← Blog

He Flipped a House at 14: Bryce Kander on Debt and Legacy

From the show · October 29, 2026 · Andrew Rocha

Bryce Kander was 14 when his mom drove him and his brother to the dump in a Mercedes.

The back was full of what a tenant's three Rottweilers had left behind. The tenant would go away for a month at a time, and the neighbours complained that the dogs were alone in the house the whole time. By the time the family got the place back, the dogs had broken into the house, eaten the couch and, in Bryce's words, "crapped everywhere." The dump wouldn't even let them use the normal drop-off.

His mom had the boys spend a day cleaning it out. "If you're going to be a landlord, this is the kind of crap you got to deal with," she told them. Literally.

Then the neighbour offered to buy the house as is, mess and all. They sold it, and they hired someone else to finish the cleanup. That was Bryce's first flip.

I've known Bryce for years. He's a realtor in central Alberta, a real estate investor, a content creator, a husband and a dad, and he started the Central Alberta Real Estate Investor Network, which I co-host. When I had him on the show, I wanted to know how a kid ends up owning three houses by 18, and what he's building now that he's grown.

A homeschool class on how to sell houses

Bryce's mom has been a realtor for 47 years. She spends nothing on advertising and still ends up a top-selling realtor every year, according to Bryce. When he was homeschooled, one of his classes was how to sell houses.

At 13, he inherited $30,000 from a man he had never met. The man was a friend of his mom's in the hospital, and he'd offered the money to her. She didn't want it. "Well, can I leave it to your kids?" he asked. "Because my kids never visit me in the hospital." Bryce and his brother each got $30,000.

His mom laid out three options. The low-risk one was to give it to a financial advisor. The medium-risk one was to lend it to her at 10% interest. The high-risk one was to put up half the down payment on a property with her. Each boy would own 25% and she'd own the other half.

Bryce took the high-risk option. They signed a joint venture agreement on the side so it was clear that a quarter of the property was his if anything happened to her, and they told the bank exactly what they were doing. "It's all up front," he said. When he turned 18, his name went on the title.

I think about that man in the hospital more than I expected to. He felt forgotten by his own kids, so he left something to two boys he'd never met. And those boys got taught, at 13, to weigh risk before they spent a dollar of it.

Six months of talking people out of selling

Bryce got his realtor's license at 18. He already owned three houses. And for his first six months, he made basically no money.

The market was going down and people were losing their homes. So Bryce and his mom went on what they called non-listing appointments. They'd sit down with a homeowner and work out how to restructure the mortgage so the family didn't have to move. Sometimes that meant extending the amortization to lower the payments, and sometimes it meant pulling out some money to live on.

I put it to him plainly. You were sitting down with people and convincing them not to be your client, and you didn't make money for six months?

"Yeah, but it was fun," he said. "I don't go into the appointment going, oh, I want to sell your house. It's like, okay, what's best for you?"

Those families referred their friends later. When I asked what drives his generosity, he gave me five words: "Give to get, to give again." I've watched Bryce live that in small ways and big ones.

Being 18 in real estate came with its own problem. People told him he was too young. His homeschool sales training had an answer ready: "Would you rather someone who has a family that has other obligations, or someone who has a lot of free time that can give all their focus to selling your house?" Pre-memorized language helps.

The night he flushed it

When I first met Bryce, there was a lot going on in his life. He's open about it.

"I remember I used to be a stoner," he told me. A buddy challenged him to what he called the world's hardest challenge: read the Bible for 30 days straight, one chapter a day. It took him nine months.

One night he was high, looked at the clock, and saw it was almost midnight. He hadn't read his chapter. He opened to Deuteronomy 28, which lays out the blessings for following God and the curses for turning away. It's the chapter that says "all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God."

He came out of the room and asked his buddy, "Do you think we're sinning by being high right now?" They decided the answer was yes. He flushed his weed.

"From that point," he said, "my life just went on an upward trajectory."

Bryce calls it the number one decision of his life. Everything since traces back to it, including Bible college, where he learned to set up chairs. Now when his team sets up rows of chairs for an investor event, it feels like Bible college all over again. He thinks a lot of what he knows about building a community and running an organization came from being in the church.

I love that the biggest turn in his story came from one chapter a night, read late and badly. God used it anyway.

A stage to stand on

About two years ago, Bryce hired a social media coach. The coach told him he needed to build a stage to stand on. So he posted an investor event on Facebook five days ahead, and 25 people came. That first event was held at a rental of mine I had just finished renovating using the BRRRR method.

If you haven't heard the term, BRRRR stands for buy, rehab, rent, refinance and repeat. You buy an older property that needs work, renovate it, rent it to good tenants, and then refinance at the new, higher value. The equity you pull out becomes the down payment on the next one. The same guide is honest about the risks: renovations can cost more than you planned, the appraisal can come in lower than you hoped, lenders may make you wait before a cash-out refinance, and your mortgage payment goes up afterward, so the rent has to cover it.

I've run into that appraisal risk myself. Bryce told me what he thought my place would appraise at, and it came in lower, because the appraiser had compared it to single-family houses. Bryce offered to go back and argue. I said no. A lower mortgage meant better cash flow, and I could refinance later, which I did. These days I show up for every appraisal and walk the appraiser through each thing I've done to the property. My appraisals come in higher when I'm there than when I'm not.

The hope was maybe 30 people. It hit 100 quickly.

Bryce credits a lot of that, and the fact that his realtor business tripled this past year, to posting content. His advice is simple. Post what you know. "People are gonna do business with you because they know you, they like you, and they trust you," he said. "Someone else could be better at it, but because they know you, they're gonna do business with you."

He also admitted he enjoys it when people argue with him in the comments. He pointed me to two proverbs that sit back to back and sound like they contradict each other: "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself," followed by "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." Deciding which one applies to a given comment is a fun balance, he says. It also boosts the algorithm. His brother was a politician, so everything growing up was a debate.

Three briefcases

Near the end I played a game with him. Three briefcases, each with a different amount of cash. He keeps everything he knows, but nobody knows who he is. What does he do with each one?

$100. He wouldn't spend it. He'd take his phone and start posting short videos with free captions, because a lot of people watch with the sound off. He'd keep it up for three months, since "whatever you do today, you'll reap in three months approximately." His rule of thumb is that for every hour of content someone watches from you, they'll eventually spend about a thousand dollars with you. (He also told me 73% of all statistics are made up on the spot, so take that one in the spirit it was given.)

$10,000. His mom has always said that if you can buy a property for less than $10,000, just do it. Last June, Bryce and his wife bought a hoarder house that had been sitting on the market. She came downstairs one day and told him she'd been talking to the Lord and they should do seller financing.

Seller financing means the seller acts as your lender instead of the bank. They offered full price with $5,000 down, non-refundable. The sellers would carry the deal for five years, and Bryce and his wife would take over the sellers' $1,200 monthly payment. "There's only three reasons why a property doesn't sell," Bryce said. "Price, price, or price." You either get the price you want or the terms you want, so they paid full price to get the terms.

For the renovation, he borrowed from a line of credit and from a friend's RRSP. The friend lent him $65,000 at 10.5% interest, registered as a mortgage on the property, with a mortgage broker drawing up the documents and each side paying for a lawyer. If you're thinking about lending or borrowing through a registered plan, get advice first. RBC's guide to holding a mortgage in an RRSP warns that the fees can run considerably higher than on other investments, and that you can't simply sell the mortgage later if a better opportunity comes along.

$100,000. "Probably nothing different than I am right now," he said. He had just bought a 27-unit apartment building for $2,075,000 that should be worth about $4 million once it's renovated. He used a hard-money lender at 14.5% interest and raised $1.2 million from investors in about 10 days. That puts him at 34 doors, before he turns 34.

Where Bryce and I disagree

After the seller-financing story, I asked him if borrowing that much money ever scares him.

"No," he said. "I need more debt to retire."

This is the one place we're opposites. I hate debt. It freaks me out. When Emily and I had personal debt, we wanted it gone as fast as humanly possible, and we paid off $60,000 in seven months. I accept mortgages on rental properties because I can't grow without them, but I don't love how they feel.

Bryce sees it differently. His mom bought properties when interest rates were 14.5%, and back then there was no such thing as cash flow. And money keeps losing value. "There's no one cent candies, there's no five cent candies," he said. "My kids can have quarter candies." To him, the goal is to carry as much debt as the properties can service.

Then he turned it on me. What's my worst case if one of my properties goes down in value?

My answer was that I'm not selling tomorrow. The real worst case would be all my properties dropping at once while I lost my income and needed to sell. The odds of both happening at the same time are small. And even then, the rent would still come in every month.

So Bryce sleeps fine with a lot of debt, and I sleep better with less. What we both do is look at the worst case before we sign. On the 27-unit building, he'd already worked it out: if he goes $600,000 over budget, he still breaks even.

The quote he holds on to fits here too. "More sheep, more manure." One house means a little crap to deal with. A bigger building means more of it. Somehow that brings us right back to a 14-year-old at the dump.

Around the table

My last real question was about legacy. I asked him to picture himself old, in a hospital bed, with his kids visiting. What does he want to look back on?

It's the same scene that started his story, a man in a hospital waiting for kids who didn't come.

"Give kids lots of houses," Bryce said, "but then also teach them how to run it so that they're not just spending money." Then he went to a Bible verse about the righteous and their children gathered around the table. It's Psalm 128: "your children will be like olive shoots around your table."

"At that point in time," he said, "I hope they're still around the table."

Try this

Play the briefcase game with your spouse this week. Each of you writes down what you'd do with $100, $10,000 and $100,000 if they showed up today. Then compare.

Then look at what you wrote against the Six Fs: finances, family, friends, faith, fitness and freedom. If every answer lands in finances, that's worth a conversation. The free goal-setting guide walks through all six.

Bryce's mom handed him three options at 13 and let him choose. What's one thing you want your kids to know how to run, and not just inherit?

Listen to the full episode of The Currency of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts. If this was useful, send it to someone who could use it.

Sources