I didn't take the path
they told me to.

I didn't come from real estate. I spent almost three years in commercial HVAC, fixing refrigeration and mechanical systems on job sites. Good money for the hours, but I could already see the ceiling.

The plan was to grind out my journeyman ticket, maybe start an HVAC company someday, save up, and get into real estate way down the road. On the side I flipped cars: buy them wrecked, fix them up, sell them clean. Just a side hustle, but it taught me how to take something broken and make it worth more.

I got good at the trade, and then I got bored. I wanted to build something.

There was no clear path into real estate in Canada that looked like what I wanted to build, so I taught myself the U.S. market. Books, YouTube, courses, cold calls, and a lot of mistakes.

The more I learned, the more obvious it got that I didn't need to wait ten years to start. So in October 2024 I quit and went all in. Five months on the phones before anything hit. My first deal closed in March 2025, and I put every dollar back in.

In 2025 I bought properties across 13 states. Then I did the opposite of what felt natural: instead of adding markets, I cut them. I pulled out of a dozen-plus states and put everything into South Carolina, because depth beats spread when you're actually trying to build something.

Most of what I do is curative title. The house is usually the easy part. It's the ownership that's a mess: probate, foreclosure, heirs nobody can find, quiet title, partition, estates that never got finished. Usually a few of those at once.

I figure out what's actually keeping the property stuck, get the right people and the legal process moving, clear the title, and sell it clean. The complicated ones are the whole point.

Proving the model worked was stage one. Now I'm building the company around it. There's a team, and we're going deeper across operations, sales, software, and legal, so the business runs on systems and good people instead of me grinding every deal myself.

We lean on software and automation hard, because scaling shouldn't mean hiring a giant back office. It should mean better people and better systems. Hire sharp, hand over real ownership, hold a high bar.

I'm not a guru and I'm not selling a course. I don't have a degree or a pedigree. I move fast, which means I break things and I've made expensive mistakes: deals I misjudged, hires that didn't work, lessons I paid full price for.

I'm still figuring plenty of it out in real time. The difference is I'd rather be in motion and wrong sometimes than stuck and comfortable. That's the whole bet.

The path everyone pushes, get the degree, ask permission, work one job that can cut you loose on a Tuesday, is a worse bet than people admit. I'm building proof there's another way: learn by doing, own the outcome, and stop asking for permission.

I also just like who this work forces me to become. It's hard in all the ways that matter, and I'd rather do that with people who want the same than coast on something I already know how to do.