We set out to protect our own investments, and that changed everything.
Jake and Brandon came up in real estate from two different sides of the table — Jake as a real estate agent and Brandon as a mortgage lender. That's how they were first introduced and started working together, and over time it grew into a partnership: investing in real estate side by side.
Like a lot of investors, they made the shift out of long-term rentals and into short-term ones. They bought homes in the places they loved — multiple properties in Island Park, multiple homes in Garden City, a place in Eden, and a home in Southern Utah — and ran them themselves.
Not because they had to, but because they loved it. Self-managing their own short-term rentals started as a passion — almost a hobby. They obsessed over the details, kept their calendars full, and treated every booking like it mattered. Because to them, it did.
There was another reason, too. As they researched the management options in the markets where they were buying, they came away completely unimpressed — archaic operations run on spreadsheets, with no one putting modern property management and accounting tools to work the way they should be. They wouldn't have trusted their own homes to any of them, and they knew they could do it better. That conviction became as much a part of Prime as the passion did.
We had no plans to manage anyone else's homes.
After that first year, the questions started. Neighbors of the homes they ran — owners who watched their places stay booked while theirs sat empty — kept asking them to take over their properties. For a while, they said no. This was their thing. They weren't a company.
Then one day, driving up to the property in Garden City, Jake and Brandon looked at each other and realized something: they had a chance to turn the thing they loved into the work they did every day. By the time they reached the lake, Prime Properties existed. From that moment, it grew — and grew fast.
What makes us different
Here's what makes us different, and we mean it literally: we own real estate in every market we manage. We know what it feels like to carry a mortgage on a major asset. We know the pressure of the expenses, the stress of a slow month, the weight of a property that has to perform.
Most management companies don't own what they manage. They've never carried that weight, so they don't run your home the way you would. We do. Every property in our portfolio gets treated like one of our own — because that's the only standard we know how to operate by. It's the difference our owners feel, and it's the reason they stay.
We grew faster than we ever expected. So we made a promise: we would never let growth dilute the quality that brought owners to us in the first place. That meant bringing on the right partners.
None of us wears too many hats. That's by design. It means every owner who works with us gets specialists, not generalists — people focused entirely on doing one thing exceptionally well, all in service of one goal: making your property perform.
We manage short-term rentals across Island Park, Bear Lake, Southern Utah, and Park City. We don't just work in these places; we own in them, vacation in them, and love them. We are also expanding into new markets where owners are tired of the status quo. If you own a property in one of our current regions, or you're looking for a partner in a new market, let's talk. We'd love to treat your home like it's our own — because that's exactly what we'll do.