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Pacific Union International Announces Expansion to Lake Tahoe

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 17:51:53 +0000

Premier Luxury Real Estate Brand Continues Bay Area Growth

SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — Pacific Union International, the leading luxury real estate brand in the Bay Area, is expanding its reach to Truckee and North Lake Tahoe.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120530/CG14179)

The company will launch a Truckee/North Lake Tahoe region office today, under the leadership of branch executive Sally J. Gardner. Located in Truckee, the office will serve clientele throughout the North Lake Tahoe area, including West Shore, Tahoe City, Squaw Valley, Alpine Meadows, Northstar, and Truckee.

“Lake Tahoe is an extremely popular destination for Bay Area residents, many of whom own or are considering owning second homes in the area,” said Mark A. McLaughlin, CEO of Pacific Union. “Tahoe is a perfect fit for the Pacific Union brand, and we are looking forward to bringing our passion for extraordinary service to the region.”

Gardner, the principal of Dashel Mills Distinctive Properties, will lead the charge for Pacific Union‘s northern expansion. She notes that Pacific Union‘s values align extremely well with the Dashel Mills philosophy, making the decision to take the helm of the new office an easy one.

“Dashel Mills was built on a promise for exceptional, committed service to each client, with personalized attention, professionalism, and great follow-through,” she said. “Pacific Union embodies these qualities both in its management and its real estate professionals, which made it a perfect fit. I’m very proud to be joining the Pacific Union team and am looking forward to a very successful start.”

Gardner has lived in the Lake Tahoe area for more than a decade and has deep real estate experience, including land and commercial development, finance, marketing, new home sales specialists, commercial and residential leasing, new construction management, and founding Dashel Mills, a full service residential brokerage.

An entrepreneur at heart, Gardner has also worked in the airline industry and founded a Bay Area Internet-based business early in the dot-com era. She is active in the Lake Tahoe community, where she founded the Tahoe Mothers’ Club, is a member of the Truckee Sportsmen’s Association, and serves on the board of directors of the Olympic Heritage Ski Museum. She also founded the Gardner Family Fund and is a supporter of the Queen of Hearts women’s fund and the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation.

Gardner maintains her Bay Area connections as a sustaining member of the Junior League of Palo Alto-Mid Peninsula. A mother of three active boys, she enjoys many of the outdoor activities the Lake Tahoe lifestyle offers, including sailing, hiking, snow skiing, water skiing, and paddle boarding.

About Pacific Union International

Pacific Union International is the San Francisco Bay Area‘s premier luxury real estate brand operating in seven regions, including the East Bay, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, Sonoma, and North Lake Tahoe.

With 22 offices in the Greater Bay Area – more than any other independent real-estate firm – Pacific Union offers a full range of personal and commercial real-estate services, including buying, selling, and relocation.

Locally owned, Pacific Union‘s leadership operates with an entrepreneurial mindset and unwavering commitment to deliver exceptional service and expertise to ensure deep, long-standing client and agent relationships.

For more information, please visit us at www.pacunion.com, get our real estate news and insights at blog.pacunion.com, or find us on Facebook (facebook.com/puintl) and Twitter (@pacunion).

Media Contact: Mark A. McLaughlin Pacific Union International, 415.345.3140, mark.mclaughlin@pacunion.com

News distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.com

SOURCE Pacific Union International

Pacific Union International Announces Expansion to Lake Tahoe

Thu, 31 May 2012 11:39:19 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2012 — /PRNewswire-iReach/ — Pacific Union International, the leading luxury real estate brand in the Bay Area, is expanding its reach to Truckee and North Lake Tahoe.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120530/CG14179)

Gardner, the principal of Dashel Mills Distinctive Properties, will lead the charge for Pacific Union’s northern expansion. She notes that Pacific Union’s values align extremely well with the Dashel Mills philosophy, making the decision to take the helm of the new office an easy one.

About Pacific Union International

Pacific Union International is the San Francisco Bay Area’s premier luxury real estate brand operating in seven regions, including the East Bay, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, Sonoma, and North Lake Tahoe.

Locally owned, Pacific Union’s leadership operates with an entrepreneurial mindset and unwavering commitment to deliver exceptional service and expertise to ensure deep, long-standing client and agent relationships.

For more information, please visit us at www.pacunion.com, get our real estate news and insights at blog.pacunion.com, or find us on Facebook (facebook.com/puintl) and Twitter (@pacunion).

Media Contact: Mark A. McLaughlin Pacific Union International, 415.345.3140, mark.mclaughlin@pacunion.com

News distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.com

SOURCE Pacific Union International

Article source: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/30/4524993/pacific-union-international-announces.html

Colorado companies are elevating the Lake Tahoe ski area with big investments

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:34:28 +0000

Three Colorado companies are digging deep on the shores of California’s Lake Tahoe, pumping more than a billion dollars in the last several years into resorts and communities that are elevating the nation’s “other” ski destination.

Lake Tahoe is probably the most bustling region in the continent’s ski resort landscape, thanks largely to investments and plans by Denver’s private equity firm KSL Capital Partners, Avon’s East West Partners and Broomfield’s Vail Resorts, who together control four of Tahoe’s seven larger ski resorts with big plans for development.

“It’s really the last bastion of undercapitalized, undermanaged and undermarketed grouping of resorts in North America. There is no place like Lake Tahoe for opportunity,” said Andy Wirth, the former Steamboat and Intrawest marketing boss who now captains KSL’s Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows ski areas.

The executives behind each company go a bit breathless when relating the upsides of Tahoe, which boasts a total of 14 resorts that draw about 4.1 million skier visits a year. Colorado, by comparison, has 26 resorts that log about 12 million annual skier visits.

Reno’s big-city airport is “just 42 minutes down the road,” said Wirth, whose KSL acquired Squaw in late 2010 and promised $50 million in capital improvements before quickly forging a deal to become majority owner of neighboring Alpine Meadows ski area.

“It’s just a huge market with the Bay Area and I think the San Francisco-Silicon Valley market will continue to be one of the most vibrant markets in the country,” said Harry Frampton , who developed Beaver Creek and is managing partner of East West. The company has spent more than $250 million on two golf-course communities and employee housing near Truckee and close to $1 billion — alongside Northstar ski-area owner CNL real estate investment trust — on lodges and a Ritz Carlton hotel in the area’s base village.

The nine counties in the Bay Area include some of the most affluent in the nation, and Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley again is bubbling with sudden wealth.

“It’s a booming market right now,” said Rob Katz, chief of Vail Resorts, which owns Heavenly, operates Northstar and last week acquired Kirkwood. “Tahoe is behind Colorado in terms of infrastructure, sophisticated marketing and season-pass programs. I think people are looking down the road saying, ‘Hey, this offers some opportunity.’ I know we are.”

Add it all up, and Colorado’s top resort developers are fueling a second gold rush in California as they till Tahoe for the next era of ski-resort development.

It’s no easy task, requiring hundreds of millions if not billions in capital improvements designed

to marry high-end real estate with modern-day resort expectations. It’s a bit of a gamble, with players rolling their development dice in a heavily regulated and scrutinized environment that has largely limited development for the past several decades.

With the economy hindering large-scale development and building regulations growing even more complex, going big in Tahoe has never been more difficult.

“The development climate is certainly troubled right now … but if you look at the spectrum of players who could embark on big, long-term projects, these guys are certainly on the list of qualified entities able to do that,” said Paul Habibi, a Southern California real estate entrepreneur and real estate professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Ziman Center for Real Estate.

(Tahoe is already drawing the eye of smaller yet equally vibrant Colorado developers. Carbondale’s Timbers Resorts, for example, is working with Placer County to develop a rare lakeside destination to join its collection of international resorts.)

Colorado developers like Vail Resorts and East West are no strangers to building under scrutiny. But even though most of the resort land around Tahoe is privately owned, as opposed to Forest Service-owned slopes in Colorado, that doesn’t mean the environmental and community-guided regulations are more lax in Tahoe than in Colorado.

“In some ways, it is more difficult here,” said Michael Johnson, director of the Community Development Resource Agency for Placer County, home to all of East West’s Truckee-area projects and the Squaw Valley, Alpine Meadows and Northstar ski areas on the northwest shore of Lake Tahoe.

With strict county regulations protecting community values and both the California Environmental Quality Act and the federally designated Tahoe Regional Planning Agency safeguarding the region’s sensitive environment, Johnson said the environmental and local rules surrounding development demand quality work.

“The Colorado companies have shown that you can build successful projects that are compatible and harmonious with the local environment,” he said. “They bring the entire package. It’s not just land development but how it fits into the landscape here.”

In addition to water and environmental concerns, the companies — including Avon’s Booth Creek Ski Holdings, which owned Northstar from 1996 to 2007, when it sold the resort to CNL — are well-versed in addressing community needs. East West, for example, delivers $5,000 to a local open-space fund for each unit it sells, donated two $10 million parcels to Truckee for a park and school and spent $12 million to build a 96-unit employee-housing lodge at Northstar.

The companies, Johnson said, embrace the county’s mission to keep development corralled between swaths of open land.

“Even though there are opportunities for them to build in more remote locations, they have been very successful in working with the county’s desire to bring development into specific areas so the balance of the land can be preserved as open space,” Johnson said.

Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com

12 million

Colorado’s annual skier visits at 26 resorts

4.1 million

Annual skier visits at the Lake Tahoe area’s 14 resorts, along the California-Nevada state line

Article source: http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_20042333