? I'm going to share exactly what it is on this video, how I determined it, and how I actually did make millions of dollars by choosing the right locations to invest. Hello, my name is Christian Osgood. If you don't know me, welcome to the channel. I bought hundreds of rentals starting with no money because no money was in fact the budget. To do this successfully, you have to choose the right places. Economics are extremely important when you come to this, and this is what I mean. It's simple supply and demand. The first thing, the most important thing anytime you're choosing a deal— I've invested in Stephenville, Texas, my favorite market in the country. I built my portfolio originally in Moses Lake, Washington, another fantastic town to invest in. What do we look at first? Population growth. At the end of the day, what are you providing? Housing for humans. Now, do you want to provide great housing to great humans in great areas? Absolutely. But you need to understand what your product is. People need houses, you provide them. You want more people moving in than moving out, which means demand is going up, unless you're in a market that's overbuilding. So be aware of that. The easiest way to check for population growth, go to worldpopulationreview.com, type in the city, the county, the state, whatever level that you want to analyze. Type that into worldpopulationreview.com. This website's going to show you a graph right on the front of the page. It shows a bunch of other great demographic information, by the way. But the first thing I'm looking at is the graph going up over time. Now, I like to see a minimum of half a point of growth every year. I like to invest in places that have more than 15,000 people, ideally 30,000 to 100,000. Above that, it gets a little bit harder to compete, and you find that there's less people able to sell or finance. The higher equity markets are usually a little smaller markets. Your ability to come in and really influence market rent and operate independently— I love that size. So I'm looking for towns about that size, population growing by a minimum of half a point, ideally a lot more. If you look at like a Stephenville, Texas, for example, Go to world population right now. Pause this video. Check it out. Graph is going up like this. It's a city that's going off. I know for a fact they're not building enough housing. They're trying to, but they're not keeping up with demand. Which leads us to number 2. What's causing the growth? Or if you see a market that has a dip, it's good to understand why is it going up or down? Let's use Stephenville, Texas, as our example again. Tarleton College just went D1. This is a college that's been 15,000 students. It's expanding to 30,000 students. Their basketball team doing amazing, their football team doing really well. Their sports are doing fantastic. They're expanding the school, they're expanding their curriculum, they're building, building, building, building, building. It is an excellent, excellent employer driving population. But would I invest in this market if that was the only employer? Absolutely not. It's built on the backbone of the dairy industry, the beef industry, rodeo. We have hundreds of years of history. In this small little town in the middle of nowhere, Texas has more than 30,000 people. It has a school that's expanding. It has businesses moving in all the time. And you have large industries, multiple large industries propping up the town. In a town like that, I absolutely love it. Then you look at a town like Moses Lake, Washington. This city has in the greater metro area, it's about 60,000 people. In Moses Lake, Boeing is the largest employer, but there's data warehouses for Microsoft, Amazon. You have all these big, big campuses around because of the hydroelectric power, which is also why we have a whole bunch of car battery manufacturers moving in. And I'm talking like electric cars, large battery, huge manufacturing, bringing in thousands of jobs to the area. On top of that, it's been an agricultural mecca for a long time. It has a ton of agriculture there. So you got the agriculture, you got the cheap power, you got the electric, you got the You got Boeing, and then you look at the population growth, it's absolutely going up. So we have stable jobs, we have diverse jobs, we have people wanting to live there. This is having the makings of a good market. Now, less importantly, but something I still look at, is it a place where people rent? In Stephenville, Texas, middle of nowhere Texas, this is something that you actually worry about. There are markets around the country, and I've seen them, a lot of them are the smaller markets where homeownership is just what you do. It's, hey, everyone owns a house. You got a dog, you got your 3.5 kids or whatever it is. White picket fence. Everyone owns a house. This is traditionally really popular in areas where housing is very inexpensive. If you're in the middle of the Midwest, there are cities where people just don't rent culturally. I want to see, and this is also on worldpopulationofyou.com, percentage of owners versus renters. I just want to see there's a healthy body of renters. Usually it falls out somewhere in the ballpark of 50/50. But I just don't want to see a market where it's like 85% of people own houses. I'm like, wow, maybe there isn't a market for what I'm trying to provide here. Someone could find cheap enough housing where everyone's just going to own a house. But if jobs are moving in and housing's moving in and we're really becoming a renter nation, especially the way inflation's going, we are really, really drifting that direction. Almost any market that's a large enough market is going to have pretty stable rentals. We're going to look for population growth. And I'm going to add one more rule to this. And this is a rule. You need to drive the market, it needs to make sense to you. And here's what I mean. I've driven down I-35 in Texas and I've pulled off in some cities, population growth is going insane. And no matter where I drive, I cannot imagine living there ethically and strategically. I'm providing housing to people. I would not rent to someone somewhere that I'm not comfortable living myself in their same situation. If I had less money, because I do a lot of low-income housing, if I was low-income, I would love to live in any place that I own. Cody Davis, my original business partner in Moses Lake, he just moved into one of our multifamily buildings. Now, I had bought him out of that building, so he's actually one of my tenants, funny enough. But that is a building that at some point we had purchased together. We've renovated, he's moved into. So when I say we buy buildings that I would myself live in, my business partner literally lives in a building that I purchased. In Stephenville, Texas, Caleb and I, he moved into the first 25-unit building we ever purchased there. We buy places that we would actually live in ourselves. We're not slumlords. I have driven through some towns where I'm like, I wouldn't live in this town. I wouldn't do it. I can't imagine living in this town. I would have the same hangup on that town. You go to like Stephenville, Texas, there's stuff to do. The buildings are fantastic. The people are great. The streets are clean. The college is beautiful. Tons of these epic limestone buildings that this amazing town square. Restaurants are amazing, barbecue there is unreal. You have culture, you have aesthetic. That is a community where I'm like, I could absolutely see why people live here. And that's how we determine markets. Those are the most important things. You physically have been there, population's going up, there is an actual need for housing, and you have stable jobs in the area. If you do all of these things, and you can find these markets all over the country, that may be the market for you to invest in. Your next step is figure out who are the other owners there and how are you going to buy your first property.
