Emmanuel Lavoie, Jetstream Hospitality Solutions: Real Finds Podcast #5 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast series where we speak with key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping the real estate community and, as a result, our world. In today’s episode, we’ll be talking to Emmanuel Lavoie of Jetstream. Jetstream is a really unique platform that is shaping how we look at the hospitality industry. In the interview today, we’re going to discuss decentralization in the real estate industry, long-term changes in the hospitality industry, and Jetstream, a really unique asset for property managers that’s helping expand the way property managers get value out of their short-term rentals.
Here we are with Emmanuel. He has one of the most interesting tech products I’ve seen in a while, and he’s really revolutionizing some of the ways hospitality booking is done. Emmanuel, I’d like you to start us off. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Thanks, Gordon. Pleasure to be here, and thanks for having me on your podcast. I’m a mechanical engineer by training. I spent ten years doing building consulting engineering, which frankly was somewhat interesting but somewhat boring. I got tired of selling hours for a living, so eventually I started a business, sold it, and joined Jetstream, which was then called Leavetown. Leavetown.com is still our direct channel. I joined my good friend in the business, and it was just a tiny little thing then. I knew nothing of hospitality tech. I’d never worked with software developers in my life. Here we are eight years later, and we’ve had a wild journey, which I’m sure we’ll talk about on the show. We’re going all guns blazing, and we’ve created a very unique technology offering for the brokerage and realtor space, which I’m excited to tell you about today.
From the Boiler Room to Software
Gordon Lamphere: One of the most interesting things about you is that you started out in the really fundamental, down-and-dirty part of the real estate industry, the HVAC world. Could you tell me a little bit about what you did in a previous life?
Emmanuel Lavoie: I can tell you about the day I realized I was on the wrong side of the business. I’d visited a customer of mine in Sacramento. He was on the real estate marketing side, and I was there to do a boiler energy retrofit study. We walked into the building, and he went right into the marketing office, where there were a lot of young, attractive people, and I went into the boiler room of this sixty-year-old building, crawling around taking measurements of ducts. That was a profound day in my life. I thought, wow, is this what I’m going to do for the next thirty years?
That’s an anecdote, but the work itself was interesting. I worked on everything from very large homes to healthcare and commercial buildings. One of my last projects was an elementary school where I designed the entire mechanical system. It was geothermal, and it became the most energy-efficient school in that district. There’s a lot of good that comes out of being an engineer, because you create parts of buildings that are going to be around for fifty to a hundred years, and if you make them energy efficient, you’ve contributed to society. I liked that part. I just didn’t like the selling-hours part.
It’s even worse than that, actually. You’re pre-bidding a project, and you say it’s going to cost eighty grand to design. Six months later there have been seventeen revisions by the architect, and you ask for an extra, and they say, no, you said it was going to be X amount of money. No thanks. I didn’t need that.
Gordon Lamphere: Can you tell us more about selling hours and how that mentality inspired you? One of the things that’s particularly interesting about the real estate business is you have such a wide swath of people, people who are selling hours and people who are working in a completely different world.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Very good point, and that’s why I love the real estate side so much. It’s a new discovery for me. On the selling-hours side, when I graduated in mechanical engineering, the last year you had to do specializations, and a lot of my peers were doing specializations in line for a master’s degree in something related to engineering. All my specialization courses were on the business side of things, so I naturally had a really strong interest in business. I read The E-Myth back in my twenties, and by my late twenties I’d started my own consulting engineering company.
Essentially, in the Rich Dad Poor Dad cashflow quadrant, I’d gone from an E to an S. I was now a self-employed engineer, which is probably the worst quadrant, to be honest, in many ways. Reading The E-Myth crystallized that this is not a good business if you want to grow a business. It could be a good quadrant for all kinds of other reasons, but for what I wanted in my life, it wasn’t the right one. I also realized the only way to make more money in that space was to charge more billable hours, which means hiring more people to charge more billable hours. And even then, at the end of the day, when you sell the business, it’s not worth a lot of money. All of that told me I needed to get out.
It took me a while. First I had to sell my business. Then I did a three-year journey with the acquirer. I didn’t have to, but I felt it was needed to do right by their purchase, even though it was a tiny purchase in retrospect. All said and done, it was a nine-year journey in that world.
Gordon Lamphere: So understanding the value of your time is what inspired you to move on to something riskier, a more out-there passion?
Emmanuel Lavoie: Yes. I’m not a software developer, but I’d been seeing the ability to write software that repeats a process, and I wanted to be part of that in some capacity. Just by luck, my business partner today, a friend then, and I met paragliding on top of a mountain. He said, hey, I’ve got this little thing, why don’t you come join me in the business? And I did. I took a big salary cut. I was mid six figures, and all of a sudden I was making a lot, lot less. I was in my mid to late thirties, and after a year and a half we still hadn’t figured out product-market fit, and I’m still not making a lot of money. I remember thinking, am I doing the right thing here? I’m watching my peers and friends continue their careers. But when you hustle, you scratch the surface somewhere, and if you hustle hard enough you’re likely to find something. Eventually we did find product-market fit, and that was the real launch of this business.
Finding Product-Market Fit
Gordon Lamphere: Can you talk about how you found that market fit? It’s a particularly interesting journey, from Leavetown.com originally to now a similar industry, but a little bit different.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Leavetown.com, which is still our direct booking channel, had an original goal of creating an OTA, an online travel agency. That’s Booking.com, Expedia, even Airbnb, which is an OTA with a strong community aspect. They’re all places to book travel. We were foolish to think we could somehow compete against Booking.com and their six billion dollars a year of ad spend. Anyway, we went at it.
It was a really cool site. In many ways the branding was much better than it is today. Back then it was trying to be this Canadiana thing, bears and moose and all that. We’d go to all these resort companies and condo hotels, which we have a lot of here in Western Canada on the ski slopes, the kind of inventory you’d find in Breckenridge and Vail, and we’d ask if they wanted to be on Leavetown.com. Of course everybody said yes, because it was such a cool site. But in reality, we weren’t making any money with it.
What we were doing manually, and we didn’t even tell our partners back then, although we could have and should have in retrospect, is we would put their listings on Vrbo, and eventually Airbnb, by hand. No APIs, no tech, just manually updating calendars. It was super messy. But then we’d get bookings, because that’s where the eyeballs were. Then we’d call the resorts and say, hey, we have a booking, are those dates still open? Because obviously we didn’t have a live availability feed. By hustling that for many months and years, eventually Airbnb and Vrbo both said, wow, you’ve got a lot of great inventory, would you build an API to feed it to us? That’s when the light bulb went off, and we realized it wasn’t about Leavetown.com. It was about the software and connectivity in the background.
Gordon Lamphere: It’s fascinating how getting deep into the woods can reshape where you find the true value.
Emmanuel Lavoie: A hundred percent.
Bridging Old Hospitality and New Marketplaces
Gordon Lamphere: I wanted to talk more about that, because the hospitality industry isn’t that different from the rest of the real estate industry. Even though they’re a little bit ahead, they’re definitely behind tech or finance in terms of implementing technology. One of the things that’s particularly interesting about your product is how it bridges that gap from old to new. Can you speak to how the hospitality industry has embraced technology?
Emmanuel Lavoie: Absolutely. I think hospitality has actually embraced technology more, or quicker, than the real estate side, if I can throw that out there. What we solved in that space is we were the first to bridge the software gap between traditional hospitality and its software systems, meaning hotels and condo hotels, and marketplaces that were new to them, like Airbnb and Vrbo. That was our role.
To do that, we had to bridge not only software, but also provide the hospitality, because we’re the ones responding to all the inquiries on Vrbo, Airbnb, and so on. We’re an outsourced hospitality tech solution for these large companies. Most people listening will know IHG, InterContinental Hotels Group. We work with 600 of their hotels. That’s the scale of hotel company.
The hotel industry was early to adopt some technology back in the nineties, but a lot of their tech today is legacy and archaic. The more modern tech in hospitality is now with the more modern property managers who have distributed assets, because you need better tech when you have a hundred homes in Nashville, Tennessee, with different addresses and different linen packages, than when you have one building with a hundred units served by one elevator, where your cleaning people can walk around with a cart. That’s where the more progressive players are. Then by chance, and we can talk about this more, we landed on offering something on the real estate side, bringing our hospitality tech experience and putting it into the hands of real estate people.
A Business in a Box for Brokers
Gordon Lamphere: I’d love to hear more about that. One of the things that makes your product such a game changer is how you incorporate smaller shops into the business. If you could elaborate, that would be phenomenal.
Emmanuel Lavoie: I love genesis stories, because they always paint the picture of how you ended up doing something. About eighteen months ago, a single broker-owner on Cape Cod found our website. Our website never talked about working with brokers, but she said, I’m mainly a buyer’s agent. When I sell a home, a lot of the buyers like me and ask if I could do their vacation rental management, because these are often secondary investment properties on Cape Cod. She said, this is not my core competency, I’m not a vacation rental management company, could you help me? Eighteen months later, here we are, with many more brokers and now signing up brokerages, not just realtors.
We built a technology and service solution that isn’t too different from what we do on the hotel side. But when you apply it to a new market, you develop the product around it. Our tagline is that we’re a business-in-a-box solution that empowers brokers and realtors to market, manage, and monetize their short-term listings. That’s the elevator pitch. We can take any brokerage. Usually it’s brokerages in leisure destinations that resonate with this, because they can see how much money the property managers around them are making, but a lot of them don’t have the technology in house, or even the desire, frankly, to do a lot of this. Jetstream comes in with a packaged solution and says, you’re now a property manager, but we’re going to do ninety-five percent of the work in the background, and we do it under your brand, which is what they love.
Getting Wiped Out in 2008
Gordon Lamphere: The next thing I wanted to talk about is your venture into the real estate world. You’ve talked about it on a couple of other podcasts, and I think it gives really unique insight into what makes your methodology particularly interesting.
Emmanuel Lavoie: In summary, I got wiped out by 2008. I was in my late twenties. I’d bought a house the year before for about two hundred and fifty grand, and a year later it was worth three hundred and fifty grand. It was insane. I was in a very hot destination in Canada, and an unscrupulous mortgage lender allowed me to pull even more money than that. That lender subsequently lost his license for this kind of thing.
So I had all this money, and I went and bought another property. It was going to be a two-unit project, my first real estate development, because in my heart of hearts I still want to be a real estate developer. I was going for it. I won’t get into the details, but 2008 and a few other things all hit me in the face at the same time. I did not go bankrupt. I clung on, held on, and dug myself out of a financial pit for five years, from salary.
It’s all fine and good to lose a hundred grand when you have two hundred grand. But if you lose a hundred grand and have zero, now you’re negative a hundred grand, and you can’t invest your way out of that. You have to pay your way out. That’s the situation I was in. When I sold my last house, which is when I moved to Vancouver, I wrote a check for seventeen thousand dollars to the bank. I’d had that house for seven years. I sold it for two ninety-three in 2013, and now they’ve rezoned the entire area for four dwelling units and it’s worth about nine hundred thousand. I had three of those, and I lost a hundred grand.
Gordon Lamphere: Any developer who’s been in the game long enough knows the market goes up and the market goes down. There are plenty of successful real estate entrepreneurs and developers who lose, and they often end up winning somewhere else. I think the big win is Jetstream and Leavetown.com.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Exactly.
What Jetstream Actually Does
Gordon Lamphere: So going back to Jetstream, I’d like to focus on your ultimate value add. One of the things that makes you special is that you work with four or five different types of real estate folks: managers, larger traditional businesses, and so on. If you could go down the list of what you actually do, that would be terrific for our listeners.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Our technology and service offering is more or less partner agnostic, and I’ll talk about that in a second. But let’s start with the product and service. The software itself, to use MLS-type wording, is a syndication engine, except we syndicate to Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Google, Expedia, HomeToGo, Holidu, TripAdvisor, and the list goes on, everywhere people shop to book accommodations, plus our own website, Leavetown.com. We also power our partners’ websites. If you have a brokerage, Gordon, we can power Gordon’s Brokerage.com with our tech. That’s the demand generation side.
Once the guest books, we’re part of an ecosystem of software we’ve integrated with, what we call best-in-class third-party solutions that complement our offering. One is guest screening, where the guest takes a photo of their face and their driver’s license. Once they’ve passed screening, we have a partnership with an insurance company that puts a million dollars of damage protection behind that booking. There’s a keyless access solution where the guest only gets a code that works while they’re there. Noise monitoring to detect parties. We do all the dynamic pricing and yield management. We integrate with on-site cleaning companies through software so they know what to do and when. And finally, guest amenities delivery: soap, shampoo, lotion, all branded under your brand, Gordon’s Brokerage, if you want the soap in the shower to say that.
We handle all the funds, from collecting from the guest to distributing to the cleaner, the broker, their agents, and ultimately the homeowners. Even the fund delivery to the homeowner behind the brokerage and the agent is white-labeled under Gordon’s Brokerage. Every single booking, multiple times a month, in the asset owner’s bank account, it’s your name and your brand.
Gordon Lamphere: Huge value add.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Huge value add. That’s the tech. Then the services: we have a team of reservation agents located around the world, and we respond to all inquiries, live chat, web, WhatsApp, email, phone, 24/7, 365. Our teams are in Canada, Spain, and the Philippines. All of them are our own employees, no outsourced call center whatsoever. We also do all the content creation and optimization, so we maintain the listing content and our partners don’t have to.
That’s Jetstream as a whole. We take all of that complexity and all those software integrations, package it, and sell it to different verticals on a rev-share model, which people love. The best vertical for us is brokers and realtors, because you’re uniquely positioned in the middle of transaction flow to capture inventory for management. Most brokerages and realtors in North America don’t do short-term rentals yet, because it’s complex for all the reasons I just listed.
We also partner with asset owners. One of our customers and a great friend is a Canadian real estate developer who built a fifteen-unit apartment building and boutique hotel in Sayulita, Mexico, and we power all of that, including the website. So we work with small real estate developers. We even partnered at one point, though that’s stalled because it’s under renovation, with a US pension fund that acquired ten hotels, twenty-two hundred rooms. They’re renovating all of them. They’re a pension fund, not a hotel operator, and what they’re trying to do is complex, and they picked Jetstream. We’ve even partnered all the way down to a single homeowner. We’re not fans of single homeowners, because it’s a small deal for Jetstream, but if they have a really nice home, we’ll definitely partner with them.
Powering the Small Operator
Gordon Lamphere: There’s a tremendous gap in the real estate industry with tech. Depending on where you look, forty to forty-five percent of all US GDP comes from small businesses. If you’re bringing that big value add to small and mid-size hospitality businesses, that’s a unique way to enter the market and a really unique way to reshape how folks connect with where they’re going to spend the weekend.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Let’s talk about that, because it’s really close and dear to my heart. Right now there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into private equity buying real estate inventory for short-term rental purposes. That’s one field most of us aren’t playing in. You’ve got the likes of Vacasa, which is public now and took a beating recently, but nonetheless has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and is doing a roll-up of property management companies. They go around to brokerages and say, send us your homeowner leads and we’ll pay you two grand. Whoopee-doo. And now they’re turning into a brokerage.
Jetstream really is the only solution out there purpose-built to power the small operator, the small brokerage, the realtor, to compete on a global scale. We’re the same technology stack as those guys, but instead of building it for ourselves and raising hundreds of millions to acquire other companies, we’re offering it on a rev share to smaller operators so they can compete and grow their businesses. That resonates with me profoundly, as a human being.
Gordon Lamphere: We run a small shop as well, and I can tell you that without our tech stack there’s no way we could compete. It’s unbelievable what folks like you in real estate tech have done over the past five to ten years to revolutionize the business and open it up for everyone. Once again, huge value add, particularly for us small folks.
Where the Technology Is Heading
Gordon Lamphere: Where do you see the tech application going first? Do you think the future is smaller and smaller, or do you think you’ll be scaling across the board?
Emmanuel Lavoie: I think Jetstream is going to keep scaling, because we’re serving multiple smaller pillars. But if you mean the industry in general, this is no secret, and I’m not saying anything groundbreaking, but there’s going to be more and more adoption of technology in real estate. I was at the NAR iOi event in LA a few months ago, and a lot of what I saw was around fintech, payments, and loan processing. I think a lot of middlemen are going to get squeezed out by technology, massively, which means things get done a lot faster with a lot less friction. There are a lot of layers in our current system that are extracting quite a bit of wealth, and I don’t mean that in a terrible way, but I believe technology is going to squeeze a lot of that out. There’s a lot of room in real estate for that.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: That leads us into our final four questions, which give a long-term, big-picture perspective on you and the industry. Ten years from now, what do you think will change most in the real estate industry, particularly hospitality?
Emmanuel Lavoie: I like to think there will be a democratization of the people who can participate in this rewarding and exciting industry. I know I’m sort of plugging Jetstream here, but I’m actually seeing examples of it. In hospitality, before the advent of Airbnb and do-it-yourself vacation rental management, hospitality was a big-money game with large hotel chains and big, expensive technology stacks. Then Airbnb came in and said, hey, you could rent your spare bedroom and make extra money. That’s a massive disruptor, and we all know that. Then people started saying, well, I could do ten Airbnbs. Software has been building around that, and we’re that generation of software that’s empowering just about anybody to do short-term or vacation rentals.
I’ll give you an example. One of our really unique customer bases, and we just signed up another one last week, is cleaning companies. Back to selling hours for a living, cleaners sell hours. It’s two hundred dollars per clean, or whatever it may be. But they enjoy the relationship with the asset owner. Powered by Jetstream, all of a sudden they can be a local property management company. They can still bill the hours for the clean, but they can also take a percentage of the booking, which is moving up in the economic world. That’s another flavor of somebody who can now play in this game.
I was speaking to a good friend recently, and he had this wonderful idea of creating mixed-use buildings in urban cities where artists are being gentrified out of their communities. He’d love to do a building where half is long-term living for artists, hyper-subsidized, and the other half is short-term rental to pay for it, as a not-for-profit. I said, wow, what a great idea, and of course he’d want to work with Jetstream. Technology is going to enable more and more ideas, and democratization of access to the opportunity is what we’re going to see more of.
Gordon Lamphere: Fascinating. That last example, true placemaking, is phenomenal. I have a lot of friends from a past life in New Orleans who are really struggling to keep that culture and community that brings people in. That would be a phenomenal change in the industry. Next: if you could travel back in time and give yourself some career advice, what would it be? When we reach the point where things start humming in our careers, we realize we’ve done so many things to get there that we might change.
Emmanuel Lavoie: I would definitely give myself this advice, and I’d give it to all your listeners. Real estate knows this better than most. I came from a traditional university degree, five years of mechanical engineering, never really liked it, but I needed a degree. Then I graduated and figured I might as well work in this thing because I studied it. Nine years later I finally left, and I didn’t like those nine years of my career at all in many respects. I would just say, go for it. You have a brain. Just go and work hard. I saw the world as much more siloed before. It’s like, well, that’s what I studied, so that’s where I need to work. And it’s not like that at all.
That’s what I’ve enjoyed so much about the real estate space. I was just at the NAR event in Orlando, and you see that your degree doesn’t matter at all. Color, shape, size, none of it matters. It’s your hustle. You can make twenty grand a year or a million bucks a year in real estate, and it’s all how hard you work and how networked you are. I love that. That’s true to my roots. So I would say to my younger self, trust it, just go for it, it’ll work out.
Gordon Lamphere: A hundred percent in agreement. An ounce of grit is what it takes, and having faith in yourself is the best darn advice you can give anybody on this podcast. Another of the final four we always ask is, what real estate or business books have you read that inspired you? I know you’ve mentioned a couple, and that’s fine if those are your books, but what should our listeners be reading?
Emmanuel Lavoie: There are a million out there, but in terms of the ones that really shaped my mind, I already mentioned The E-Myth. It’s a classic. I know it’s old. The other one, and these are old, which is why I say maybe they’re not as relevant, is The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. I think there’s a new revisited version I haven’t read yet. That book blew my mind back in the day. Those are two.
More recently, I read Netflix’s No Rules Rules, which is more around culture, and we’ve had everybody in the company read it. How did Netflix scale to be so big yet stay so creative? How do you culturally build in the ability to be hyper-nimble, responsive, and creative? That’s a tough question for most companies, and I thought that book was a really good template for it.
Gordon Lamphere: Tremendous template, and Thomas Friedman is phenomenal as well. The scalability of the modern world with the internet is something I don’t think people twenty years ago even imagined, and we still can’t imagine how much the world is changing.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Exactly. And with crypto now, and I’m not a big crypto guy, but the whole blockchain thing opens up a new frontier again for fintech and so on. Some of these applications come along and I think, boy, some people are going to get disrupted pretty good.
Gordon Lamphere: And decentralization. You could go down the list. The biggest change we’re seeing is that who influences us has become decentralized. It used to be really localized, or traditional hierarchies. So the last question we always ask is, who has influenced you the most in building your tech platform, and is that a person we’d like to have on the podcast?
Emmanuel Lavoie: Day to day, my biggest inspiration in business has been my business partner, Mike Liverton. He’d already had a successful tech exit by the time we met. He’d seen me work and hustle and thought it would be good to have me in the business, and he’s my friend. He brings the hustle factor to a millionth level, and that’s inspiring. I draw a lot of inspiration from him. You can certainly have him on the podcast, but a lot of the story would be the same as mine.
I have another name for you, though. Have you heard of or talked to Daniel Dubois in Canada?
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve heard the name.
Emmanuel Lavoie: We bought his business in the early days of Jetstream, before we really figured out what we were all about. It was a share purchase, and we inherited all of his investors. He was a prodigy, in his early twenties at the time. It was an Airbnb for outdoor gear called Share Shed. Nothing ever came of it, but he went on to work for Airbnb, and now he has a really cool concept called Key Living. I think that would be interesting for your show, because it’s also a very disruptive idea for real estate.
Gordon Lamphere: Very cool. We’ll have to bring him on. In the end, I think you’re an unbelievable asset to reach out to if you’re in the hospitality industry and looking to revamp your business. If someone wanted to reach out to you, where’s the best place to get in contact?
Emmanuel Lavoie: Very open. Our website is jetstreamtech.io. You can find me on LinkedIn. My last name is L-A-V-O-I-E, Lavoie. Type Lavoie Jetstream and I’ll probably come up on Google. You can also email me directly at [email protected].
Gordon Lamphere: Emmanuel, thanks for being on the podcast. We appreciate it, and we hope to have you on again soon. Thank you so much.
Emmanuel Lavoie: Thank you so much, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions matter for the podcast algorithm, and they help us continue to get the guests our viewers want to listen to and learn from. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
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