Bryce Kander - Real Estate Investing

I bought this house on a rent-to-own — for $5,000. Today it's an Airbnb, and here's how the numbers stack up. I pay $1,200 a month to own this place. That's my rent-to-own payment, working me toward owning the house outright. Against that, the Airbnb brings in about $3,000 to $3,400 a month. Even after the other costs of running it — utilities and the rest — that spread between $1,200 going out and $3,000-plus coming in is what makes this deal work. The guests are effectively paying down my path to ownership. It doesn't run itself, though. My wife orders everything for the place off Instacart, and I bring it in. And our cleaners are the backbone of the whole operation — Helen and her team turn the place over between guests, and I wouldn't be able to do this without her. A great cleaner isn't an expense on a deal like this; she's the reason the income keeps coming. This is my favourite kind of creative financing: a house I got into for $5,000, on a rent-to-ow...

Have you heard of shadow tax? It's what inflation really is — a tool the government uses to pay off its debt faster. Think about it from the government's side. The first time they borrowed a million dollars, that was real money. But inflation shrinks the value of a dollar year after year, so repaying that old debt later is easy for them — they hand back dollars that are worth less than the ones they borrowed. The debt stays the same number; the dollars get cheaper. That's the shadow tax: nobody votes on it, nobody sees a bill for it, but it quietly transfers value away from everyone holding money. Here's the part most people miss: it's exactly the same with your mortgage. At the end of your amortization, you're paying the loan off with inflated dollars — dollars worth less than the ones you borrowed at the start. As a borrower, that long tail of cheaper dollars actually works in your favour. And the lenders know all of this. That's why they front-load the in...

Here's one for tenants. If a landlord puts an Airbnb into the upstairs suite or the downstairs suite of the property you live in, the place you call home changes overnight — and that change is worth money to you, if you handle it right. Start by naming what's actually different. You used to live beside a neighbour 365 days a year. Now there are 365 different people cycling through the property over the year. That's more noise, more strangers, more wear on the shared spaces — and your landlord knows it, because the Airbnb only works if the building stays in good shape and the reviews stay five stars. So make the offer that turns their problem into your discount. Tell the landlord you're fine with the arrangement — and that you'll keep an eye on the property for them. Offer to handle the snow removal and the lawn care, the exact things that make guests happy and keep those five-star reviews coming. You're offering to be the on-the-ground help their Airbnb needs. T...

I just learned something that changes the math on tiny houses completely: you can get a 25-year mortgage on one. A full 25-year amortized mortgage — on a tiny house. That surprised me, because I assumed tiny house financing worked like RV financing. An RV is a vehicle, so you're looking at a short loan — five or seven years — with payments to match. Short amortization means big monthly payments, and big monthly payments kill cash flow before you even list the place. A tiny house isn't financed that way. Spread over 25 years, the payment drops to something a rental can actually carry. Now run that idea where it belongs: your own backyard. Put a tiny house on your property, finance it over 25 years so the monthly payment stays small, and rent it out on Airbnb. The nightly income comes in against a mortgage-sized payment instead of an RV-loan payment — and that's where the cash flow lives. It's a different way to get into short-term rentals without buying a whole second pr...

How do you know you're looking at a good flip? It looks bad. Eggshells on the floor, a place in rough shape — that's what a lucrative flip actually looks like when you walk through it. A lot of people get this backwards. They tour properties that are already nice and wonder where the flip is. There isn't one. If a house is already too nice, you can't make it any nicer — and you can't recoup the money you'd put into it, because there's no value left to add. The profit in a flip comes from the gap between what the place is now and what it could be, and a pretty house has no gap. So you need the opposite: something ugly. A place where you're stepping over the previous occupants' mess just to see it, where every other buyer walks in and walks right back out. That's exactly the point — while they're seeing a disaster, you need to be seeing what the place is going to look like when it's done. Ugly is not a warning sign in a flip. Ugly is the op...

I've paid tenants to move out more times than I can count — so let me tell tenants how to be on the receiving end of that deal. If someone buys the property you currently live in, and the place is run down, you can usually see the writing on the wall: they're going to fix it up, and you're probably going to be moving anyway. So don't just wait for it to happen. Go to the new owner and ask for cash for keys. Tell them you'd move out early — offer them a number, like $500 — and point out the advantage to them: they're going to renovate this place and make a lot of money on it, and having you out sooner gets that started sooner. Frame it as help with your moving costs, and ask if that would be advantageous to them. Then comes the most important part of the negotiation: after you've said it, don't say anything. The next person to talk loses. You've made a reasonable offer that helps both sides — an early, clean vacancy for the owner, and cash toward your...

Some of the smartest Airbnb plays I've seen don't involve buying anything. I've got friends who live on an acreage, and all summer long they Airbnb'd the trailer in their backyard. The trailer was just sitting there — so they turned it into a rental and let guests pay them for it. Other friends took it even further. They moved into their trailer, parked it at Sylvan Lake for the summer, and rented out their massive house while they were gone. Think about that trade: they spent the summer at the lake, and their big house — the expensive one — was busy earning money instead of sitting empty. It worked out to more than a free holiday. Renting out the main house paid for their mortgage for the year, and then some. One summer of guests covered twelve months of payments, while the owners lived in a trailer by the lake. That's the part of Airbnb people underestimate. It's not just about buying rental properties — it's about looking at what you already have differen...

My basement suite flooded, and the bill to fix it was $3,600. Here's the part that surprised people: I paid that $3,600, I didn't have to pay a deductible, and my insurance didn't go up even though I made a claim. My short-term rental coverage — my Air coverage — covered it. That's how it's supposed to work. You carry the extra coverage on the rental side of the property, and when something goes wrong in the suite, that coverage is what responds. The flood got fixed, the claim got handled, and it didn't touch my premiums. So you'd think carrying that extra insurance would earn you something on the other side of the policy. You'd think your primary residence insurance would cost less — you're a better, more covered customer, after all. It doesn't. My home insurance is still more with a short-term rental in the picture, and the extra coverage I carry doesn't bring the primary side down at all. That's the reality of insuring a property with ...

Can you believe it? Someone stole the sign right off the side of my car. Not the car. Not anything in the car. The sign — the one with my face on it. And this isn't even the first time. This is the second time one of my signs has walked away. We used to have a sign out on Gasoline Alley with a giant chicken on it, and that one disappeared too. Somewhere out there, in someone's basement, is a giant chicken sign with my face on it. I hope they're enjoying it. There's a strange compliment buried in there, I guess. Nobody steals a sign nobody notices. When your marketing is big, bright, and has your face all over it, people pay attention — and apparently a couple of people have paid the kind of attention that involves taking it home. I'm sharing this because it's the unglamorous side of running a business that nobody posts about. Signs get stolen. Marketing disappears. You replace it and keep going. If a stolen sign is the worst thing that happens to your advertisin...

Six hundred square feet. A basement. One room that has to be both the living room and the bedroom. And it brings in $2,000 a month on Airbnb. That's not a typo — that's what a small suite in a great location can do. Let me describe the place honestly, because that's the whole point. It's a studio: the master bedroom is the living room, because there's only the one room. There's a cute little seating area, a mirror by the door so guests can check themselves on the way out, and an updated kitchen done in white and gold. Even the entry door is, frankly, ugly. None of that stops it from renting. Why does it work? Location. The suite sits right next to a park, and for short-term guests, where a place is beats how big it is. Guests aren't moving in — they're visiting. They need a clean, updated, well-located base, and 600 square feet is plenty for that. This is the house-hacking math people underestimate. A basement that most owners treat as dead space can car...

Dirt. That's where it's at. When I look at a property, the house is almost the last thing I care about — what matters is the size of the land underneath it and what the zoning lets you do with it. Here's a perfect example. Picture an ordinary house sitting on a lot, parked between much bigger buildings. Most people drive past and see an old house. What I see is the zoning: on a lot like that, you can build an apartment building. The house is just what's currently occupying land that's allowed to become something much bigger. That changes how you value the property completely. A house priced as a house can actually be priced like future development land — and if the seller and other buyers are only seeing the house, you may be the only one pricing in what the dirt can become. So train your eye. When you see a modest house sitting between larger buildings, or on an unusually big lot, ask the zoning question before you ask anything about the kitchen. The size of the la...

People sometimes assume landlords never budge on rent. As a landlord, I'll tell you the secret: good tenants ask, and sometimes the answer is yes. I've had tenants who'd been with me for a year come and ask, plain and simple, if I'd reduce their rent by $50 or $100. And I have. Here's why that works. For a landlord, a good tenant is worth more than a little extra money. Peace of mind has a price, and a reliable person who's already in the unit, paying on time and looking after the place, is worth a small discount — or worth not raising the rent at all. And context matters: rents went up about 40% in a single recent year, so simply holding your current rent steady is already a form of affordable rent compared to the market. There's a second route if a straight discount isn't on the table: trade labour for value. I've had tenants build fences and upgrade a bathroom for me — I paid for the materials, they provided the labour. They got a nicer place with...

I own a vacant lot in Mirror, Alberta. I bought it for $10,000. It's now worth $22,000. And one day, that lot is going to turn into a Corvette — that's the goal, and it's not a joke. It's just math and patience. Here's the math most people get wrong. They think real estate grows in a straight line: $10,000 becomes $20,000, then $30,000, then $40,000. That's adding, not doubling. Real estate value doubles in steps — $10,000 to $20,000, $20,000 to $40,000, $40,000 to $80,000. Each doubling is bigger than the last, because the growth applies to the whole amount, not just your original purchase price. That's the path a $10,000 lot takes. This one has already done its first doubling — $10,000 to $22,000 — and nothing dramatic happened to it. It's a vacant lot. It just sat there while time and the market did the compounding. The land didn't need me to renovate it, manage it, or check on it every weekend. This is why I tell people that time in the market be...

One door in one of our buildings saved us $300,000. Not because of what the door is — because of what we found when we actually looked closely at the wall around it. Under current construction standards, this building would need a sprinkler system installed throughout. That's the kind of unexpected renovation cost that can wreck a project's numbers. The building has a fire suppression wall, and the assumption was that the firewall ran straight through the entire building — which would have meant the sprinkler requirement applied everywhere. It didn't. When we looked at the actual layout, the firewall doesn't go all the way through in a straight line, because one of the units — with its kitchen — sits in the path. The firewall zigzags around it. And because of that zigzag in the original design, we didn't have to put a sprinkler system throughout the building at all. Total saved: $300,000 in unexpected renovations. The lesson isn't about firewalls specifically. I...

You've seen the signs everywhere: "We Buy Houses for Cash." They look like an easy way out if you need to sell fast. Here's what the signs don't tell you — and it starts with the fact that they're illegal to post without a permit. That's why I cut them down. The bigger issue is the price tag hiding behind the pitch. On average, if you sell to one of these outfits, you're selling for about 20% less than fair market value. Run that number on your own house. Twenty percent of a home's value is not a small convenience fee — for most sellers, it's tens of thousands of dollars handed over in exchange for skipping the normal selling process. Cash sounds simple, and that's exactly the hook. But "fast and easy" stops looking like a favour once you realize what it costs. The discount is the business model. They aren't paying you for your house so much as they're buying your equity at a markdown and keeping the difference. Before you...

Your basement floods, you've got an Airbnb down there, and guests are checking in right away. Panic is an option. Here's the better one: call Airbnb, tell them your basement flooded, and ask them to help you — because they will cancel the reservations for you. That detail matters more than most hosts realize. If you cancel the reservations yourself, you can lose your shot at Superhost status. When Airbnb cancels them for you under their emergency coverage, your reputation isn't affected. Same flooded basement, same cancelled bookings — completely different outcome for your account, depending on who pushes the button. The second half of the save is insurance. I carry loss of rent insurance, so even with nobody staying in the suite right now, I'm still collecting income while the place gets sorted out. A flood is disruptive enough on its own; it doesn't also have to be a month of zero revenue. Emergencies are part of hosting. Water doesn't care about your booking ...

On one street, there are three houses in a row — and my family owns all three. My wife and I own two of them, side by side, and my mom owns the third one right next door. People ask why we'd concentrate our buying on a single row of houses, and the answer is sitting right across the street: a park. That's the whole strategy. The houses themselves are modest, but they're not really what we bought. We bought the land under them, in that location. A park doesn't move. The amenity across the street is permanent, and over time the land in a spot like that is going to be worth way more than the house sitting on it. This is the oldest rule in real estate: location, location, location. Houses age, wear out, and eventually get torn down or rebuilt. Land in the right place just keeps getting scarcer and more valuable. When you're choosing between a nicer house in a weaker location and an ordinary house on great land, the great land is usually the better long-term buy. It'...

Here's one of my favourite ideas for a rental building: put a manager suite right inside it. Instead of managing the property from a distance, you have a live-in caretaker on site — someone who actually lives in the building as part of the setup. It's a small change to how a building runs, but it changes the whole experience for everybody in it. Think about what happens when something goes wrong in a typical rental. A tenant has a problem, and their only option is to call or message a landlord or a management office somewhere else and wait. With a live-in manager, the answer is simple: go speak to the manager. They're right there in the building. Problems get a face and a door to knock on instead of a phone queue. That on-site presence is also what builds community. A building stops feeling like a stack of separate units when there's a person in it who knows the tenants and is visibly looking after the place. Tenants feel looked after, issues get raised early instead of...

Cutting down illegal "We Buy Houses for Cash" signs has become a hobby of mine. Those signs get stuck up without permission — nobody approved them being there — and what the companies behind them really sell homeowners is a discount on their own house. Let me explain what I mean. The big pitch from cash buyers is speed: quick possession, no hassle, sell it fast. But here's a real comparison. I sold a house before it even got on the market, and it sold for $33,000 less than what it was listed for — and the buyers still got possession in under 21 days. It wasn't on the market for a day. So a regular sale moved just as fast as any cash offer promises, without the seller having to give away their equity to get that speed. That's what those signs don't tell you. When you sell to the "we buy houses for cash" guys, you're often selling for 20% less than you'd get selling the normal way. Twenty percent of your home's value is an enormous price to...

Here's a property where the garage is the headline act. It's so big I joke that you buy the garage and the house comes free — and honestly, it's the biggest residential garage I've ever seen. It's not just wide or deep, either: there's a full mezzanine level inside it. The house itself is really nice, but the garage is what makes this place an investor's kind of property. Most buyers walk through a home and judge it on bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchen finishes. Investors need to look at the extras, because extras are where the hidden income lives. A garage this size isn't just parking and storage — it's rentable space. Space like this could rent out for $700 a month, and that's income most buyers never even think to count when they're running their numbers. That's the lesson here. Two buyers can look at the exact same property and see completely different deals, because one of them only sees a house and the other sees a house plus a secon...

My mom couldn't afford to rent her vacation home — so she bought it instead. That sounds backwards until you run her numbers, and her numbers are exactly why she owns the place today instead of handing a landlord a small fortune every winter. Here's the math she walked me through. Renting the home in prime time would cost $23,000 Canadian a month. Broken down nightly, that's $545 US a night — and she likes to stay for three months at a time. Three months of prime-time rent adds up to roughly $75,000. As she put it, she doesn't have $75,000 to spend on a vacation rental. Most people don't. So she flipped the problem around. Instead of paying $75,000 in rent and having nothing to show for it, she bought the home. The place isn't a cost sitting empty the rest of the year, either — she rents it out for ten months, and the rental income is what carries the property while she's not there. Then comes the best part: because she owns it, she gets to stay there for tw...