Meet the latest Salt Lake City reality star: A Utah real estate broker on Bravo’s ‘Sold on SLC’

As owner and founder of a Utah real estate firm with 600 agents, Jennifer Yeo says she’s good at talking to an audience.

“I’m kind of used to being in front of people and having good conversations,” Yeo said.

Starting this week, Yeo will be talking to a bigger audience: The TV viewers who tune into Bravo for such shows as “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”

Yeo and her firm, Presidio Real Estate, are featured in the new reality series “Sold on SLC,” which will premiere Wednesday at 9 p.m. Eastern time — 7 p.m. Mountain time for people watching on satellite providers, and 10 p.m. Mountain for Xfinity customers.

“This is a new world,” Yeo said from her firm’s Lehi office last week. “I hope I don’t say anything stupid, [because] this is going to live forever in the world of TV.”

“Sold on SLC” shows Yeo and five of her agents as they navigate the Utah real estate market, meeting well-off clients and showing houses to prospective buyers. It also highlights the agents and their interpersonal drama — and, because this is Bravo, there’s plenty of drama to be had.

“What’s cool is I get to put my name with Bravo,” Yeo said. “That’s a massive name, and people know it. It’s a brand and people love it. They’ve got massive followers. To me, as a marketer — and that’s what you are in real estate — that’s the biggest golden ticket you could ever get.”

Yeo got her first taste of the Bravo cinematic universe in 2021, when she appeared as a client on the network’s “Below Deck,” booking the charter yacht for a vacation with her husband and some friends. (To the recap writer for New York magazine’s Vulture blog, Yeo was noteworthy because she didn’t want any kind of cooked fish.)

“I was celebrating the 10-year anniversary of my company,” Yeo said. “I believe that’s how Bravo found me. They said, ‘We really like what you’re doing. Would you be interested in doing a real estate show?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s my life, and I would love to.’”

Why Bravo loves ‘everything’ about Utah’s market

Yeo said she expected she would be on a show similar to Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing,” where agents in the high-stress markets of New York and Beverly Hills sell mansions to the rich and famous.

The difference is that “in Utah, we’re a totally different demographic,” Yeo said. “I said [to Bravo], “are you sure you understand our real estate market?’ And they were, like, ‘Yes, we love everything about it.’”

Utah has been ranked the eighth most expensive housing market among all 50 states, Yeo said, and “our real estate values have gone up drastically in the last 10 years. I think that the nation is starting to look at us and go, ‘What’s going on over there?’”

Yeo credits that price increase to Utah’s growing tech sector. At first, “the real estate was so cheap,” she said, driving companies to Utah — but, as more tech workers moved in, the prices went higher and higher.

The tech sector is at least one reason for the rise in Utah real estate prices, said Babs De Lay, who owns Urban Utah Homes and Estates, a real estate agency based in Salt Lake City.

“I love to tell people when they’re driving into Utah County: To the left is technology, and to the right is [multi-level marketing],” De Lay said.

Yeo started Presidio in 2011, striking out on her own after the people in charge of the Provo brokerage where she worked were convicted of mortgage fraud in 2009.

Presidio started with eight agents in a small office in Pleasant Grove. Now, the brokerage has offices in 17 Utah cities, from Logan to St. George — though Yeo said most of Presidio’s business is in Salt Lake and Utah counties.

“If I go to a networking meeting in Utah County, we’d have punch and doughnuts,” she said. “You go up to Salt Lake City, and you have wine and charcuterie.”

Meet the 5 agents with ‘dynamic personalities’

The homes displayed on “Sold on SLC” — at least on the first episode, which was made available early to TV critics — represent the higher end of the scale, houses worth $1 million or more.

“For everybody, it’s like the Parade of Homes — you want to go see them, right?,” Yeo said. “I also think that’s what the Bravo viewers want to see, too. ... It is like eye candy to look at a house like that. … It really makes you dream. You go through [those houses] and you go, ‘I want that in my next house.’”

The other thing Bravo viewers want to see is interesting characters. Bravo picked five of Yeo’s 600 agents to highlight:

• Tyna Edwards, a mother of two, lesbian and former member of the Latter-day Saint faith, who in the first episode confronts another agent on a rumor that could hurt her business in selling to Latter-day Saint clients.

• Malaysia Fua, a married mother of four who bills herself as “Mormon 2.0″ (a phrase familiar to “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” fans), who is back at Presidio after leaving for a competing firm a year earlier.

• Matt Jones, a married father of four and devout Latter-day Saint who’s struggling to take his business to the next level.

• Sarah Martindale, who was born in Brazil, has two children with her husband — who runs one of Presidio’s biggest rivals. (One of Martindale’s clients is “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” cast member Lisa Barlow; Martindale made a cameo appearance in the “Real Housewives” season premiere in September.)

• Kenny Sperry, also a Latter-day Saint, is married with three children, and credits his faith with helping him through struggles earlier in his life.

“They all have very dynamic personalities,” Yeo said. “And there’s a couple of cast members who don’t get along well, so you’ll get to see that. … Real estate’s competitive. I see agents all the time mad at each other, pressuring each other.”

“Sold on SLC” also emphasizes, at least early in the series, the influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the agents’ lives and Utah’s culture. Yeo identifies as a former member of the faith, while Martindale identifies herself as Christian.

Yeo estimates that half of Presidio’s clients are Latter-day Saints. “I think the world looks at LDS people, and they’re peculiar — and they love learning about them,” she said. “It’s [woven] into all our lives here in Utah, whether you’re LDS or not. You don’t get away from it.”

As a businesswoman, Yeo said, “you have to be a chameleon. When you go take buyers out, you don’t talk about religion. … Same reason you don’t post on Facebook who you’re voting for as president. You just can’t pick a side. You have to be neutral.”

‘A business decision’ to go on TV

Since filming “Sold on SLC’s” first season (Bravo hasn’t announced whether there’ll be a second season), Yeo said she’s getting a crash course in becoming a reality-show celebrity.

“I’ve done so many interviews this week,” she said ahead of the Dec. 4 series premiere.

Yeo said she ultimately agreed to appear on “Sold on SLC” because “I’m a business woman, so I looked at this as a business decision. I’m also out for the good of my agents — so taking this huge risk was hoping to open doors for all my agents.”

Bravo viewers will determine the wisdom of Yeo’s decision.

“I hope, in a year, we can look back and we can say it was worth it,” she said.