I Quit My Job in Canada at 22 to Flip Houses in the US. I Wouldn’t Do It Again.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Teagan Trapp, 24, a Canadian based in Kelowna, British Columbia, who buys and sells real estate in the US through his company Blue Peak Ventures. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, all my life up until a year ago when I moved to Kelowna, British Columbia, in September 2025.

I grew up thinking I was going to go to university and get a job working for the government with a good pension and paychecks.

For three years, I worked as an HVAC and refrigeration mechanic as a commercial service tech. I would work up on roofs, I would work at hospitals on ice machines or on their commercial kitchen equipment, walk-in coolers, and walk-in freezers.

I would work in ceiling spaces, on air handling units, and in crawl spaces. I would work in all kinds of very difficult areas where most people would not work.

Growing up, my dad had rental properties — he still has them — and all my life I was around them. He had tenants in his houses, and I would help him with things like evictions, doing repairs before move-in, after move-out, doing showings, throwing big mattresses in dumpster bins, and anything you could think of.

I saw what it was like to have rental properties, but I didn’t see any kind of financial opportunity within Canada for residential.

I wanted to work in HVAC for probably five to 10 years. I thought I would save up enough money to buy a couple of apartment buildings that had at least 32 units, and then I would live in one of those units and rent out all the other ones.

That was my goal. I didn’t want to have residential houses and rent them out in Canada, because I didn’t see it being profitable because of mortgages — they renew every five years in Canada.

If I want to get debt on a property, I don’t want so many different things changing in the next three to four years. Taxes and insurance are going to go up no matter what; you can project that. But not the mortgage interest rate — and your payment could go way up.

Say you get a house, and it’s cash flowing, and then you have to renew your mortgage after five years — you’re screwed. I can’t control the interest rate on my debt. Whereas in the US, you can get an interest rate locked in for 30 years.

I decided that instead of doing multifamily in Canada, I can just flip homes in the US, and it’s a lot easier to make the numbers work. There’s just so much more of a market opportunity versus in Canada.

It took time to land my first sale from Canada

I never thought about doing anything in the US.

Someone who I used to work with in HVAC left the trade to go work for his dad’s construction company and become a partner in the business. He knew I was interested in real estate and sent me a webinar that was happening on US real estate in March 2024. That’s how I initially got the idea.

I spent a lot of time when I wasn’t working looking at YouTube videos. I got some books on Canadians who are snowbirds in America, trying to understand the tax strategy and ownership. I was talking with cross-border accountants and attorneys in the US who had worked with Canadians.

In October 2024, I quit my HVAC job.

I was grinding every day trying to figure out how to make it work.

At one point in November 2024, I got in my car and drove to Minnesota — it took me two days to get there — and I was door-knocking looking for homes to buy. I got doors slammed in my face.

That was the only time I went to the US and went looking for properties, though.

I run a business that buys real estate that most buyers would walk away from: someone has passed away, there’s a problem between the family, or the mortgage didn’t get paid. Sometimes the house is vacant, or sometimes someone is living in it. Sometimes we have to track people down.

They’re very complex real estate transactions. Sometimes there’s a will, and it’s locked in a safety deposit box, and it could be at two different banks, and the family doesn’t even know which bank it’s at, and nobody has access to the safety deposit box, and one of the heirs is missing who might have the key. All kinds of situations like that.

So I own the properties, and then I find a buyer for them.

It took me until March 2025 to buy my first property.

It was an auction for a pre-foreclosure condo just outside of Atlanta. It was an older lady; she wasn’t living there anymore and was in an assisted living facility. She was behind on her payments, so I bought the house from her and paid off the mortgage as well.

There were liens on the property from the utility companies for the water, sewer, and a lot of other outstanding things.

I paid about $70,000 cash.

I found someone online to go over there and take pictures, and they discovered it was a hoarder’s house. There was cat poop everywhere. The power was turned off. It was a disaster inside.

But I got a buyer lined up for it and sold it as-is within about three weeks for $130,000.

Between March 2025 and now, I’ve done over 30 deals. I average about two deals a month.

This business isn’t for everyone

I think I will do this for quite a while and eventually buy apartment buildings, RV parks, self-storage, and larger asset types in the US.

But if I were to start over and knew how hard this was going to be, and how much you have to devote to actually make this a business, I would have done something else, to be completely honest.

You have to have an insanely high risk tolerance, and expect it to take way longer than you ever thought, and cost way more than you would have ever thought.

I make about $25,000 on the average deal — that’s before you pay all your overhead, operating expenses, payroll, fees to maintain your entity, and everything like that.

I’m pretty far into it that I have this all going, and engines and people who are relying on me.

Right now, we’ve got a team of five, and now I’m hiring an executive assistant. I’m bringing on a business operations manager as well to remove myself as the operator so that we can basically do more. My capacity is maxed out.

I devoted myself to this business. I’m in it now, but if I knew how hard it was going to be — and how long it was going to take — I wouldn’t have done it.

Last year, we did deals in 13 different states, and it was just chaos. My head was on fire every day with all the problems and stress. By the end of the year, the goal is to operate in only four different states: South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.

Very few people will take on this kind of stress, risk, and complexity in their lives. It’s just so much easier to fail and mess up.

You have to have very thick skin to be able to deal with running a business.