As Greg Mezak prepared to drive to a private home tucked away on a Wilson hillside, he grabbed a screwdriver, multi-tool, and set of Allen keys.
“At least one thing I think needs tightening,” he said.
On the edge of Flat Creek, he crossed a small moat to the front door, and found the right key from a ring of over a hundred. Once inside, The Clear Creek Group’s director of operations pulled out a detailed list of defects from the remote homeowner.
This log cabin has 30-foot ceilings and a moose antler chandelier. But Mezak headed straight for the eight-burner stove to check the exhaust fan.
He made a few finds of his own while touring the residence, which he said rents at most once a year: a pump that heats the floors is broken. The hot tub cover is torn. The scents in the seven-faucet steam shower need replacement.
Luxury homes in Teton County can rent for tens of thousands of dollars a week. Mezak declined to share the price for this home, but listings on Airbnb range from $3,000 to $13,000 for a handful of nights.
A recent post in Wilson was on discount for $36,000 per month, down from $40,000, a range The Clear Creek Group CEO and founding partner Morgan Bruemmer described as “pretty normal.”
The local economy depends on high-net-worth spenders. But more demand for jobs is a key culprit of the worsening housing crisis.
Property management is booming in Jackson, companies and elected officials say.
Guests are paying more for shorter stays and demanding more from those that manage them. The Clear Creek Group is starting to use AI for scheduling and operations. And homes require greater technical skills to fix.
All of that is driving a surge in employment for staff and contractors, many of whom can’t live in the same community they work.
“Are we becoming a class of castle owners and servants?” asked longtime resident and former Teton County GOP chair Mary Martin, who has helped inform Teton County land use plans since the 1970s.
Officials have tried to limit rental durations and impose mitigation fees to balance out the harms of second home ownership. But there’s ultimately little they can do when it comes to property rights of limiting second or third homes.
“I don’t see a lot that could change for that,” Town Councilor and Realtor Devon Viehman said.
Viehman said electeds are looking to update land development regulations this year, balancing “trying to make things better without taking property rights away.”
Rather than limiting what gets built, Jackson Mayor Arne Jorgensen said electeds should continue to leverage that development to fund affordable alternatives, through mitigation fees. But that strategy is being challenged in court and the state legislature. It has also done little to slow growth at the extremes.
The average single family home price in Jackson Hole is now over $7 million. The median is closer to $5 million.
“Very few of those homes are going to be sold to people who are earning their money locally,” said Jackson and Teton County Housing Director April Norton.
“We’ve seen a significant growth in property management type jobs, and that directly correlates with high end homes in the county and then short term high end homes in the town,” she said. Those “may or may not be occupied year round, but are nonetheless generating or creating jobs to caretake, to maintain.”
For years Jackson Hole has planned and permitted housing with a top goal in mind: Keeping 65% of workers housed in the valley. Housing Department data show that number has fallen from 68% in 2002 to 57% in 2024.
Town Councilor Jonathan Schechter said his frustration has hit a tipping point.
“We’ve got an incredible number of really talented, really dedicated, really smart, really capable people, just working their tails off, trying to address it, and we’re falling further and further behind,” he said.
The latest federal data back this up. For over 20 years Teton County has led the nation in per capita annual income at over $500,000. But the gap between the few super rich and everyone else has only grown.
In the last decade, across property management and all other sectors, Schechter said “we’ve created 10 times as many jobs as we’ve built affordable housing units.”
Job growth hasn’t been so strong across the board, said Mekki Jaidi, owner of vacation rental and property management company Outpost Jackson Hole, which focuses on short term stays.
He anticipates a more mild summer as high gas prices limit road trips through Yellowstone this summer.
He said the broader market is still recovering from a Covid-era boom of luxury home inventory that was “tricky for Realtors and other managers alike.”
The Clear Creek’s Bruemmer serves wealthier clients, whom he said have shifted dramatically over the years. People are still coming here to fly fish and ski, but “those expectations are loftier now and require a quicker response than they did 20 years ago.”
“The demands are greater. They are going 1,000 miles an hour. When they’re here, they are still working and they’re relying on us to get things done,” he said.
The company’s portfolio spans 1940s cabins decorated to period and 16,000-square-foot mansions with bowling alleys.
“We do have some that are unbelievably expensive,” Bruemmer said.
He feels the strain that puts on the local community.
Bruemmer lives in a workforce deed-restricted home and hasn’t been able to buy property for his 90 employees, many of whom are seasonal.
“I would love to,” he said, but “the business hasn’t been quite profitable enough.”
Most of his staff commute from Alpine or Idaho.
“That’s one of the reasons that 21 years in and at 55, I’m not insulated from an alarm call at 3 a.m. if I can respond faster than a caretaker that lives in Alpine. I was hoping I’d be able to shed some of those responsibilities at my age,” Bruemmer said.
While Bruemmer can’t control the market, he said he refuses clients who ask to push pricing “beyond what the market will bear.”
Other forms of advocacy are more subtle, like the inclusion of locally-sourced products in guest gift packs.
