Moonlight facing foreclosure.....will stay open

bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2009/08/06/news/20moonlight.txt

Interesting power play going on between whoever ended up with Lehman Brothers after it went under and the current owners of Moonlight.

It's always sad to see anyone work as hard as these folks seem to have worked and just can't make it go. It's a beautiful development but even in a good economy it was a stretch to think there was room for Moonlight, Spanish Peaks, Yellowstone Club and the high end home sites around the base of Big Sky. Just how many "championship" golf course developments does it take in an area where you can only play a few months out of the year? Golf developments are in trouble where people live full time and play year round. Add the cost of short season golf to the cost of mountain real estate and you really push the development cost into an area that few can afford.
Many of the Big Sky/Bozeman area developments have higher than average land cost per sq. ft.and finished building cost per sq. ft. Maybe this will bring them more in line with Utah and some of the Tahoe resorts.
Someday we may see Moonlight, Big Sky and Yellowstone under one banner or at least with an interconnect and then it truly will be the biggest ski area, and probably have the most variety too.

This story does have an air of inevitability about it...when the real estate bubble burst, Big Sky (over) development was in for it. 

The story of the Stagecoach Ski Area in Yampa Valley, CO, is a cautionary tale for over-extended real estate plays cast as ski resorts:

Big Sky has managed to survive for decades by pacing its expansion.  It wasn't until recently that it ran into trouble and that was probably more because of Boyne overextending itself than the ski area.

Moonlight, on the other hand, was built on a model that required rapid growth.  It was hard enough for them to sustain the developments they had around Lone Mountain but they made matters worse by venturing into the Madison Valley where they were trying to develop an large expanse of ranch land.

I have mixed emotions about their demise.  On the one hand, they tried to be a good employer paying salaries above Boyne and treating their staff better.  They also put extensive amounts of money into lessening the development's environmental impact.  They tried to get involved in the area by donating to local acting companies.  On the other hand their rapid consumption of land was destroying the very thing they were selling.  Their Madison Valley development would have parsed pristine ranch land into 'gentlemen estates' that have proven to have huge impacts on animal migrations and end up lessening the local economy as the ranch economy disappears.

 I think its sad to see any ski resort struggle, but I also think its inevitable, as we all know, when they put too many eggs in the real estate basket.

Well, I don't have a lot to add to this thread.  At this point everything is a lot of question marks.  Even a foreclosure is not a sure thing.  I'd say it's almost a certainty we'll open this winter, so that's positive.  Personally, I feel a lot more comfortable than I did a year ago at this time. 

With regards to development strategies, I don't think that's where the core problem was.  The development strategy was fairly sound and actually was paced fairly slow.  There's not all that many properties and they were built over several years (Diamond Hitch began construction in 1995.)  Where things got difficult was the non-revenue generating things needed to make things run - better roads, administration buildings, etc.  Again, I don't think any of that development was much of a cause for concern.  Had this been a normal real estate market, or even a slow real estate market, that kind of development would have just been absorbed as the cost of doing business.  Instead, we've seen real estate nationwide fall off a cliff and unprecedented levels of crisis.  (Heck, I'd even say we had even anticipated that pretty good by the end of 2007.) 


By "Madison Valley development" I'm going to assume you mean the Reserve Ranch properties.  Those are 160 acre lots encompassing the western third of the resort.  There's 21 of them.  They were also set up from the beginning to fall under Montana's open space conservation easements, so that means all future development is severely restricted.  The actual home building sites are designated in advance and are very small areas typically about 3 acres in size.  All of the roads and access were designed with migration routes in mind.  So, rather than "huge impact", I would say it's pretty minimal.  In addition, the types of owners that will eventually own properties like this won't be full-time, year-round residents.  They'll come out in the winter and they'll come out in the summer.  During the spring and fall they won't be around at all and that'll make the elk happy.

The rest of the master plan takes into account a wildlife corridor a few miles wide.  Development is clustered outside of that.