Copper Mountain’s new owner dusts off love of outdoors
The village was built and is owned by another company. The condos are developed and sold. The ski hill is an island in a state dominated by the biggest resort companies in the country. The mountain must battle an ingrained season-pass war that has prices hovering at 1970 levels.
So what compelled Utah’s Powdr Corp. to spend $107 million for Copper Mountain?
“This is the most competitive ski market in the world, but it’s also the best skiing in the world, and you take the good with the bad,” said John Cumming, the 42-year-old skiing chieftain of Powdr, which added Copper to its now eight-resort stable in December.
The vowel-challenged Powdr has quietly become a growing force in the nation’s ski industry, accumulating in the last 15 years a diverse collection of ski areas in every skiable region of the country. Its purchase of Copper from a debt-choked Intrawest marked its first push into Colorado. The deal included 463,000 square feet of developed commercial space and 426 acres of vacant and improved land, totaling 73 parcels. It didn’t include a large swath of Copper’s village, which Intrawest sold to Florida real-estate investment trust CNL Income Properties in 2004.
via Copper Mountain’s new owner dusts off love of outdoors – The Denver Post.