Canadian Engineer Builds 20-Property US Portfolio Starting at $22,000

Araceli was a mechanical engineer in Canada — seventeen years in aerospace, a good salary, and a stable life. Then she got divorced, lost half the household income overnight, and the bills didn't shrink one bit.

She took action. She bought a property in Hamilton, Ontario, split it into three units, lived in one, and rented the other two. That first house generated $400 a month in cash flow while she lived completely rent-free. Everything clicked.

But by 2016, the Canadian market had moved against her. The same type of fixer-upper she'd bought for $180,000 was now going for $300,000 and above — with offers coming in $50,000 to $100,000 over asking. At those prices, cash flow was gone. She looked at St. Catharines and Niagara Falls. Nothing worked.

Then someone asked a simple question: "Have you ever looked at buying in the US?"

Araceli had worked in Cleveland for six months as an engineer. Her memory of the city wasn't glowing — but she took another look. What she found stopped her: two houses available, one listed at $17,000, the other at $22,000. Coming from Canada, that was the price of a used car.

She bought both. The first property ran into trouble immediately: a bad property manager, a tenant who trashed the place, and a sale at a loss to regroup. That failure came with a lesson she now tells every investor she meets — a good property with a bad team becomes a bad property, every time.

The second house was different. She bought it for $22,000, put roughly $20,000 into repairs, and placed her tenant on a lease-to-own agreement. The tenant paid $810 a month and took over all maintenance responsibilities. Three years later, Araceli had paid back her entire investment from a single property — and still owned it.

When Araceli started, every deal had to be cash. No US credit history, no Social Security number, no lending options for foreign nationals. That landscape has changed dramatically.

Today, Canadian investors can access DSCR loans — Debt Service Coverage Ratio loans — without a US tax ID. These loans qualify based on the property's rental income, not the borrower's personal income. You don't need to set foot in the US to close.

Araceli has now completed 20 deals in the US market. She obtained her E-2 investor visa and runs a renovation company in Cleveland full-time. What started as a search for cash flow from Hamilton became a full business built around the same market she first looked at skeptically.

The $22,000 house paid back its full investment within three years through the lease-to-own arrangement. That tenant stayed the duration, handled maintenance, and treated the property as their own — because eventually it would be.

Her competitive advantage? The same one that originally made her reluctant to invest: she started her own renovation company because most contractors don't show up. Reliability, she found, is the actual edge in US real estate investing.