Meet the Team
Two co-founders, Two disciplines, one outcome: your property gets found and booked.
We're not a generalist agency that dabbles in STR marketing. We're not a property management company taking a cut. Crest & Cove is built entirely around short-term rentals across the Southeast—the search patterns guests use, the visibility gaps that cost independent hosts bookings, the specific content that moves a searcher from "maybe" to "book now."
When you can't be found, you can't be booked. That's the core tension we solve.
Our Story
We noticed a pattern: talented STR hosts with stunning properties, losing bookings because guests couldn't find them. Not because the properties weren't beautiful. Not because the locations weren't worth visiting. Because the people who should have been helping them weren't built for this.
National agencies treat Southeast markets like line items. They run the same playbook in the Smokies that they run in Scottsdale—generic photography, boilerplate listings, no understanding of how a mountain guest searches differently than a beach guest, or why a lakefront cottage in North Alabama needs a completely different content strategy than a coastal cottage on the Outer Banks. The result is a property that looks passable and can't be found.
Local freelancers move the needle in isolation. A photographer who doesn't know listing SEO. A listing manager who doesn't understand visual content strategy. A consultant who hands you a report and disappears. The pieces exist. The integrated team—photography, platform strategy, SEO, and direct-booking infrastructure under one roof, with one point of accountability—didn't exist for independent hosts in secondary Southeast markets. That's the gap we built Crest & Cove to fill.
We've driven these roads. From the Tennessee River towns of North Alabama to the barrier island coastlines of the Carolinas and the Gulf. From mountain cabins in North Georgia and Eastern Tennessee to coastal cottages along the Atlantic and Gulf shores. We've stayed in these properties. We understand the difference between a mountain guest and a beach guest, between a cultural market and an adventure market, between a property that practically books itself and one that needs a sharper story told for it.
We've also watched independent hosts go up against property management companies with full marketing departments, volume OTA relationships, and pricing algorithms—and we've watched those hosts win when they had better content, stronger direct-booking infrastructure, and search visibility those PM companies don't bother investing in.
Crest & Cove bridges that gap. We show up in person. We combine professional visual content, platform expertise, and data-driven strategy under one roof. We build direct-booking visibility so guests search for your property by name—reducing your reliance on Airbnb and VRBO and the percentage they take with every reservation. We don't take a cut of your revenue. We're a marketing partner, not a co-host.
Every property we work with becomes findable, irresistible, and backed by a guest experience that earns repeat bookings. That's the whole point.
Jacob Mishalanie
Co-Founder & Creative Director
Jacob leads all visual production — photography, cinematic video, sound engineering, virtual tours, and color grading. His background is professional broadcast video production. What that means in practice: your property gets the production standards luxury hotel brands invest in, applied to your specific market and the guests searching it.
Production value alone doesn't move the needle. Jacob's work solves a specific tension: guests can't book what they can't see. An underlit listing photo costs you bookings. A cinematic walkthrough — morning light through the windows, waves rolling in from the deck, the sound of a creek moving through the property — removes friction from the decision. Guests watch it and stop browsing. They start picturing themselves there.
Jacob has driven mountain roads at 5 AM to catch fog burning off a ridgeline at golden hour, and arrived at coastal properties at low tide because that's when the light and the landscape do what the guest imagined when they searched. The shot that stops the scroll isn't an accident. It's a decision made before the shutter opens.
He doesn't just shoot properties. He removes invisibility.
Thomas Garner
Co-Founder & Visibility Director
Thomas builds the digital foundation that gets your property found. SEO strategy, keyword research, Google Business Profile optimization, direct-booking website architecture, schema markup, Google Vacation Rentals integration, and the citation networks that feed organic discovery — that's his lane.
Here's what that solves: a traveler searches "beach cottage with private pool, Outer Banks" or "mountain cabin with hot tub near Asheville" or "Gulf-view condo, Fort Myers." If your property isn't ranking in those searches, it doesn't exist to that guest. Thomas makes sure you appear — not just on OTA platforms, but across the full digital landscape where independent bookers search before they ever open Airbnb.
Thomas has personally audited hundreds of STR listings across Southeast markets, from mountain corridors to coastal clusters. He knows which Google Business Profile categories actually drive discovery in secondary markets because he's tested them. He knows why a property ranking for a branded direct search converts at three times the rate of an OTA click — and how to build toward it from day one.
When a guest finds your property without touching an OTA, books direct, and you keep the full revenue — that's the result of deliberate visibility infrastructure. Thomas builds it.
