Michael Jordan Van Rooyen.
Founder, CedarKeep — Whistler, BC.
I’m Michael. I’ve been in Whistler long enough to know who actually fixes things on a Sunday and who only takes new clients in summer. My background is in sales, which in this kind of work mostly means listening and following up. The people I’ve spent the last few years around are the people CedarKeep is built for — second-home owners trying to look after a place they’re not in most of the time.
What I kept seeing was the same pattern, over and over. An owner in Vancouver or Seattle or California, a home they used eight to twelve weeks a year, and a tangled set of arrangements for keeping it safe in their absence: a cleaner who texted updates, a handyman who didn’t, a neighbour with a key, a friend’s adult son who checked the heat. People doing their best. No single thread connecting any of it.
CedarKeep started because I thought the existing options were missing something simple. A second home doesn’t need a property manager. It needs stewardship — a calm, accountable relationship with one company that knows the place and is on the hook for it. Software makes that possible at a price that makes sense. AI makes it possible at a quality that makes sense. The combination is what CedarKeep is.
I want owners to feel about CedarKeep the way they feel about a good doctor or a good accountant — that there’s a person they can call, that the records are kept properly, that nothing important is being left to chance. Calm, because someone is actually looking after it.
Michael
Michael Jordan Van Rooyen
How we work.
What being on the hook for your property actually means.
Insurance.
Commercial general liability cover in place at all times. Documentation available on request.
Licensing.
Registered as a property-care business with the Resort Municipality of Whistler. GST and PST registered.
Photo log.
Every visit produces a durable photographic record — captioned, timestamped, accessible from your phone. The kind of documentation your insurer expects of an unoccupied property, and the kind of record you’ll want yourself if anything ever happens.
Service agreement.
Every owner relationship is governed by a written agreement built for second homes — not a handshake, not a text thread.
Key handling.
Keys are held in locked storage; smart-lock codes and key-safe combinations are protected by a written access protocol.
A person decides, every time.
AI helps us run the service efficiently. Every action at your property — every dispatched trade, every concierge request fulfilled — is approved by a person at CedarKeep before it happens.
The team today.
At present, CedarKeep is one person — me — responsible for every property under care. That’s deliberate at this stage: when you sign up, you know whose hands are on your home. As we take on more homes, the team grows with vetted local contractors trained on the CedarKeep checklist and held to the same standards. You will always know who walked your property, by name, in every report.
Where this goes.
The growth plan is intentionally slow. Founding owners first — twenty homes over the first season. Then a referral-driven phase, as those owners introduce friends and neighbours. Contractors join as the volume justifies it, never before. Eventually the same model extends to Squamish and Pemberton.
The principle is simpler than the plan: never grow faster than the company can stand behind every home. There is no version of CedarKeep where the founder doesn’t know the name of every property under care. That changes the kind of business this can become — and the kind it can’t. That’s the choice.