Grollo family buys Mt Hotham Airport for $6.5 million

The airport has a 1460-metre runway, allowing aircraft such as the Dash 8 twin turboprop – which carries up to 90 passengers and can fly direct from Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane – but has available land to extend the runway by a further 300 metres to cater for larger aircraft.

Ski resorts around the world face the problem of accommodating workers and with the airport accounting for just 40 hectares of the naturally flat site, there was room to develop housing for staff, Grollo Group chief executive Lorenz Grollo said.

“The surplus land, which is freehold, is available for development so long as you comply with the alpine regulations and the standards,” Mr Grollo told The Australian Financial Review.

“All resorts need to get better accommodation for their staff and need to lift the standard of worker accommodation in order to attract staff.”

New York-listed Vail Resorts, which in 2019 acquired Victoria’s Falls Creek and Hotham resorts for $174 million – adding to a portfolio that already included Perisher in NSW – said it sold the airport, 10 kilometres from Dinner Plain and a further 10 kilometres from Mt Hotham, because it did not want to take on the development task itself.

“The opportunity there to work with a group that has runs on the board in terms of alpine property development, to tackle a key resourcing problem and do it in a way where we’re using a specialist in that experience rather than trying to tackle that property development – which is well outside of Vail Resorts’ experience – is a model that Vail Resorts is looking to leverage across its portfolio,” said Nathan Butterworth, Vail-owned Hotham Skiing Company’s general manager.

Grollo Group property manager Martin Ansell said residential development on the site was likely to be in the form of a village, with a number of buildings providing a range of different accommodation types, to reflect the different needs of people working on the ski fields.

At least 1500 beds that could be sold to paying guests were taken up by staff on the ski fields at Mt Hotham and Dinner Plain in winter, said real estate agent John Castran, who brokered the deal.

“If half of those beds could be taken off Hotham and Dinner Plan and return to commercial punter beds, that would be a great [business] driver,” Mr Castran said.

Design and development planning alone would take up to two years and cost about $1 million, Mr Ansell said. He declined to give a budget for development.

Grollo Group has developments at Mt Hotham worth between $8 million and $10 million, including a four-chalet project it is about to start selling, and at Mt Buller – 270 kilometres from Mt Hotham by road – where its $100 million-plus development book includes the Whitehorse residential project and Kooroora hotel and apartments developments.

Separately, the family group owns the Mt Buller Chalet Hotel & Suites and Abom Hotel, and ski operations including chairlifts and ski schools.

Like ski resorts the world over, Mt Buller has a shortage of worker accommodation and the Hotham Airport development could serve as a template for similar developments on land the family owns at Mt Buller, Mr Grollo said.