How to Transform Unhappy Neighbours into Allies to Keep the Peace for your Airbnb with Chris Cade

00:00:00 - Jenn Boyles

There are plenty of people who aren't happy living next to an Airbnb. Thankfully, what are problems or worries about potential problems with neighbors or others in your community? Let's face it,going to speak about today will help you put those worries to bed.

You are listening to the Direct Booking Success Podcast, bringing you all the information you need for your short term rental to stand out from the crowd. I'm your host, Jennn Boyles. As an owner and manager myself, I know how hard it can be to navigate the hospitality industry. I'm here to help so you too can have direct booking success.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Direct Booking Success Podcast. I'm Jnnn Boyles, your host. I'm so happy to be here with you today. And today I'm bringing you a guest who has a fascinating story about. He came into this industry, the problems he faced within his community, and the creative solutions. He applied to run a very successful vacation rental business which was solely booked with friends and family. My guest today is Chris Cade. Chris is now the CEO of Saasberry and the founder of Private BnB. Welcome, Chris.

00:01:27 - Chris Cade

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

00:01:29 - Jenn Boyles

Wonderful. Now, let's get into your story here, your background of how you sort of went into this industry. Now, I guess first we should say where we are in the world. I'm outside of Vancouver, and you're not far from me. You're just like across the bridge, aren't you?

00:01:45 - Chris Cade

I'm in Port Moody, British Columbia, right on the water.

00:01:47 - Jenn Boyles

Awesome. And your properties? Where?

00:01:50 - Chris Cade

So I had a number of properties around four and a half hours north of here in the Thompson Nicola regional district, just outside of a town called Castle Emblems Mountain Airiness.

00:02:00 - Jenn Boyles

Great. So tag us back to the beginning. How did you start? Why, why were you, why did you have these cabins?

00:02:05 - Chris Cade

Yes. My story of this, although accidental, started around 25 years ago. I've been in the tech world since the nineties. And in the early two thousands, a friend of mine said, let's go into business and let's start building some lakefront cabins. Both him and I were fishermen. We loved it. We fly fished everywhere we could and we thought this is the great way to invest in real estate in BC and to have fun while we're doing it. So it was around 25 years ago when I bought my first property.

00:02:36 - Jenn Boyles

Wonderful, wonderful. And then what did you do with it? How did you start renting it out to others? Because it was a place for you to go and fish. So how did you start getting gas in? Yeah.

00:02:48 - Chris Cade

Actually, our original idea was just to buy the land and to build a house and sell the houses. So that's what we started doing. We hung out at the three houses and we were just letting friends, like literally friends from our hockey team and from our business stay at the place. And we weren't even thinking about short term rentals. In fact, back then, they didn't even call it short term rental. We just, hey, why? People would come up to us and say, can we rent your cabin for the weekend? We're like, sure, going up there, and what do you want to give me? Right. So what would happen was the US market real estate situation started getting very fragile and buyers for these remote lakefront houses started to go away because everyone was heading down south and getting these deals on golf courses and so on down there. So we found ourselves in a situation where we had to create some revenues from it. The other challenge that we had was they were very remote and we couldn't rent them out full time. People couldn't live in these remote locations, although there were people going up there on all four seasons, people can live there. For example, two of my cottages were on a lake called Red Lake. It was around 47 km off of a paved road, purely gravel. So in the winter time traveling in and out of town where it was not feasible for a long term rental then. So we started advertising online, and all of a sudden we started getting some good traction.

00:04:07 - Jenn Boyles

And this is pre Airbnb, isn't it?

00:04:09 - Chris Cade

This was pre Airbnb. This was around 2002, three, four, around there. And there wasn't such a thing as Airbnb that we knew of. The very first site that we found was one called vacation rental 411. Not sure if they're even around anymore, but it just allowed us to pay an annual subscription where we print a posting of our place on their marketplace. And we started getting the same types of inquiries that you would get from Airbnb today. We pretty much get families looking for summer vacations.

00:04:39 - Jenn Boyles

Sounds like everything was going really well. So when did the sort of story kind of take a turn?

00:04:47 - Chris Cade

Well, we definitely still had the dream to sell these places and make money and then try to keep three of them for ourselves. But what had happened around the 2005 six seven mark was Whistler, BC had a new bylaw in there where people weren't allowed to rent their places short term. And my place is probably around a five hour drive from Whistler. It's a completely different city, different district and everything, but one day a bylaw officer called me up and said, oh, by the way, you're not allowed to let guests rent your places anymore. And when I asked why? Well, because Whistler just put this new law, and we're going to put the same type of regulation into your neighborhood. And what had happened was I got pretty nervous, you know, these properties I had mortgaged on. And so I called the lawyer that was involved in that case at Whisper, and he said, in no way does the local bylaws affect you because we're in a completely different municipality and city. But I would suggest that you try to figure out how to let guests stay at your place more discreetly and stay out of the limelight and try not to pay the government because the legal fees would just crush an individual like myself. And that's what I did. I actually decided to sit down with my neighbors and my community, and I said, look, I have to create some revenue for this. I can't get people to live here all year long. And I'll work with both neighbors on both sides and the community to make sure that the environment or in the community wasn't being affected. And most importantly, that my neighbors wouldn't even know that I had guests at the place from loud noises and parties and things like that. And both neighbors on both sides agreed that if there were partiers and rangers that were causing issues around the lake, because I was a lake, and there's a lot of environmental things to consider. In fact, two of my cottages were built right in a bird sanctuary. And some of the birds migrate from Costa Rica every year to just lay their eggs and nest there. So it was a very sensitive area. And so I agreed, and I committed to them that I would vet every single guest, and I would make sure that everyone that came up here respected you guys, the community and the houses as if it was their own community. And that's when I had to start to figure out, how do I do this? How do I get leads? And what was unique about it is I started reaching out to the fishing community. That's why I got into this. And I went on Facebook and I started joining the local fishing community groups in the neighborhood. And I just started saying, like, hey, anyone. Would anyone be interested in maybe visiting me? I've got very strict rules, but at these beautiful places. And it turned out one of the lakes was a trophy fish lake. And I started getting a lot of messages, a lot of DM's inquiry, and I had no idea what even to price these nightly rates out at. And so I started working with a small group, and it started getting very popular. And then I started actually creating my own Facebook page. I created my own domain website, which was bclegfronts.com, and everything that I did, I never advertised nightly rates. I never advertised in the traditional way that an Airbnb or VRBO would do. I pretty much just said, hey, if you want to stay in my place, then maybe do some fishing. Just contact me and we'll see if we can work something out. That's pretty much how I started the direct booking initiative that I'm now working with currently.

00:08:15 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, it's great because you were prioritizing the relationship with the guests. It wasn't a transactional relationship. The basis of it and our sector with Airbnb and whatnot, they've done amazing things for industry, but they've also done us some disservice. And one of them is that it's become a very transactional relationship where you don't even speak to the guest, you don't see the guests. They do all this, you know, key codes and lockboxes and whatnot. It goes against everything that hospitality is about, in my opinion. Anyway, let's just go back to when that law officer came to see you. So he's basically decided to take it upon himself to tell you, try to you in your place, that you shouldn't be doing this, although he had no rights to do so. Is that correct?

00:09:13 - Chris Cade

100%. I think it was initiated from someone in the community that was actually living 45 km away from me. But I think what that individual was upset with was their hidden secret fishing lake was getting exposure about my places that I had on there. So that individual started describing untruths to the bylaw that there was constant partying and there was constant ecological, environmental pollution, anything you could think of, this bylaw officer had said that there was claims against me, which none of it was true, in fact. So that's what initiated the bylaw officer to reach out to me in the first place. Yeah.

00:09:55 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah. That's crazy, because when you sat down with your immediate neighbors and those closer to where your cabins were, they had no problems, did they? They didn't see any partying or anything like that.

00:10:06 - Chris Cade

No. Up until that time, there was a very limited number of people that we last rented. And with vacation rental 411, we were getting the fishing crowd, we were only getting the families, and that was only for July and August. So from September all the way till June, we were getting any inquiries from there anyway. So when they said that there were all these parties and people at the lake. We didn't even have renters. In fact, at any time there were actually pictures that the bar office was short of our place, and it was a community event. I had. I had neighbors on both sides. We were all around the barbecue, and we were actually cheersing the person that took a picture, and they said, what about this party? I'm like, that's me and my family and the neighbors. So pretty much at that point onwards, I realized, instead of trying to fight this, I'm just gonna continue to do exactly what you said, start building relationships. And in fact, I grew to around a thousand followers on my own Facebook page. And those followers would bump into friends and family of mine outside when I'm not there. And, oh, I'm good friends with your dad, to my daughter. And I wouldn't know who these people were, but it turns out that they stayed at my place every year over year, and they actually called me up on, hey, what was biting at the lake? Yo, how is the lake? How's the weather? And they actually considered me a good friend of theirs, even though we had only parked once or twice on the phone. And they stayed in my place once a year.

00:11:27 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, it's really building that relationship and building a community of friends that are coming to rent from you. So talk to us a little bit more. You talked about going into a Facebook group for fishermen, and you're looking at this niche, aren't you? You started looking at that niche and finding it. You probably weren't even aware that you were looking for your ideal guest.

00:11:52 - Chris Cade

No. In fact, to be 100% honest, when we were advertising on vacation rentals, for one, there were traditionally families, and they were traditionally large families. And honestly, Jenn, I was having a problem with them. They were never happy. They. When they went to the lake, they did things that I know they wouldn't do at their own homes. They were playing loud music. They were disrespecting the community and neighbor, and I actually had a problem with them myself outside of my actual neighbors bringing that up. And once I started accidentally finding this niche where I was targeting the fishermen, I saw that the respect for my place grew incredible. Everybody I would even see on some of the security cameras, people would take their boots off at the door and just do things as if it was their own brother's house or their own family house. And I actually started seeing people do things around the property. I saw people stacking firewood. I saw one group cut the lawn for me one day, and they were actually treating the property as if it was their own property. And they not only came back once a year during the regular spring, but then they started calling me up, saying, hey, I want to take my wife out there for a romantic weekend and go kayaking. And then they said, hey, what happened to the farm? So I started getting these groups of usually four men coming up to fish, and started coming back with their wives and their own kids. Because they wanted to share the experience of a mountain cottage in the middle of nowhere. But one of the things that I also had to rent or have guests stay at my place was because my places were very remote and consistently had challenges. In the summer, it went up to 40. In the winter, it went to -40 sometimes. And damages were always. And so if I left my cabin or cottage and came back a month later, there was always something that I was surprised about. I had bats living in the attic. I had wasp nests. I had, like, black fly outbreaks. And I would go into the bathroom, and because it was well watered, the toilets were all dark. The water was all, like, smelling like rotten eggs. And so I found out that I didn't have people actually staying in these cottages. They started to deteriorate a lot. So it wasn't just the revenue that I needed. And honestly, my goal was to just break. Even if I could keep these places without any cost, I was ecstatic. But I needed people to go there, whether or not they were paying or not, to just run the water, to flush the toilets, to make sure that if there were any problems, that they could make me aware of that. And so it wasn't just, I didn't do this for revenue. And literally, when that bio officer called me, all I wanted to do is stay financially, okay, without going bankrupt. And that's what got me into the Facebook groups.

00:14:41 - Jenn Boyles

Right, okay. And so we started with. With fishermen, and they branched out to their. To their wives and their family. And these are people that, you know, I could imagine a group of guys coming for, like, a fishing weekend, and they're going to bed early so they can get up. So they can get up early to go fishing, right? So there's no big parties. They're probably aware of smelling like fish. So they're taking their boots off outside, which is great. So where did this take you? What sort of next niches did you look into?

00:15:12 - Chris Cade

So the fishing was beautiful. They would be out on the lake all day long. They'd come back so tired, they'd sleep. People didn't even know they were in the place. But so when I did this with the fishing in the Facebook fishing groups, I was like, I'm not getting anything in the fall and I'm not getting anything really in the winter. So fishing is fly fishing, but there's another fishing season, ice fish. And those are different fishing groups. So I did the same type of taking pictures, just going into the Facebook groups because the admins came to me and said, stop advertising your places, but couldn't come out and say, hey, my places are for rent. So what I would do is I would post a picture of the ice and how deep the ice was and say, we're two weeks away before our ice fishermen are going to be able to walk on this ice. And I would take a picture now and then under my name, it would say, dme if you'd like to stay at my place. And instead of posting as Chris Cade I was posting as my Facebook page, which was BC lakefronts. So BC lakefronts would do a picture of the ice. It would say that we're close and then dm me if you want. And that's when I started realizing, hey, I'm just Matt, I'm sold out from May 1 until June 15. Now I'm sold out from around December 1 until around January 30 for the ice season. What else is going on in the fall? Well, hunting season is really big in British Columbia. So I did the same thing. I joined hunting Facebook groups and did the exact same thing. I took pictures of all the wildlife in the neighborhood and all of a sudden I started getting hunters dming me. And hunters are even better renters because they would go drive off all day long into the mountains hunting. And when they came back, they literally walked down to bed and went to sleep right away. So they weren't even on the property during the day. And then I started getting noticed a lot in the hunting industry. Um, one other thing that I did, Jenn, getting off topic here was I started looking at our organic search engine optimization and what I mean by that, instead of doing typical SEO, I started inviting bloggers that were fishermen and hunters and one of them you can still find online today. I invited him up. I said, hey, I got these beautiful places up at Redneck, why don't you go and take your family out there and fish? And only thing I return is to talk about my cottages and that innovative individualized website with fishing with Rod. Rod was getting pretty famous. A lot of followers wrote a stellar article about him. Fishing was amazing. This cottage was great for his two year old son and his wife. While he fished. He caught fish right off the dock. And that's when I knew I had something. My DM box and Facebook every day when I looked and had ten to 20 inquiries and hey, is this data available that day available? And so I copied that from fishing to ice fishing to hunting, and then sitting there one day and thinking, these birds are coming from Costa Rica. I wonder if they're bird watchers. I wonder if they're birdwatchers. Then I went onto Facebook and there was the Kamloops bird watch, and I posted all these, does anyone know what birds these are? And dm me if you would like to stay to see these birds yourselves. Holy smokes. I started getting hundreds of inquiries from bird watchers. And then I'm thinking I'm going to go back to summer. So what would you do up here in the summer in July and August? Well, Toby on the golf course was around a 30 minutes drive down the gravel road. And I said, I'm not sure this would be golfers. And so there was a Tobiano golf community Facebook group that did the same thing. And then all of a sudden I started getting summer golfers. So before I knew it, I was super swamp and I was sold out. And this actually went on for over a decade where I did $0 and paid advertising and I had a thousand followers that were consistently coming back. And it really got to that point where I was just like, I'm sorry, I'm booked out. And I stopped posting these pictures because I just had too much demand from the recurring revenue of the customers that were coming year after year. And again, those people started treating it as if it were their own cottages. And so a lot of it's so.

00:19:22 - Jenn Boyles

Great because, you know, what you've described is content marketing in a nutshell. It's not selling, it's not advertising, it's not saying a book now, it's not, you save money, come and experience this for yourself and stay at my place. But this was only a vehicle to allow you to have this experience. And then the blogging, that's basically influencer marketing. So you've had, that's exactly what you've done before. These buzzwords have come out, and we're all trying to have the Kardashians come and stay at our vacation rental. You know, you were doing it, but you were doing it in the niche that you needed to fill. And it's something that I do a lot with my clients. You know, they'll be posting about sandy beaches and hot sun, and I'm like, are you full this summer? And they'll say, yes. And I'm like, well, when aren't you full? That's what you need to be marketing for. And so you're doing all of these things off of your own back, which is amazing. It's really a masterclass in content marketing and using influencers in specific niches. Now bring us up to speed now. And about the app, the tool private b and b that you have created, tell us a bit how you've used your experience from running these vacation rentals and coming and renting out to friends and family into the tool that you've created today.

00:20:49 - Chris Cade

Yeah, you go back 20 years ago, there weren't any PM's tools on. Well, there were, but they weren't anything designed and developed for someone like me. I would tell people all the time, I'm not a business. This is just, this is just me covering my costs and making sure my place is secure and making sure of the maintenance. So I managed to find a reservation tool that had nothing to do with short term rentals. It was called rent reservation poor.com dot. And it was so basic, it had automatic notifications and just the basic things. And I used that and they always said, you know, we only have 20 customers, we're not making money off of this thing. I'm like, it does everything I need it to do. And then around in two they said, you know, we're turning this off. I think they gave me two years. So around 2015, I started looking for software, and there was a lot on the market by that time, but every single one of them that I would get on these demos for were meant for like commercial property managers, and they were super complex and they were super hard to use. And so with my company Sasper, and my consulting firm right now, we started saying, let's build a basic, simple tool to allow guests to stay at my places without me doing any work. I want something where I can just invite a guest in, click a button and it would go to their email address. Now you can choose the time, the location, and then it comes back to me. And all I have to do is click is approve or deny, and then you're booked in. And so that's what we did. Around three years ago, we started designing some software and the key element of it was simplicity. With automation, how do we have all of the notifications go out right, how to get to the lake 45 km in the middle of the mountains, how to get into the cabin, what the Wifi password is reminding them, do not make my neighbors man. Emphasizing that over and over and over again. And so now we've been on the market. Last year, we launched an MVP. It was called schedule our time, and last December, it launched as a follow-on version called Private BNB. And the name Private BNB did get established because of discrete, you know, and uniqueness, where most of our clients are people that have under six properties, you know, an average, I would say, are two or three properties. And these are the same thing. People that are doing exactly what I do, and a lot of them have day jobs, so they're not sitting there doing advanced property management needs. They're just warning someone like, hey, did I get their money? Did they agree to the terms? And do they know how to get there and get in and what they have to do when they leave? And that's what we built, and it's been ticking off, and we're seeing a whole world of people. I was on the line with Croatia last week. I was on the line with Spain. We have a user in St. Paul's. She has six units in one apartment building, and she is 100% now direct. She's removing herself off Airbnb, and her niche is accommodating parents that come down to see their parents at the university colleges in her area. She's got three college universities in walking distance, and she's going off the hook. So our whole business, even though we've got some really good software to help people do these tasks, it's helping them create experiences, helping them understand what their niches could be like what I did and the way I was doing my niches, it's now working for her. It's now working for the people in Croatia. The lady in Croatia is right where a lot of the movies have been shot. So she's getting involved with the Marvel comics and bringing people out to that. And, yeah, we're really excited about the future, and now we're really starting to take off, and we're getting a lot of unbelievable users, and we're seeing people build their direct and get excited about it because they're in control of who gets to stay in their place now. And that's pretty much why they first came to us in the last six months.

00:24:44 - Jenn Boyles

So, yeah, no, it's wonderful. And, you know, I've been, this spring, I've been to three conferences back to back in Canada, the states, and in Spain, and a lot of the emphasis on scale, you know, and getting your company as big as you can and getting the return, which is totally this sector is primarily built on people like you and I who are owner operators and don't want to have a huge portfolio, don't want to scale. Just have, you know, one or two or three cabins in the woods and have people come treat them well and also allow us to keep them and use them ourselves.

00:25:27 - Chris Cade

Yeah, I think that's key. Most of our users, the primary person that picks all the good spot is the owner, and that's me. I always, I always went up there on the prime fishing boss, but when I wasn't there, then you guys could go out there. And that's what we're seeing. We're majority are non commercial, non Super Airbnb hosts. They're just people that do exactly what you just described and don't think a lot of people are focusing on that market because they don't have the ten to 100 properties. It is pretty much ten and below that are described like what you had just mentioned, right?

00:26:00 - Jenn Boyles

Yes. No, I love what you're doing. And I think it really, there's a need out there. And I've definitely seen it with the direct booking success summit, I've seen the need and I've seen the audience how half of the people that are coming are owner operators and they don't want to scale. They're fine the way they are. If you want to scale, great. If you don't, great. Let's, you know, everything is good. But I need to ask you, from what you did with direct bookings, being completely booked, directly with a community of friends and family that you've created, I want to know what your answer is to what does direct booking success mean to you.

00:26:39 - Chris Cade

Well, direct booking success is having the comfort to know that my place is secure. I trust that there's safe people in my place, and that my neighbors are happy. My neighbors, actually, you'll see them joining my guests around the campfire, and they became friends with a lot of the guests. So I think the word is peace. I want to know that I know who's at my place. I want to know that my neighbors are happy and my places are safe in good hands and it's not being destroyed. And that, that's what success is to me. Of course, financially, my goal was to have it so that my places cost me nothing to own on a yearly basis. And I started actually going above that. And that's when I said, you know what? I don't need to go above that. I just. I'm comfortable with breaking even and having these three properties pay for themselves.

00:27:26 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for coming on today. I'm going to put some links in the show notes of where listeners can connect with you. The website is privatebnb.com and you've got a special offer, don't you, for listeners?

00:27:42 - Chris Cade

Yeah, absolutely. All of your clients and listeners through your link that you're going to provide get 15% off. And right now we're actually offering all of our customers a free enhanced listing page. So with private BNB, it actually creates and generates a listing page, and we've now been enhancing that. For other clients, it's a $200 package. And for everybody that's listening here, we'll set you up with your own custom listing webpage that looks sharp at no additional cost as well for all your customers.

00:28:10 - Jenn Boyles

Great. So I'll put the links in the show notes. So if you're interested, come to the website and have a look and get in touch with Chris and he will get you set up on a private BNB. Thank you so much, Chris, for coming on today.

00:28:23 - Chris Cade

And thank you so much for what you do and keep up the great work and I love seeing you and all the best.

00:28:28 - Jenn Boyles

Thank you so much, Chris, for sharing your story. If you have a story that you'd like to share, head to Instagram and send me a DM @directbookingsuccess and if you've enjoyed listening or watching this episode and you think somebody else you know would too, please send them a link in the next episode. I'm going to be speaking with Leo Walton from the company Superhog and I can't believe it's taken 103 episodes to get him onto this podcast as I have been a superhog customer myself since before the podcast even began. His product knows your guest is something that I recommend on almost a daily basis as it's the first question I'm usually asked by someone who is looking to start their direct booking journey and that question is, how do I know who the guest is before they book? So this is exactly what Superhog helps with and we'll be diving into trust marketing and how that will help you increase your direct bookings. Until then, please go out and take action for your own direct booking success.

00:29:34 - Jenn Boyles

Hey, thanks for listening to the Direct Booking Success Podcast. For more information about this episode and others, head to the website directbookingsuccess.com podcast. See you next time.