I quit my job when I was 22 to flip houses. I make money, but I wouldn’t do it again.

This as told 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 until I moved to Kelowna a year ago. British ColumbiaSeptember 2025.

I grew up thinking I would go to college and get a government job with a good pension and salary.

I worked as an HVAC and refrigeration technician as a commercial service technician for three years. I worked on roofs, I worked in hospitals on ice machines or on their commercial kitchen equipment, walk-in coolers and walk-in freezers.

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

When I was growing up, so did my father rental properties – he still has them – and I was around them all my life. He had tenants in his houses, and I helped him with things like evictions, pre-move, post-move repairs, showings, throwing large mattresses into trash bins, and anything else you could think of.

I saw what it was like to have rental properties, but I didn’t see any financial opportunity for housing in Canada.

I probably wanted to work in HVAC for five to 10 years. I thought I would save enough money to buy a few apartment buildings with at least 32 units, and then I would live in one of those units and rented out all others.

That was my goal. I didn’t want to own homes and rent them out in Canada because I didn’t think it was profitable because of mortgages — in Canada they are renewed every five years.

If I’m going to get into debt on a property, I don’t want so many different things to change over the next three to four years. Taxes and insurance will go up anyway; you can project that. But not the mortgage interest – and your payment could increase significantly.

Suppose you get a house and enough money comes in, and then you have to renew your mortgage after five years, then you’re screwed. I have no control over the interest on my debts. While you can get that in the US a locked interest rate for 30 years.

That’s what I’ve decided instead of doing multi-family in Canada, I can just do that houses turn inwards the USAand it’s a lot easier to make the numbers work. There are just so many more market opportunities than in Canada.

It took time to get my first sale from Canada

I never thought about doing anything in the US.

Someone I worked with in HVAC left the field to work for his father’s construction company and become a partner in the company. He knew I was interested in real estate and sent me a webinar on US real estate in March 2024. That’s how I initially came up with the idea.

When I wasn’t working, I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos. I have some books Canadians who winter in Americain an effort to understand tax strategy and property law. I spoke to cross-border accountants and lawyers in the US who had worked with Canadians.

In October 2024, I left my HVAC job.

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

At some point in November 2024, I got in my car and drove to Minnesota – it took me two days to get there – and I was knocking on doors looking for houses to buy. I had doors slammed in my face.

However, that was the only time I went to the US and looked for properties.

I run a company that buys properties that most buyers run away from: someone has died, there is a problem between the family or the mortgage has not been paid. Sometimes the house is empty, sometimes someone lives in it. Sometimes we have to track people down.

These are very complex real estate transactions. Sometimes there’s a will and it’s in a safe, and it could be at two different banks, and the family doesn’t even know which bank it’s at, and no one has access to the safe, and one of the heirs is missing who may have the key. Those kinds of situations.

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

It took until March 2025 before I bought my first home.

It was an auction for a pre-foreclosure apartment just outside of Atlanta. It was an older lady; she no longer lived there and was in a residential care center. She was behind on payments, so I bought the house from her and also paid off the mortgage.

There were liens on the property from the utilities for the water, sewer and a lot of other outstanding issues.

I paid about $70,000 in cash.

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

But I got a buyer lined up for it and sold it in about three weeks for $130,000.

Between March 2025 and now I have closed over 30 deals. I have an average of two deals per month.

This business is not for everyone

I think I’ll do this for a while and eventually apartment buildings, RV parks, self-storage and larger assets species in the US.

But if I were starting over and knew how hard this was going to be, and how much you have to spend to actually turn this into a business, to be completely honest, I would have done something different.

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

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

I’m pretty far along in having all this, and engines and people relying on me.

Right now we have a team of five, and now I’m hiring an executive assistant. I also bring in an operations manager who removes myself as the operator so that we can actually do more. My capacity is maximum.

I have dedicated myself to this company. I’m in it now, but if I knew how hard it would be – and how long it would take – I wouldn’t have done it.

Last year we did deals in thirteen different states, and it was just chaos. My head was on fire every day from all the problems and stress. The goal is to operate in just four different states by the end of the year: 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 so much easier to fail and mess up.

To run a business you have to have a very thick skin.