CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - It was a dark day in 2007, the mortgage meltdown smoldering all around us, when Kyle Harper got the news.
"I was the first one to be terminated," he says.
Harper worked for a housing developer. And now he was desperate.
"Only four days earlier I'd had my child," Harper says. "Here I had this brand new baby and my wife had quit her job to stay home with her and all of a sudden the job I had was pulled out from under my feet."
At that point, a lot of people would have run screaming from the industry. But Harper tried to re-assess.
"I looked at the housing market and said where do I fit in?" he recalls.
The new element, of course - all those foreclosed homes selling for drastically reduced prices.
"The real opportunity I saw was the fact that for the first time I'd seen in a long time, maybe ever in my real estate career, you could finance 100% of the purchase price and still be able to put a tenant in place and cover your payments," Harper says. "I was seeing houses you could buy for $50,000, $60,000 and rent for $800 or $900 a month."
Over the next 24 months, he says bought 29 foreclosures without dipping into his savings.
And now Harper wants to teach you how he did it. He just wrote a book called Free Me Forever. Today, he signed copies at Bank of America's Founders Hall.
Harper says it'll teach you how to build a portfolio of private investors.
"The good thing about real estate is you can take people out and they can touch the investment. And it's not very sophisticated so you don't have to explain complex financial models," he says.
But the most important lesson in here might just be how sweet it is to work for yourself.
"It gave me a lot of freedom and I could start doing other things like asking myself what's important in life," he says.
Now when Harper looks back to the day he lost his job, "What I thought was the worst day in my life actually turned out to be one of the best days of my life."
Find out more by logging on: www.kylepharper.com
