I started an Airbnb business with my friends with 4 cabins. Now we manage more than 500 properties.

• Samuel Sévigny cofounded Chaletô, a Quebec-based rental management firm, with friends in 2022.
• They've grown the company in four years and now manage over 500 properties.
• Sévigny said that some things run more smoothly at scale — others don't.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Samuel Sévigny, 32, the cofounder and marketing director at Chaletô, a short-term rental property management company based in Quebec, Canada. Sévigny started Chaletô in 2022 with four of his friends and has scaled to over 500 cabins and condos. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

It started as six friends fresh out of college. We all had other jobs. It was in 2016, and we wanted to invest in real estate, diversify, and get started in life.

One of our co-founders had condos in downtown Quebec City already, so he pitched us the idea of investing all together and building our own cabin, and to manage it ourselves. So that's what we did.

We launched our first cabin together in 2019, then our second in 2020, right in the middle of COVID.

Fast-forward to 2022, and we had four different units that we owned and managed, and we wanted to delegate the process of managing them. We couldn't find anyone who was professional enough for our standards, so it was just like most origin stories: it starts with a problem that we're trying to solve.

In the meantime, our neighbor started pressuring us, asking if we could manage his property because he could see that we were rented pretty much the whole year. We said no at first, but he kept asking. At some point, we decided to say yes. It started with our neighbor, then it was the neighbor's neighbor, and then the whole street.

Then we had 10 properties under management in 2022.

The six of us had to sit down and say, "Hey, what are we going to do with this? It's getting serious." Either we'll make this a serious, legitimate business, or we stop, because there's no in-between.

So in 2022, we decided to incorporate Chaletô. We grew from 10 to 500-plus units in four years. We decided to make it a real thing and to go all-in.

When we scaled our business, our gains scaled, too

The biggest difference between an individual host and a property management company is really the optimization at scale.

When you're a professional host, you're dealing with your own cleaner, your tech stack is under one roof, and you've got one or two listings. You're paying the higher-bracket price for all the tools you're using.

You probably decide to cut different tools because you maybe don't have the resources, or the time, or the training to be able to use them well. I'm thinking about dynamic pricing tools. I'm thinking about AI automation for operations. I'm thinking about a bunch of things like that, because that's not your day job.

I was working in advertising in Montreal and doing Airbnb hosting on the side. I was managing the guest messaging on nights and weekends, so I really lived the individual host dilemma of having a full-time job and then dealing with guests Friday and Saturday when you're off from your day job. I lived through that for several years, so I really, really understand how it feels.

When you make this a full-time gig and it becomes a full-time business, then you make gains at scale.

You get a little bit more leverage with relationships within the industry. For example, you can negotiate cleaners' contracts a little bit easier. That comes with professional management, and that's the main benefit of having it at scale.

Also, you can attract talent for specific things in your business that you couldn't if you were alone. If you're managing only one or two properties, there's no need to have a full-time dedicated revenue management person, someone who's trained for this, sophisticated, and educated about that. But when you manage 50 or 100 properties, it becomes interesting because you can optimize each function of your hosting business.

Our business works best when we're not distracted by the latest trends

When you scale, it's easy to get distracted. You see it in every industry possible: real estate, service, and tech. It's like when something starts clicking, and it works, and everything seems to be working for you, then the easiest shortcut for entrepreneurs, I think, is jumping on all the opportunities.

It would be easy for us to say, "We're going to keep investing in real estate because we're giving the service to support it," but it's a different beast. Investing is totally different than servicing the owners. Now you're distracted between two different businesses: you're scaling one, and then you're trying to scale the other.

Another problem we face is the speed at which AI is moving, not only for our industry but for everyone.

At what stage does it become mature enough to be implemented within our business, and where do you focus? Because it seems like there is a new tool and there's a new shiny object being created by the next engineer every other week.

One of our challenges is always, do you keep hiring people and training them and keep it very hospitality based, or do you optimize with AI, and is it mature enough to support that optimization, or is it just a super shiny object and a gamble?

So far, I'll say I don't think we have 100% the right answer to that. We prefer to hire and grow our team for now and really double down on service when everyone's running towards AI.

We also prefer to hire actual people from Quebec. They speak French first, English second, and they can support any type of customer service issue because they live here, they understand the market, they understand the region, and the experiences around it.

We use tech to support our business, but every couple of months, it feels like you have to re-challenge yourself. Is this still the right tech? Are you overpaying for it? Because AI is going at a speed that is so fast.