What If We Disrupted Ski Real Estate?
DANSKIANDBUILD.COM · SKI REAL ESTATE · MAY 2026
One conversation with an independent ski area operator changed how I see the mountain. The slope is about to get steeper for developers willing to build where the big resorts won’t.
I had a conversation today that I can’t stop thinking about. Eric Mogensen, the operator behind Black Mountain in New Hampshire, is doing something the big corporate resorts forgot how to do. He’s running an independent ski area the right way. And it got me fired up about the biggest untapped opportunity in ski real estate.
If you’ve skied Black Mountain, you already know. It’s independent. It’s real. It’s affordable. Eric runs it like a person who actually loves skiing runs it, not like a private equity fund optimizing EBITDA per lift ticket. The lifts run. The snow gets made. The experience isn’t transactional. It’s what skiing used to feel like before the big corporate operators turned your season pass into a subscription service.
Talking with Eric got me thinking hard about the parallel universe that exists in ski real estate, and why nobody with real development chops has gone after it yet.
The Mountain Has a Real Estate Problem Nobody Is Solving
Here’s the reality at most ski resorts right now, corporate or independent. The people who make skiing happen can’t afford to live there.
The ski instructor driving 90 minutes each way because there’s no workforce housing near the hill. The lift operator sleeping four-to-a-room in a rental that costs more than their paycheck. The snowmaker pulling overnight shifts and then commuting through a blizzard because “ski town” has become synonymous with “second home for wealthy people from somewhere else.”
Meanwhile, the skiers themselves are getting priced out of the overnight experience. Mid-range skiers, the people who built the ski culture, are driving day trips instead of staying on-mountain because the only lodging options are either $600/night slopeside condos or a mid-century motel 20 miles down the highway that charges $200 anyway.
The independent resorts, the Erics of the ski world, are doing the skiing right. But most of them don’t have the real estate expertise or capital structure to solve the housing layer underneath the mountain. That’s exactly where we come in.
Four Problems. One Developer. One Thesis.
How We Actually Make This Happen
This isn’t a whiteboard idea. We have the tools, the track record, and the capital structure to execute. Here’s the playbook:
Why Kaufman & Company Can Do This When Others Can’t
Most real estate developers don’t ski. Most ski people don’t develop. That’s the gap. We live on both sides of it.
Between Kaufman & Company’s development and land acquisition expertise, Convivium Living’s bridge lending platform, our modular construction experience in cold-climate affordable housing, and —frankly, the fact that I am a season passholder who has skied these mountains and talked to these operators as a fellow skier, not just a suit with a proforma — we are genuinely uniquely positioned for this.
Eric at Black Mountain isn’t just a business contact. He’s proof of concept for what independent ski culture looks like when it’s done right. The real estate layer underneath that mountain should match the integrity of the operation on top of it. That’s the mission.
📧 daniel@danielkaufman.info
🌐 thekaufmanco.com
🌐 danielkaufman.info
📲 @DanSkiAndBuild
