If Vail Lets Go of a Mountain, Who Builds for the Town?

There is a real fight happening right now over the future of Vail Resorts. Oasis Management has built a stake of roughly 6.5%, filed a 13D, and nominated a board slate that includes Picabo Street and former Disney CEO Robert Chapek. In its filing, Oasis calls Vail's 42 resorts "irreplaceable" and says it may explore a review or sale of the company or some of its resorts.

Whatever you think of the politics, the question underneath it is a land and housing question. If Vail ends up shedding non-core mountains, what happens to the towns built around them?

The Epic math

I said it on this blog back in July: the Epic Pass growth story is over. A pass model built on volume only works as long as volume keeps growing.

Vail's own numbers for last season: 14.8 million skier visits, down from 16.9 million the year before, the biggest drop in company history. Early pass sales for this winter came in about 10% lower, the worst early season showing since the Epic Pass launched in 2008. A terrible Western snow year did a lot of that damage. But housing costs in the gateway towns kept climbing right through several flat seasons, and weather does not explain that.

When a public company under activist pressure starts hearing "review or sale" about its resorts, that is usually the first public admission that the math stopped working somewhere. The mountain does not stop being a mountain. The operator just stops wanting to run it.

Introducing The Gateway Index

So I am going to start publishing the data I watch, right here on Danski and Build. I am calling it The Gateway Index.

The Gateway Index will track land and housing fundamentals in ski resort and gateway communities continuously, the way a lender watches a covenant, not just when a deal is already on the table. For each town it will follow four things:

• Land absorption: how fast buildable land is actually trading and getting used
• Permit activity: whether anyone is building, and what
• The workforce housing gap: what the people who run the mountain earn versus what it costs to live near it
• Price per buildable acre: the real basis for anyone who wants to build

The first towns on the board sit next to Vail's smaller and regional mountains, the places that would feel it first if a portfolio review ever became a sale:

• Gunnison and Crested Butte, Colorado
• Stowe and Ludlow, Vermont
• Dover and Wilmington, Vermont
• Bartlett and Jackson, New Hampshire
• Newbury, New Hampshire
• The Laurel Highlands, Pennsylvania

Nobody has said any of these mountains are for sale. That is the point. This is the list of towns worth understanding before anybody does. The Gateway Index will run as a recurring feature alongside The Dan Report.

Why I care about this

None of this is a prediction that Vail sells anything specific. Boards say a lot of things during a proxy fight that never turn into a transaction.

But distressed and non-core mountain assets do not wait for certainty to trade, and the operators, lenders, and landowners around these towns are already positioning. That is the whole reason I started DEK Builds: when a public operator retreats from a market, the workforce housing gap and the land underneath it do not retreat with it. Somebody still has to build for the people who run the lifts, staff the hotels, and work the shops.

If you are watching this fight for the stock price, that is one story. If you are watching it for what happens to the towns, that is ours. Subscribe to Danski and Build and the first Gateway Index lands in your inbox.

About the Author

Daniel writes Dan Ski and Build about the business of skiing, mountain towns, and the housing that keeps them running.

Daniel@kaufmanredev.com · danskiandbuild.com · @danskiandbuild

Sources: Vail Resorts season metrics release (April 2026); The Colorado Sun (June 15, 2026); Oasis Management Schedule 13D filed September 16, 2026.