Montreal

Christopher Rossie

Sarah: Next up is Christopher Rossie, based in Montreal. Christopher began investing on his own in short-term rentals about eight years ago. At one time managing 12 across Quebec and he really enjoyed connecting with people and he earned his real estate license. And working to become an expert in real estate law, rental laws, short-term leases, closing adjustments, customer service also while growing his Airbnb portfolio.

Christopher, welcome. I'm excited to hear what you've got for us today. And you are talking about Montreal.

Christopher: Thank you, Sarah. Thanks for having me. My name's Chris Rossie from Montreal, as Sarah said I want to talk a little bit about the ups and downs of my journey to what I call a passive living.

Primarily achieving this goal through leveraging my real estate with ideas like STRs short-term rentals, things like that. Real quick, a little bit about how I got into it. Rewind seven years. And I'm quitting my day job as a fashion designer of all things. Super toxic world, underappreciated and nine to five that quickly turn into all-nighters basically to make some fat cat rich.

Here I am, I'm quitting my job. Having a baby coming at the same time. A huge change in my life. That was seven years ago and now I got two kids. I'm at a crossroads in my life. I basically dropped my only source of income. I'd already been baptized in the real estate world at this point.
About a year earlier, I bought a six Plex in a rundown part of town. At the time my rent was no more than 350 bucks a month. It was pretty low. The building itself needed a lot of work. I was renting the basement in that building at that time, teaching Kung Fu and the owner came to me to basically ask me to leave.

He wants to clean up the property to sell it. Next thing, I know I'm a half a million dollars in debt. I own this crappy black in a terrible part of town with four tenants, one of which was me renting the basement. I started with the first empty unit, cleaned it up, started renting it on Airbnb, and started getting bookings.

Starting with the next one, this one I renovated, I redid the kitchen. I redid the bathroom. I'd never done any of this at this point in my life. I'm YouTubing how to do plumbing. This is the point where we're at. That started working too. At this point, it started flowing. I ended up taking the whole building and doing the short-term with it.

I kept that one unit in the basement where I had somebody. Back to the point that Genevieve had made, always basically being able to create a system and having essentially an eye on the prize. In that Plex, because I had so many unit's going at once. I kept out, I kept one unit where I can have someone helping me out, keeping an eye on basically an eye on the units, making sure everything was running safe and for quick turnovers, things like that.

One thing that really helped me was I partnered with a household company that supplied household goods to places like home sense winners, things like that. I had a great connection with linens and things like that. I never ran out of that sort of thing. That really helped me.
Different tricks that helped me become successful in this aside from that, as Gen had spoken of getting your permits in order. This is a priority, depending on where you are, the regulations are different and you have to get that stuff in order because they're going to come after you one way or another, if you're not.

Getting your permits in order is like the first step to do, especially these days back when I started. Everything was under the radar and almost like anything went so next, I would say making sure you have a strict policy, a strict cancellation policy, because he can't do what I found by playing with the different policies.

I was able to get better quality hosts, one or better-quality guests, one cause people who are actually making plans. That helped me scale my business as well, because I knew it was coming. Again, Like Genevieve said that the cleaning system, it really has to be on point. You have to have an accounting of everything going on in these units from linens, making sure things are refilled so that the guests can have the ultimate experience.

What it's all about. Another good thing to have is to make sure that your rules were set up so that you didn't have to deal with things on the fly that normally could have been adjusted. Things like charging per head, that's something that I had to learn really quickly because some of my units were bigger units, a three-bedroom apartment, and then you're renting for a couple and wind up paying? Let's say a hundred bucks for the night for two people, but then comes in at 7:00 PM. Now, like you're leaving cash on the table there. Especially with the big apartments and there's, it's not just that you could rent these big apartments to large groups because I would put locks on the doors.

If I was only getting two people coming in, I'd give them a room and an access to the rest of the apartment. And that worked well. Another thing, knowing your holiday. Where it's the hospitality industry, right? You got to know your holidays, you got to know what days you could lean on and adjust your prices accordingly.

At the end of the day if you're not going to look after these things, you're still leaving more money on the table. You have to have your security deposits set up properly. If, and when things go wrong you're able to have a basis for how you're going to lay out and deal with these things.
And you would, depending on the platform you are using, you only have a certain amount of time to make these claims. You really got to be organized and you gotta be quick about your affairs. Another thing that's not super evident that I wanted to talk about was how people plan on accepting the guests. Are you greeting your guests? Are you putting some sort of lockbox or coded entrance to get them in? I found and I did both. I found the best thing was to either leave a lockbox or have a coded entry and then touch base with the people shortly afterwards. I found when I had someone or when I was greeting them, they felt intimidated or they just wanted to get up to their apartment and let loose after a long flight.

There's so many different things that you could look at to optimize and see where you could improve on your short-term rental. One really big point is your view. How people see and book your apartments. It's all algorithms through these websites. One really key factor that I find that helped to fill my calendars was by modifying my listings, modifying my pricing.

Blocking dates one day, unblocking them the next day, having that type of activity in the algorithms really put me right up to the top. And of course, to stay at the top is a whole other thing. Amongst all my different units. There were some that I was super, I had it in multiple accounts too. There were some that were Superhosts.

There were some that weren't at the end of the day, I say screw Superhosts it's about giving a service. It's about being real with what you're providing and it being accurate right? At the end of the day, I was renting through some three and a half, said $30 to $50 a night that was nothing special.

I was a super host. And then I was renting luxury chalets up in the Laurentian where I couldn't get the Superhost status, because it was just regardless that I'm implementing the same procedure everywhere. It's about people's expectations. Obviously when people are looking for that savings and they're going for more of that bargain type of unit, which was super successful you have to lay out expectations.

People have to know what they're buying and if they know what they're buying they're happy. They're happy afterwards. There are no surprises. I have a couple of final points. The next one I want to get onto is basically a do's and don'ts that I found super helpful for me. Like I said, having a good marketing profile and it's not enough to be on all the websites because having an, a bad omnipresent.

It's just going to work negatively, leave for you in the long run anyways. Having good marketing professional photos, a good and accurate description that actually depicts what you're selling. That goes to eternity, right? Don't undervalue your property, right? I remember when I first started, I had this one property where I wasn't getting a booking. I was playing with the prices and I ended up getting a certain type of clientele. And there's this one night where I booked it for two guys and I had a feeling. I stayed in the unit next door. And that evening I see four underage girls climbing up the back entrance to go into the apartment.

I'm like, whoa, what is going on here? It's super important to filter your guests, not to undervalue your property, to attract the wrong type of crowd and to have the eye on the prize, make sure that either you're there to watch it. You have someone there to watch it, or you have external cameras like Genevieve had mentioned because otherwise you're toast.

You're toast. You don't know what's going on and anything could happen. And especially when you're charging per head. There's a huge difference between a week stay for one person and a week stay for their whole family. You don't want to leave the money on the table for you.

There were a lot of ups and downs, especially because I had a lot of listings under the hundred dollar mark and plenty over. And you deal with all kinds of people. Most of the time, it's a lot of fun. Now, we have COVID came. I call it post COVID BNB.

What to expect, what to look out for. I thought it would be a lot tougher. Like Genevieve said there, I would end up cutting my inventory in half, just because at the end of 2019 it wound up being a real good rental market. And I found some really interesting candidates to fill up some units.
At that point. I was having a second baby. I really needed some more time to aid in growing my other businesses and to spend time with my family. I cut my units in half and thought that the other half would just flutter along, not getting booked up, but I had so many different types of situations where we could feed the need for this post COVID era. I appreciate being here with you guys.

Sarah: That was awesome. Christopher, I just actually have a question. Where are you advertising your units right now? Or were you strictly on Airbnb? Are you using other platforms?

Christopher: No. For sure, you gotta have that presence everywhere. I was on Airbnb. VRBO booking.com and then to name a bunch of others because here in Quebec, there's Shalia Lua for our Laurentian ones. There's like a whole bunch of other smaller ones and you have to be on all of them.

And at first it was when I first found myself 12 different units on a whole bunch of different platforms, getting messages from people all over the place. It goes to show you again about Genevieve. She must've seen it all managing 250 plus properties, but it's so true. You have to be organized.
You have to be on point otherwise a lot of profit to be had, but a lot of risks too.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Christopher. And we will put your email right there. If anybody wants to reach out, feel free to email Christopher and also hang tight for the networking. If you have more questions for Christopher, thank you so much.