The White-Collar Winter
AI, White-Collar Displacement, and the Hidden Fragility of Resort Markets
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
David Foster Wallace used that parable to make a point about the most obvious and important realities often being the ones hardest to see. I was born in Vail, CO and grew up in a nearby ranching community. I have spent my entire career building and operating real estate in resort markets. And I would like to think I am not the young fish who doesn’t know he’s swimming.
What follows is my honest attempt to look at the water.
The Mountain We’re Standing On
I am going to pick on Vail since it’s a big name and so close to home, but this applies to all ski markets in some capacity. First, some context on how far we have come. The Vail Valley real estate market has been extraordinary by nearly any measure. Eagle County real estate dollar volume hit $2.28 billion in 2019 and has climbed substantially since. The median home price in Vail today sits around $2.1 million, with some data sources showing it higher. Prices across Eagle, Grand, Pitkin, Routt, Summit, and San Miguel counties have more than doubled since 2012, with the average price increase in those counties running nearly 189% above the statewide average.
This isn’t just a luxury story. The run-up has lifted all housing, which has pushed the cost of living to levels that strain the workforce that makes these communities run. The ski industry itself has followed a parallel trajectory. Vail Resorts now charges more than $1,000 for a full Epic Pass and generated nearly $975 million in pass revenue from 2.3 million passholders in the 2024-25 season alone. Alterra Mountain Company, which runs the competing Ikon Pass, is privately held and doesn’t report passholder counts, but industry estimates suggest the two companies combined sell roughly 4 million season passes annually. That means Ikon likely sits somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 1.7 million passholders.
Four million people who have made a financial commitment to skiing. That is the customer base underpinning the entire ski and snowboard economy.
To understand where we are, you have to understand how far we have traveled in a very short time. The pandemic created a demand shock unlike anything these markets had ever seen. Remote work gave high earners the freedom to relocate, and they chose the mountains in enormous numbers. The results were staggering: average prices across Eagle, Grand, Pitkin, Routt, Summit, and San Miguel counties were up 57% from 2019 to 2021 alone. From 2012 to today, home prices in those same counties have more than doubled, in some cases tripled, far outpacing the statewide average. In Eagle County, roughly two-thirds of homes once sold for under $1 million; today that figure is closer to 30%. The market did not gradually drift higher. It repriced, rapidly, and has not looked back.
This is the context that makes the current moment so consequential. These markets did not drift to their current valuations over decades. They got here in a handful of years, driven by a specific set of conditions: historically low interest rates, remote work flexibility, equity-fueled cash buyers, and a flight to quality of life. Some of those tailwinds are still intact. Others are not. And a new headwind is forming that nobody in this industry seems to want to talk about.
The question worth asking is: who exactly are those four million people, and what happens to them if the economy turns in a structurally different way than it has before?
The Customer Profile Is Concentrated
Skiing has never been a sport of the masses, and the numbers reflect that. More than 60% of ski area visitors have household incomes above $100,000, compared with roughly 25% of the general population. The demographic skews heavily toward white-collar professionals in finance, technology, law, and consulting. These are not factory workers or retail associates. They are precisely the people whose jobs are now in the crosshairs of artificial intelligence.
This matters because of a data point that should stop anyone in this industry cold: 59% of all consumer spending in the United States now comes from the top 20% of income earners, according to a Moody’s Analytics analysis of Federal Reserve data. That figure is near an all-time high. The bottom 80% of earners, meanwhile, accounts for only 41% of spending, a record low.
Consumer spending drives roughly 70% of U.S. GDP. And resort economies do not draw from the broad consumer base. They draw almost entirely from the top slice. When Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi says “this group is driving the economic train with their spending, and if they pull back, they’ll take the economy with them,” he is describing a national vulnerability. In a ski town, that vulnerability is multiplied.
The AI Disruption Is Not a Future Risk
I am not an AI pessimist by default. But I have been paying close attention to what the people building these systems are saying, and it is worth taking seriously.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, potentially spiking unemployment to 10-20%. He is not some alarmist academic. He runs one of the three most powerful AI companies in the world and is describing what he sees from inside the machine. Ford’s CEO warned AI will “replace literally half of all white-collar workers.” Goldman Sachs is taking a “front-to-back view” of how it organizes its people as it deploys AI across its businesses. JPMorgan has told managers to avoid new hires as the firm deploys AI firm-wide.
The data is already moving. In January 2025, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the lowest rate of job openings in professional services since 2013, a 20% year-over-year drop. Forty percent of white-collar job seekers in 2024 failed to secure a single interview. Hiring for positions paying more than $96,000 annually reached a decade low. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce where AI can automate tasks.
Bloomberg research found AI could replace more than half the tasks performed by market research analysts and 67% of the tasks performed by sales representatives. These are not edge cases. These are the core occupations of the upper-middle class. And upper-middle class discretionary income is what funds ski vacations, second home mortgages, and lift ticket revenues in places like Vail, CO.
The Fed can recapitalize banks. It cannot QE new white-collar jobs. That is the structural difference between this potential disruption and everything that came before it.
The GFC Was a Preview. And It Was Ugly.
Locals here tend to think of resort markets as insulated. And relative to other markets, they often are. Eagle County generally heads into downturns later and has historically shown resilience. But the one exception to that pattern was the 2008-09 financial crisis, and it is worth remembering clearly, not just through the lens of home prices but through the lens of spending, which is the actual lifeblood of a resort economy.
Look at what happened to spending. The Town of Vail’s sales tax is the most direct real-time measure of economic activity here, encompassing everything from lodging to restaurants to retail. In 2008, the town collected a record $19.6 million in sales tax. By 2009, collections had fallen roughly 20 to 25 percent as the recession took hold, with the valley-wide drop in that range confirmed by the town’s own reporting. Total town revenue fell 25% in fiscal 2009 from fiscal 2008. It took until 2012, four years later, to crack the 2008 sales tax record. Four years of lost ground in what is supposedly one of the most insulated markets in the country.
The real estate story followed the same arc but was even more severe. Eagle County real estate dollar volume fell from $2.96 billion in 2007 to just $898 million in 2009, a collapse of nearly 70% peak to trough. Foreclosure filings hit an all-time record of 618 in 2010, and at the bottom of the market in 2011, a full 20% of all transactions were distressed sales. Some neighborhoods lost 30% or more of boom-era value.
Here is the part that tends to get glossed over: it took more than a decade to recover. Eagle County did not match its 2007 dollar volume peak until 2019. Twelve years.
And that recovery was largely powered by the work-from-anywhere boom of 2020-2021, when remote workers flooded mountain towns with equity-fueled cash purchases. That was a once-in-a-generation demand shock. It cannot be counted on again.
We also have to be honest about something the GFC and the subsequent recovery had in common: both were ultimately financial crises that the government addressed with monetary tools. The Fed cut rates, printed money, bought assets, and backstopped the banks holding the collateral. It worked, eventually. But what happens when the disruption is not a financial crisis but a structural change in the labor market? You can bail out a bank holding a bad mortgage. You cannot print new white-collar employment.
Not All Resort Markets Are Created Equal
I want to be clear about something: I am not predicting the end of mountain real estate or commerce. I am trying to think carefully about tail risk in a market that has priced itself as if tail risk does not exist.
The long-term case for these markets remains real. Land is genuinely scarce. More than 80% of Eagle County is public land, and Vail is essentially built out. Quality of life is undeniable. Demand from international buyers, retirees, and the genuinely wealthy is not going away. Wealth will continue to be generated in this country, and some of it will find its way into the mountains.
But not all resort markets will fare equally if the labor market gets disrupted. A market like Park City, sitting 30 minutes from Salt Lake City, has a diversified economic engine nearby. If the ski crowd thins out, it still has a metro area to draw from. A stranded market like Telluride, where the employment base is almost entirely ski tourism, has no such cushion. The more isolated the market and the more dependent it is on discretionary travel by the top 5% of earners, the more exposed it is to a structural shift in that demographic’s economic security.
The AI productivity boom also has a real upside case. If it generates new industries and new categories of wealth the way the internet did, some of that wealth will end up in ski towns. The story does not have to be uniformly dark. But the timing and the transition matter enormously. And during a major structural adjustment, there are likely to be some serious bumps.
Where We Are Positioning
I am not pulling out of mountain markets. I have spent my career here and I believe in them over the long run. But I am being disciplined about what I will pay, and I am not going to rationalize overpaying because an asset carries the ski town premium.
I am also pushing harder into markets that sit in the mountains but are not purely correlated to skier visits and the discretionary spending of the top two percent. Our Muddy Creek project in Kremmling is a good example. We are providing housing for one of the largest mining companies in the world, with a long-term corporate lease structure. The economic driver there is industrial employment, not tourism. If ski pass holders cut back, Muddy Creek keeps performing.
That is the kind of asymmetry I am looking for. Exposure to mountain markets with their real long-term tailwinds, but with an underlying demand driver that is not entirely dependent on the financial health of the white-collar professional class.
And if these markets do get disrupted, we will be watching. The GFC was devastating for people caught unprepared. For those who had dry powder and discipline, it was one of the great buying opportunities in the history of Colorado mountain real estate. We intend to be in the second group.
A Final Thought
I want to be honest about the discomfort of writing this. I make my living developing real estate in the Colorado mountains. There is something that feels almost heretical about laying out a case for why these markets could face a serious reckoning. These are the communities I grew up in and love.
But I also think the most dangerous thing I could do, for my investors and for myself, is assume that because these markets have been resilient, they will remain insulated from a disruption unlike any we have seen before. The fish in the opening parable was not stupid. It just had no framework for questioning the thing it was surrounded by.
I am trying to ask the question. What is the water we are swimming in, and should we be paying closer attention to it?
Hopefully I am wrong about most of this. But I would rather be wrong and prepared than right and caught flat-footed.
Mike Pearson
President
Fortius Capital Partners
