Frontier's first year, in one house.
The house we learned this business on.
Old Broken Bow Highway was a 3-bedroom poolside house, and for Frontier's first year it was the whole company. We listed it, priced it, cleaned it, and hosted it ourselves. It is no longer available to book — but every standard we hold an owner's cabin to today was written here first.
- Layout
- 3BR / 3BA house, sleeps 6
- Standout
- Private outdoor pool and firepit
- Role
- Frontier's original owner-operated rental
- Status
- No longer available to book
Listing photography from the years Frontier operated the house on Old Broken Bow Highway.
One house, run properly, for a full calendar year.
No portfolio to hide a bad month in, and no staff to blame a bad clean on. Just a single listing and whatever we could learn from it before the next guest arrived.
- 01We started with one house and no shortcuts
Frontier did not start as a management company. It started as a 3-bedroom, 3-bath house with a private pool on Old Broken Bow Highway, and two people who did all of it: the photos, the listing copy, the pricing calendar, the 11pm guest message, the turnover, the pool chemistry, the propane run. There was nobody to hand a problem to. That turns out to be the fastest way to learn a market.
- 02The off-season was the real test
Anyone can fill a Broken Bow cabin in October. The business is decided in the months nobody talks about, when the calendar goes soft and owners start discounting out of panic. We kept the house at roughly 15 booked nights a month straight through those stretches, by working the calendar every single week instead of setting a rate in the spring and hoping: midweek stays, shoulder dates, minimum-night rules that flexed with demand instead of fighting it.
- 03A house that earned like a cabin
It was a house, not a purpose-built cabin. No zip lines, no arcade, no eight-figure build, and none of the log-and-tin styling this market sells on. It competed on the things that are actually within an operator's control, presentation, responsiveness, and a stay that matched exactly what the listing promised, and it pulled revenue that rivaled cabins with more square footage and a longer amenity list. That gap is the whole thesis of the company: most cabins are not underperforming because of what they lack, they are underperforming because of how they are run.
- 04Five stars, one turnover at a time
The rating held at five stars for the life of the listing, and there was no trick to it. Guests got answered fast, by the person who actually owned the problem. The house was inspected before every arrival by someone whose name was on it. When something broke, it got fixed that day and the guest heard about it from us first. Reliability, repeated, reads as luxury.
Sitting in both seats is the best thing that ever happened to this company.
Managing your own rental is a slower way to build a management business and a much better one. You cannot learn any of the following from a spreadsheet.
You feel the whole P&L
When the cleaning invoice, the platform fee, and the occupancy tax all come out of your own deposit, you stop talking about gross revenue. It is why Frontier's fee is charged on net rental revenue, and why we say so out loud.
You learn what actually moves the calendar
A year of adjusting rates on your own property teaches more than any pricing tool dashboard. You find out which levers matter in this market, and which ones are noise.
You hear the feedback unfiltered
No account manager softened a review before it reached us. Standing in the house reading what a guest actually wrote is a different kind of education, and it made us better at protecting somebody else's rating.
You never have to guess what an owner is feeling
The quiet week, the surprise repair, the review that stings. We have had all of it on our own balance sheet, which is why we manage other people's cabins the way we wanted ours managed.
Old Broken Bow Highway is out of the rental program. The way it was run is not.
The same weekly pricing work, the same turnover standard, and the same answer-the-guest-yourself habit now run on Sublime Retreat and on every owner's cabin Frontier manages.
Want your cabin run the way we ran ours?
Free listing audit for Broken Bow and Hochatown owners, or a 30-minute call with Hunter.