At the beginning of this year, Karen and I picked our 2026 theme for Northern Properties: Independent Together. There were a few reasons behind it. This was going to be our first season without everyone coming and going from one central office, so our employees would be working more independently, and so would we. Instead of seeing each other throughout the day, we’d be communicating mostly by phone and text.

That’s how we work with our guests now, too. We live in a pretty virtual world these days. Guests book online, get their arrival information on their phones and let themselves into their vacation homes without ever stopping at an office to pick up a key. But there’s still a real person behind all of it. We’re only a text or phone call away, which is the Together part.

The Independent part meant something else. Karen and I wanted our employees to feel confident doing their jobs without a lot of oversight, and we also talked a lot this year about work-life balance. We wanted people thinking more about their lives outside of Northern Properties. What are you working toward? What do you want to accomplish personally? What matters to you when you aren’t cleaning a house, hauling garbage, answering a guest or fixing something that broke?

Northern Properties is obviously important to Karen and me, but I don’t think anyone’s job should be their entire life. We wanted to create a business where people could do good work, have some independence, help each other when needed and still have a life of their own.

It all sounded good in January. Now that we’ve made it through another Drummond Island summer, I was curious whether it actually worked. So I started looking at our guest reviews.

Through September 17, our guests have left 138 reviews, 115 of them five stars, with an average rating of 4.82 out of 5. That’s our best average rating of the last three years.

Considering what goes on behind the scenes to get 38 different privately owned vacation homes ready for hundreds of arriving families, I’m pretty darn proud of that. I was even more curious about what people were saying, so I went through the reviews. Cleanliness came up over and over again. Guests called homes clean, very clean, spotless and immaculate. That kind of consistency across over 100 reviews is something our team should feel really good about.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everything went perfectly this summer. Things still broke. Things still went missing. There were crazy Saturdays, laundry shortages, last-minute maintenance problems and houses that took longer to turn than anybody expected. There were plenty of texts flying around asking who had an extra set of sheets, who could get to a house, or whether somebody could please go figure out why something was beeping. That’s vacation rental management.

The real test of our success as individuals working independently together is the person opening the front door at 3:00 after getting off the ferry and driving to the house they’ve been looking forward to visiting for months. They don’t know that our employees aren’t all reporting to the same building anymore. They don’t know that somebody found a problem at 10:15 and sent a text, and somebody else drove across the island to fix it at noon.

And they shouldn’t have to know any of that. They should open the door and think, This is great. We’re on vacation.

And when somebody needs somebody, a real person is only a call or a text away.

Judging by what our guests told us this year, I’d say it’s working. I’m really proud of our crew.