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Mystery Buyer Wins Auction for Jay Peak

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Mystery Buyer Wins Auction for Jay Peak

Winning bid has 30 days to reveal identity

Stuart Winchester
Sep 8, 2022
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Mystery Buyer Wins Auction for Jay Peak

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To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive thousands of extra words of content each month, plus all podcasts three days before free subscribers.

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An auction for Jay Peak Resort in Vermont lasted seven-and-a-half hours on Wednesday, before one of three participating parties submitted the winning bid at around 5:30 p.m. WCAX TV’s Katharine Huntley, who was onsite at the mountain, first reported the news.

The bidder’s identity remains unknown as of this morning.  

“The employees are all looking forward to having some stewardship, a little security about who was sort of owning the asset and capitalize the right way to get us the things that we need going forward,” Jay Peak President and GM Steve Wright told Huntley.

A representative from Pacific Group Resorts, the owner of five North American ski areas and the only known bidder from yesterday’s auction, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Storm Skiing Journal. Wright declined to add any additional context, referring to the comments he’d made to WCAX.

The winning bidder will have 30 days to reveal themselves, according to a report from the NBC 5 affiliate in Burlington, Vermont (the segment also includes commentary from me on what the winner needs to accomplish at Jay Peak):

The approaching ski season, restless and exhausted employees, and relentless media pressure will likely compel the new owner to reveal themselves sooner than the 30-day deadline. There are, however, likely several regulatory and financial requirements to settle prior to the announcement.

The winner of an auction does not always end up as the final owner of an asset. When Timberline, West Virginia went to auction in 2020, Jonathan Davis, the general manager of Perfect North, Indiana, traveled east to participate on behalf of his ski area. He lost the auction, but the judge later determined that the winning bidder did not have enough ski resort management experience to guarantee a favorable outcome for Timberline. Perfect North ended up owning Timberline, as Davis recapped to me in a podcast conversation earlier this summer:

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
Podcast #93: Perfect North Slopes, Indiana General Manager Jonathan M. Davis (with a Timberline, WV Bonus)
Listen now (111 min) | To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 28. Free subscribers got it on July 1. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription…
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7 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Stuart Winchester

No one is concerned with a lack of experience if Pacific Group Resorts is the winner. They are respected and experienced operators, and last month I broke down what Jay Peak would look like under their ownership:

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast
What It Would Mean if Pacific Group Resorts Bought Jay Peak
To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive thousands of extra words of content each month, plus all podcasts three days before free subscribers. More than six years after Vermont’s Jay Peak entered receivership following an EB-5 scandal that scammed hundreds of investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and landed multiple people in federal prison, the ski area may be close to a sale…
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6 months ago · 7 likes · 9 comments · Stuart Winchester

While the identity of the other two bidders is still uncertain, both Boyne Resorts and Snow Partners have confirmed to The Storm Skiing Journal that they did not participate in the auction.

Whoever wins, they understand that Jay is the crown jewel of New England skiing, and that it’s been floating in a strange limbo for the past several years.

“I think that the people that are involved at this point understand exactly what the value of this resort is and they realize that there is still some money that needs to be invested going forward,” Wright told WCAX. “So, they’re not going to spend bad dollars on this place knowing there are still some improvements on the mountainside that need to happen.”


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The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 95/100 in 2022, and number 341 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com.

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Mystery Buyer Wins Auction for Jay Peak

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