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

Samuel Sévigny and his friends started a short-term rental property management company and scaled from 10 properties to over 500 in four years.

Chaletô 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.