The Beauty of Buying a Ski Home in Idaho? Nobody Knows a Thing About It

It isn’t easy to get to Schweitzer—the closest major airport is in Spokane, Wash., about a two-hour drive, including a steep road with sharp switchbacks. The two fastest routes from Idaho’s capital Boise are 10-12 hours and involve going through either Washington or Montana.

There aren’t many shops and hotels right at the mountain’s base, and cell and internet service can be spotty in the area. Residents have to pick up their mail in the village.

But Schweitzer is in the midst of a dramatic transformation, aiming to become a destination resort. Last season it added seven runs and two lifts and joined the Ikon pass, a 47-mountain destination ticket that gives members access to elite ski areas around the world, including Aspen, Colo., Jackson Hole, Wyo., Utah’s Deer Valley and Vermont’s Killington and Zermatt in Switzerland.

The resort village, with a year-round population of about 65, currently looks like a giant construction site, as the resort embarks on a multiple-phase rollout of residential development. An angled, contemporary, glass and steel hotel and restaurant, designed by hip Portland firm Skylab Architecture, is rising amid the more traditional alpine condos and lodges. The skeletons of new modern houses and townhouses bolstered by steel rods now inundate the steep slopes.

Demand for real estate is so high that there are currently no houses on the market for sale and only two condos—a stark difference from the 40-50 units for sale in the wider area at any given time in the past, says Patrick Werry, an agent with Century 21 Riverstone. Home prices have risen 40% over the past year in this resort village of about 700 homes.

“Everyone is trying to get on the bandwagon,” says Craig Mearns of M2 Construction, which has a three year waiting list to even start building a custom house, and whose latest spec project sold out in a month, even when prices increased from $550,000 to $950,000 for a unit.

What’s happening at Schweitzer is happening all over Idaho. The state is in the midst of a ski renaissance. As its mountains expand terrain and add amenities, demand for homes is booming.

“Idaho is attracting people who want a smaller resort experience—the feel that other Western resorts used to offer but don’t anymore,” says Thomas Wright, president of Summit Sotheby’s International Realty.

Idaho’s ski resorts are scattered across the state, and their characters are as different as the terrain that surrounds them, from the arid, celebrity-infused Sun Valley, to the insular, pine-tree dense village of Tamarack, north of Boise. All the way east is the wilder, remote Grand Targhee, in the Teton Range, located in Alta, Wyo., just on the border with Idaho. But the appeal of all these places is the same: low-key, uncrowded skiing with consistent snow.

Real-estate agents say the demand for ski resort homes is an offshoot of the demand for homes in Idaho overall, a movement fueled by the pandemic, with people looking for properties with more space and, in some cases, laxer Covid restrictions. (Idaho is currently in a hospital resource crisis because of its high rate of Covid.)

Idaho’s home prices have grown 42% in the past two years—twice the national average and the highest of all the states, according to Nik Shah, CEO of Home LLC., a down payment assistance provider.

“Most of my friends are like Idaho, what’s there? My response is, exactly—it’s because you don’t know about it,” says Harmon Kong, a 57-year-old investment adviser from Lake Forest, Calif.

Mr. Kong and his wife Lea Kong fell hard last year for Tamarack and bought two places: a three-bedroom, three-bathroom penthouse ski-in ski-out condo in the fall of 2020 for $1.8 million and three-bedroom, three-bathroom chalet nearby for $1.28 million.

Mr. Kong was used to skiing at Heavenly Ski Resort in Lake Tahoe, Calif., which he likens to Disneyland because of the crowds. At Tamarack, he says the snow is routinely powdery, there are hardly ever lift lines and there’s lots of backcountry skiing.

Opened in 2004, then shut in 2008 due to bankruptcy, Tamarack is in the midst of a resurgence. The resort’s lifts currently service about 1,000 acres of skiable terrain and it has applied to the U.S. Forest Service for permits to add seven to nine new lifts, including a gondola, and more than double its size by adding 3,300 new acres of ski terrain and a new summit lodge.

Building is underway on ambitious, multiphase residential development projects, which will result in 2,043 residential units, including about 1,000 hotel rooms and a mix of condos, estate homes, townhomes, cottages and chalets. Tamarack is in the process of starting a charter school. The average sold price for a home in Tamarack, which has about 450 homes in all, has grown 80% over the past two years, according to the Mountain Central Association of Realtors.

To attract more skiers, this past year Tamarack joined the Indy Pass, which includes small independent resorts around North America. The resort’s president Scott Turlington is aiming for 500,000 skier visits over the next couple seasons (up from 120,000 last season), which he acknowledges might make him persona non grata among some of the current homeowners. “If I do my job properly I won’t be the most popular person,” he says.