At some of the spiffiest ski resorts in North America, conditions are just about ideal–for today’s snowballing boom in vacation-home building.
From historically underdeveloped New England to the condo-cluttered Rocky Mountains, an estimated $3 billion of new housing construction is expected to go up over the next decade. Much of this investment is coming from large corporations that in the last year or two have been acquiring resorts at a breakneck clip.
A sustained bull market and basic demographics have converged to ignite housing demand. Baby Boomers have renewed their interest in skiing after a hiatus of more than a decade, in which many smaller ski resorts floundered or went out of business.
Boomers are being spurred on by their growing children, who have taken to snowboarding. And new, “parabolic,” or shaped, skis are making skiing easier. Among the well-heeled, interest in buying a slope-side house is surging.
“Everybody over 45 years old feels it’s their God-given right to have a place to go,” says John Evans, president of Trilogy Development Corp., a Vancouver, British Columbia, developer of ski-resort housing.
Today’s fitness-minded buyers tend to favor weekend houses close to home rather than distant properties that they visit infrequently, rent out or hold as an investment.
Wayne Larochelle is one of them. The 43-year-old investment banker and his wife, Valerie, recently purchased a trail-side townhouse at Whitetail Resort in Mercersburg, Pa., 90 minutes from their suburban-Washington home.
The couple and their two teenage children plan to use it every weekend during the winter, and Larochelle will mountain-bike there in the summer.
“I certainly hope it appreciates in value,” he says of their new home. But what really matters, he adds, is “making a lot of use of it.”
For many, family togetherness, more than quick profits, is the chief motivation to buy.
“Now is the time do it–before the kids turn into teenagers and have a million other things on their minds,” says Dom Rossi, 55, a marketing consultant in Westport, Conn. He and his wife, Val, bought a three-bedroom condo last year in a new slope-side development at Okemo Mountain Ski Resort in Ludlow, Vt.
Their daughters, 11 and 8, are both on Okemo ski teams, he notes proudly: “It’s a terrific family experience. I’m not sure we’d do this if we didn’t have the children.”
The flow of new housing capital can be traced partly to the restructuring under way in the ski industry.
American Skiing Co. of Bethel, Maine, has acquired seven New England resorts in the last three years, bringing its current holdings to eight.
The Justice Department recently allowed Vail Resorts Inc. of Avon, Colo., to complete its $310 million acquisition of Colorado’s Breckenridge and Keystone ski areas from Ralcorp Holdings Inc.
In the last four months, Booth Creek Ski Holdings Inc. of Vail, Colo., has bought 10 ski resorts in California, New Hampshire, Washington and Wyoming. Intrawest Corp. of Vancouver, said it would pay $192 million to add the Whistler resort in British Columbia and Copper Mountain in Colorado to its growing North American portfolio.
To draw more skiers, the new owners are adding amenities and putting up homes.
“The market couldn’t be better,” says Gary Raymond, president of resort development for Intrawest, which plans to build 1,300 new condos and townhouses over the next two years.
Intrawest recently sold all 65 available new condos at its Mont Tremblant resort outside Montreal during a one-weekend shopping spree by invited investors.
Vail Resorts held a lottery for the 93 home sites in its Bachelor Gulch Village project; the average lot fetched $776,000.
At Pennsylvania’s Whitetail, 48 federal-style townhouses priced up to $280,000 will be completed this winter.
“We didn’t spend a lot of time studying the real estate market in the area,” says Stephen K. Rice, president of Whitetail Ski Co., the developer. “We had so many requests from our skiers that we knew there was a lot of pent-up demand.”
But will it last? Skiing historically has been a boom-and-bust industry.
According to the National Ski Areas Association in Lakewood, Colo., the number of lift tickets sold at U.S. alpine resorts has been essentially flat in the past decade and analysts don’t foresee traffic surging in coming years.
In fact, while the number of snowboarders grew by 55 percent, or 800,000, from 1990 to 1995, the number of alpine skiers fell by 18 percent, or 2.1 million, according to a survey by the National Sporting Goods Association. The survey did show a sharp rise in skiing among the middle-aged.
Moreover, developers take comfort in a second demographic bulge: the 78 million “echo boomers,” aged 18 and under, who represent a promising future market of skiers and snowboarders.
The longstanding shortage of beds at many resorts and a growing effort to turn ski areas into year-round resorts also justify optimism, many in the industry maintain.
“For the first time in a long time, the stars seem to be aligned,” says George Gillett, chairman of Booth Creek Holdings and former owner of the ski resort at Vail.
Developers are also looking for ways to attract a broader spectrum of buyers.
In a strategy that expands on the one-week time share, American Skiing plans to build nine condominium-hotels at its New England resorts that owners will use 13 weeks a year on a rotating schedule and can rent out in their absence. Five are in development.
