The richest person in Utah is a man named Matthew Prince. Prince, who grew up in Park City and was once a ski instructor at Park City Mountain Resort, is the co-founder of a tech company called Cloudflare. I'm assuming his riches came from the tech company and not from being a ski instructor. But he still seems to like skiing because he's been mounting a highly public and aggressive campaign to buy the resort from Vail.

There is a narrative in the ski and snowboard community that Vail has destroyed the industry through poor management, expensive lift tickets, homogeneity, and just an overall loss of what the vibe used to be. The market may also agree with this narrative because Vail's stock price is down nearly 60% over the last five years.

So Prince's message to Vail is "you're a bad capital allocator" and his pitch to the Park City community is one that sounds really nice. It's basically a community-first rescue mission. He has promised zero personal profit of any kind (he apparently has enough money), pledged to reinvest 100% of the resort's profits into infrastructure upgrades and employee compensation, and floated ambitious ideas to build a massive gondola network connecting Main Street Park City to some of the neighbouring canyons (which would be totally awesome).

Vail's response continues to be that the resort is absolutely not for sale. But Prince is trying to encourage them to adopt a more asset-light model, where they control the brand and the Epic Pass, and local billionaires like Prince run the physical properties.

To provide a bit of real estate context here, Vail owns the mountain infrastructure, the snowmaking equipment, and the overall business operations, but much of the resort sits on land owned by Toronto-based Talisker. My understanding is that the land lease gives Vail all the practical indications of ownership for a very long time, but I thought I would explain this nuance given that we like to talk about real estate specifics on this blog.

I have no idea where this public pursuit will go, and I know nothing about Prince's values as an individual, but the story is certainly compelling. There's something to be said for a rich local wanting to buy a resort just for the love of skiing.

Cover photo by Patrick T'Kindt on Unsplash