Those who make such a post-holiday trip into an annual tradition might consider buying real estate in their favorite mountain resort town so they have a place to stay each year without racking up mammoth hotel fees on top of the cost of airline tickets — most of the best skiing and snowboarding resorts are far enough removed that a plane ride is needed to get there — and lift tickets.
Plus the property can be rented out as a weekly, monthly or seasonal vacation rental, sometimes bringing in enough cash flow to cover the cost of ownership. In ski resort towns with a solid economy, buying non-vacation rentals may even be a good play for real estate investors — even if they aren’t into skiing or snowboarding.
Below is the list. See below for more information on the methodology and downloadable tables with the full dataset used for the analysis. And just to whet your appetite a bit, we’ve included a slideshow of stunning homes listed for sale in each of the towns.
We started with ski resorts that were in towns with a population of at least 2,500 and that ranked in the top 50 of the 182 ski resorts ranked by Zrankings for “Pure Awesomeness Factor”. We then ranked these 19 ski towns by nine different factors: PAF ranking, distance from closest airport, unemployment rate, median list price of a residential property, foreclosure inventory percent of all housing units, rental vacancy rate, gross yield on a rental property, 2013 foreclosure rate, and percent change in foreclosure rate from 2010.
