Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: wasatch mountains

  • Parkview Mountain House is now open for winter 2026/2027 bookings

    I’m in Park City right now working à distance, hanging with the family, and puttering around Parkview Mountain House in the evenings preparing for this winter season. I’m now excited to announce that PMH is officially open for winter 2026/2027 bookings! Here’s our website and here’s the direct link to our Airbnb listing.

    Now the important question: Will it be an epic winter with lots of snowpack?

    The honest answer is I don’t know, but the El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific is, as I understand it, a promising precondition. In fact, Ski Utah even launched a “Vote Super El Niño” campaign ahead of this year’s US elections. Maybe that was more just for fun.

    Regardless, there is actually a science behind Utah’s title of “The Greatest Snow on Earth.” I even bought a book on it, got deep into snow, and blogged about it here. Based on this cursory knowledge, I’m optimistic that this year is going to be a good one.

    Whenever I tell people about PMH, I’m often asked: Why Utah? And the obvious answer is the snow. But it’s also one of the most accessible ski towns. There are nearly a dozen resorts within an hour’s drive of SLC airport, and PMH itself is 27 minutes from the terminal.

    On this trip, we checked out Sundance Resort for the first time. Previously the Timp Haven resort, actor Robert Redford bought it in 1968 and renamed it the Sundance Mountain Resort, after his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

    I can’t speak to the mountain itself, but Bianca and I were both super impressed by the resort and the vibe. It has an elevated feel, and it’s clearly very popular throughout the year. We tried to have dinner there, but the restaurant was fully booked. So instead we bought a Sundance sweater for Vivienne. Now I can’t wait to snowboard there. (It’s a 50-minute drive from PMH.)

    If you like skiing and snowboarding or baby Sundance sweaters and want to visit Utah, you can check out Parkview Mountain House here.

    House photo by PMH creative resident Ryan Schwartz

  • What’s next for Parkview Mountain House

    Since we first opened bookings for Parkview Mountain House, we have been using a third-party property manager. This seemed to make the most sense given our team is not local.

    But since then, we have learned that, along with the fees charged by Airbnb and VRBO, it’s simply too high a fee load. We also found it difficult to offer the exact hospitality experience we were after without full management control.

    So we have made the decision to terminate our management contract and transition the property to internalized management. What this will entail is taking on more management control (from Toronto) and having a local support team that we assemble and manage ourselves. This is underway and I’m personally enjoying getting further into the details of this business.

    What does this mean for bookings?

    Summer and fall remain open for bookings. But the winter season is now blocked off starting in early December. Expect an announcement this fall when it opens up. To stay in the loop, you can subscribe to this blog and also check off “Globizen Updates.”

    Are you local to Park City and SLC?

    In the meantime, if any of you live in the area and work in the hospitality, maintenance, or property management space, please drop us a line at pmh@globizen.com. We are currently assembling our local vendor team and we’d love to connect with you.

    I have a good feeling that it’s going to be an incredible winter season in Utah.

  • If a tree falls in a forest…

    Construction is risky. For example, last month a tree fell on top of Parkview Mountain House. The tree was located upgradient from the house and, it was so big, that pieces of it actually landed across the street on our neighbor’s property.

    Thankfully, it didn’t cause as much damage as it could have. It punctured the roof in a few places, but magically, the bay window that it landed on was perfectly fine. We also opened up the drywall around the window to inspect all of the structure.

    Needless to say, we didn’t have a line item in our budget for “trees that might fall on the house during construction.” We also didn’t have a line item to take down more trees behind the house, which is exactly what we decided to do after this happened. We called an arborist and asked them to fall anything that looked even remotely questionable. That ended up being 4 more trees.

    We were not expecting this.

    But this is why budgets have something called a construction contingency (although, we still have enough savings from some of our other contracts not to have to use it). In the end, we also learned something. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, the answer is — yes — it can still cost you a lot of money.