Snowboarders come in from the cold

David Schuh has been snowboarding since 1985, back when he and other fans were considered renegades on the slopes. Today, all that has changed.

"You can definitely go see the attorneys who are snowboarding now. It's more socially acceptable, not as bohemian," said Schuh, a publishing executive in Southern California.

Since the late 1980s, the number of skiers in the United States has dropped by half while the number of snowboarders has increased by a factor of five - so the two groups are almost the same size today, according to the 2006 annual report of SnowSports Industries America. While snowboarding still is most popular among teenager boys, the financial profile of the average snowboarder has changed since the early days of the sport. In 1990, only around a third of snowboarders earned more than $50,000 a year. In 2005 that number jumped to almost two-thirds, while almost a third of all snowboarders earned more than $100,000, according to the report.

So it is not surprising that more and more snowboarders are becoming part of the winter sports set, buying homes at upscale resorts that have terrain designed specially for boarders and, of course, a certain lifestyle.

"Because snowboarding has been around for so long now, a lot of our buyers are quite affluent, so we get a fair mix of snowboarders and skiers," said Simon Robinson, a real estate developer in Niseko, Japan, on the west coast of the island of Hokkaido.

With properties for every budget in prime snowboarding locations, a real estate decision comes down to lifestyle and preferences.

J.P. Solberg, a 23-year-old professional snowboarder with the Burton Global Team, bought a winter home in his native Norway when he was 18 and is looking in Utah for a second investment. "It's weird to start thinking at a young age of where you would like to kick back when you're older. But I already know that I'll still be snowboarding at 60 and enjoying it as I do today," he wrote in an e-mail, adding that profit is not his first priority.

"I'm not trying to make a quick buck on a winter home, but I do take it into consideration that it's an investment. I see how things develop over the years; some changes are good and some unfortunate. It's really about pinning down what suits you," he wrote.

But Keir Dillon, a professional snowboarder from Southern California who has a second home near Whistler, in British Columbia, said location should be primarily determined by function: As a rental property, a home needs to be close to the action and the lifts but for personal use, a little more land and seclusion are desirable.

Bulgaria's snow is hot

The Pirin Mountains of Bulgaria are the new European hot spot, where low prices and high appreciation rates have driven sales recently. Of the two main resorts there, Bansko is more developed and more international than Borovetz, the affordable alternative. Bansko has complexes with apartments of as many as three bedrooms that can cost as much as €250,000, or $318,000. But, on average, units are less than half that amount, said Emma Cornah of SkiPropertyBG, an agency based in Britain.

For example, the most expensive two-bedroom duplex available in the Vihren Complex, which is 50 meters, or 165 feet, from the gondola and 1 kilometer, or about half a mile, from Bansko village, is listed at €150,500.

Bansko, a quiet town whose old stone houses have started to make room for modern apartments and après-ski amenities, primarily draws crowds from Britain, France and Russia - young people looking for bargain investments and older individuals "who had been skiing for years in the Alps and decided to try something new and up and coming," Cornah said.


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