In this solo edition of Whiteboard Wednesday, Christian Osgood answers six viewer questions covering key aspects of real estate investing. He explains that there is no fixed timeline for moving from relationship‑building to a transaction; the shift should feel natural within an established rapport. He clarifies that the rental/property calculator used in his mentorship program is not publicly shared, but recommends BiggerPockets’ calculator as an alternative. Regarding outreach, he advises focusing on local owners but also shows how to locate the individuals behind out‑of‑state investment firms. He discusses cost‑segregation studies, noting they are generally worthwhile for properties over $1 million and that smaller assets may not benefit; he suggests consulting a CPA. He outlines LLC structuring when private lenders are involved, emphasizing that the lender deals with the entity, not the LLC’s internal documents. Finally, he describes his prospecting method using Google Maps to locate owners, explains why the channel avoids live‑recorded calls, and promises role‑play demonstrations in future videos. The video blends practical advice, mentorship promotion, and channel‑policy explanations.
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Hey YouTube, it's Christian, and I'm back for a solo version of Whiteboard Wednesday. Cody's on another project, so I'll be reading both parts, and we have a bonus 6th question this week. First question: Love these videos. My question for next week— now this week— is how long do you have to build a relationship with the seller until you feel like you can start the transactional phase? This is from MD Mahid, that is a great question. You never want to be transactional. That doesn't mean you're never going to do a transaction. If you have met with someone and you have a relationship where the two of you, you know each other, you know each other's goals, you've communicated, you're starting to form a friendship. If they have something to sell, you're going to be the first one who comes to mind. They'll reach out to you. It's not that we never propose sales. Sometimes I'll talk to someone and the only thing they want to do is get rid of a property. That doesn't come up as a function of, hey, um, can I buy your real estate from you, or how do we, how do we put together a transaction? Sometimes all we tell— I'm about to sell something right now. I'm in the process of selling one of my first duplexes. My conversation with one of the local owners was, hey, last time we talked you said you were getting rid of some stuff. I am going to be more liquid. In our last conversation they were asking about where money comes from and They wanted to see more liquidity from me. So it was a natural extension of our conversation to let them know where I was at and how that was changing. So the short answer is there's no right time. It's when you have a relationship and it feels appropriate as it's just a natural flow of your conversation to bring up a transaction. If you're networked with owners, owners trade properties. It's just part of the relationship. Next question. This is from Corey Caldwell. Enjoy your content. Is there a link to the calculator for analyzing your properties? If you've seen some of our math and analytics videos, you'll sometimes see Cody and I use a rental calculator. It's part of our mentorship group program, so I don't share that for just anyone. I don't want people changing it or rebranding it. If you're part of our mentorship group, we meet once a month. It's couple hours a month, there's a national call. We go over how to do the math, and the point of that document is so that everyone is on the same page speaking the same language. Uh, pretty easy to create yourself in Excel. Any calculator will do. If you're looking for a great calculator online, BiggerPockets actually has a phenomenal calculator that can do most of what we do on that Excel sheet. All right, next from T. Durden. If a lot of the apartments around my area are owned by out-of-state investment firms, should I still try to reach out to them? Or should I just focus on local mom-and-pop owners? It's a great question. Generally, focus on your local owners, but you can focus on absolutely anyone. Turns out the big investment firms do own real estate. There's an owner behind that LLC. If you haven't seen it yet, we did a video sometime last week on how to find owners in your market, how to find absolutely anyone. This will help you find the owner behind that LLC, and you can reach out to them directly. So you can approach them just like you would a mom-and-pop. Turns out they're just people too. This from Christ Gives Life. I was wondering if you get cost segregation studies for your properties. If so, how do you pay for them without any money out of pocket? Thanks. For our real estate, we have a lot of smaller properties that we picked up in the initial stages of portfolio. Cost segregation doesn't quite make sense for those. This is a great question for your CPA on when it makes sense. Some of the things that you can write down over a shorter period of time is the shared utilities. Think of like an in-building AC. If every unit is on a centralized AC, that's something that you can segregate and depreciate on an accelerated schedule. It's not for everyone. That's a question for your CPA. Last I talked to my CPA, they start looking at it on properties purchased over $1 million, and then we start looking at the actual makeup of that property to see if it makes sense. Thus far, it's not something we've done. We will likely be doing that this year on the larger buildings like the 38. Good question. From Jesus Saves, we have a theme in the naming this week. Thanks for the video. How do you structure an LLC with private lenders involved? So your LLC is gonna be separate from anything that you do with your lender. You have to have an LLC established to send to the bank. They're going to ask for, you know, your basics. If you're doing financing, they want to establish a bank account. You need EIN and you need a UBI number. These are all parts of establishing your LLC. The lender is not actually on any of your LLC docs. You're just creating an entity. Your LLC can be whatever all the lawyers sign off on. For ours, we have different debt structures, equity structures, different numbers of partners on different deals. No matter how you set it up, they're lending to the entity. So your LLC setup doesn't change all that much as far as the lender is concerned. And let's see here, we have— oh, this is in response to our prospecting using Google Maps and how we find every owner ever just using Google, no paid services. Link will be in the description below. Very insightful video. Never knew utilizing Google Maps and other free sites would be this useful. Would you guys do a live video of finding a deal with this method? Thank you. We will be doing a mock-up video of some of these things. We don't record a lot of live calls on this channel, and that is a conscious decision. It's usually role play while we make these calls. We don't want to include anything that if someone doesn't realize that they're being recorded or know, it's just not authentic to script it and put it online with someone. So if I asked them, hey, can we record, it just doesn't— it's not a real conversation anymore. And I don't want to put any content online with an unknowing subject. So, um, short answer, you won't see us do it live, but we are absolutely happy to roleplay that. And that is something that you will see on this channel, how we actually find that, how we make that call and what that call looks like. You see pieces of it in some videos, but we will target that specifically. And that's it for our 6 questions this week. Cody will be back next Wednesday, but I hope you enjoyed this. Every week we're doing these 5 questions. So like, subscribe, follow for more. Ask your questions here in the comments. We will answer all of them, or at least everyone that we can get to. Uh, today was a bonus 6-question. Generally 5 questions every week. I will see you guys next time.
