Fully Slopeside, Part of the Time

Fully Slopeside, Part of the Time
By BILL PENNINGTON
A WINTER home, preferably slopeside, is the fantasy of every dedicated skier. It epitomizes your commitment not just to a sport, but to a way of life. Let other people have second homes; you have a ski chalet.
And every wintry Friday evening, you and the family dreamily dash up to that retreat, right?
Dream on.
With the kids' sports teams, orchestra practices and SAT prep sessions, you're lucky if you have time to get away once a month. A second home near a ski area once seemed like a good idea, replete with visions of Saturday nights around the fireplace, but now you've hired a caretaker to keep an eye on the place, which he visits more than you.
The confluence of such winter fantasies and the realities of overscheduled lives has spawned the hottest trend in ski-industry real estate — fractional-ownership condo hotels. Frequently known as quarter-share properties, these are projects aimed at families and couples who can't make it to the mountain every weekend but who still want in on the winter second-home fun.
Ski resorts nationwide have heard the calling. Such time-share buildings are rising next to slopes from California to Maine.
With fractional ownership, investors typically buy 13 weeks a year for a condo unit in a hotel-like setting. The cost of the condo is also reduced to just over a fourth of what a wholly owned condo would cost for year-round use.
The 13 weeks are usually spread throughout the year, so that the owner can use the unit one out of every four weeks. Sometimes, especially at the most attractive, high-end locations, the duration of the fractions varies — four or six weeks instead of 13.
The projects, often developed by the mountain resorts, make second-home ownership easier in many ways. In a hotel environment, unit owners have valued amenities like valet parking, bell service, daily housekeeping, on-site restaurants, bars and fitness centers with hot tubs and swimming pools. Many condo hotels also have private owners' lounges and locker rooms.
And since the properties, which usually offer studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom suites, are open to the public, there is the potential for rental income for the condo owners. If a unit is not being used by its owner that week or weekend, the unit can be rented like a hotel room by the manager or by the owner.
Customarily, the owner will get 55 percent of the room's rental price, while the management company gets the other 45 percent. Any owners' gains, of course, are offset by the maintenance fees owners pay the resort to manage the property.
In the last dozen years, fractional share properties have sprung up in virtually every ski state — at the Canyons in Utah, and Aspen and Steamboat Springs in Colorado, and in Vermont at Okemo Mountain, Mount Snow and Killington. Dozens more are planned throughout snow country.
"They are popular because they are so logical," said Terry Elsemore, who as the owner of Fractional Strategies in York, Me., has had a hand in building and marketing eight quarter-share properties across the country. "Someone can get a second home for the amount of time they really need it and not all the time they don't need it.
"They can do it for their young family or they can do it to lure their older kids back into the family vacation mix. They can do it without a huge monetary investment and without a huge investment of time."
A recently completed project Mr. Elsemore helped shepherd is at Hunter Mountain in New York. Hunter, in the Catskills, always has been a snowmaking pioneer with varied terrain that includes some of the best double-black-diamond summit runs in the East. But there was a time when Hunter was known as much for the lines outside its famously raucous village nightclubs as for the lines at its mountain lifts. Mention Hunter, and people thought not about smoking backcountry chutes but flaming bar shots.
But a decade ago, Hunter's ownership began to see a shift.
"The big partiers that fueled Hunter's boom times were driving back up here with kids in the back seat," said Paul Slutzky, an owner of Hunter and the son of the resorts co-founder Orville Slutzky.
And guess what? These visitors didn't want to stay in the inns near the music-blaring nightclubs. They wanted someplace on the mountain near the new children's learning center.
In August, Hunter opened the Kaatskill Mountain Club, a stylish, 77-unit ski-in, ski-out condo hotel whose units range from 356-square foot studios to nearly 2,000-square-foot suites. Amenities like the slopeside outdoor heated pool have had investors jumping into the fractional market at Kaatskill, which, like many recent fractional projects, has all but sold out in its first year.
The quarter-share studios began selling before construction for about $35,000, and the penthouse suites were going for around $190,000. The 30 or so quarter-share units left — less than 10 percent of the total shares — are now going for $58,000 to $210,000.
Fractional-share buyers generally pay more than one-fourth of the cost of a typical wholly owned condo, if the purchase prices are calculated by the square foot, a reflection of the demand for fractional properties.
But the fractional-ownership boom is great news for resorts because it ramps up occupancy rates for on-mountain lodging. One owner per unit used to mean a lot of empty rooms on some weekends. Increasing the number of "warm beds" on the mountain means more lift tickets and more people in the restaurants and bars.
Fractional owners also tend to come back in the other seasons, which helps those resorts trying to add golf, mountain biking and hiking to the activity mix.
"It has been a great success," Mr. Slutzky said of his fractional property. "We'd like to build more."
Which means more — four times as many — opportunities for the rest of us to chase that ski chalet fantasy.
Dream on.

Also this amusing piece

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/travel/03aspen.html?fta=y