Marc Newman never set out to buy a ski property on the other side of the Atlantic, let alone one as far west as the Rockies. “I’d teamed up with a good friend of mine,” recalls Newman, 27, an IT security manager from Kingston upon Thames, in southwest London. “We looked in the French Alps, at Les Deux Alpes, southeast of Grenoble, and Brides-les-Bains, further north. But the more we looked, the more our enthusiasm faded.”

The first worry Newman and his friend Tom Gregory had was the size of the properties they could afford. They were in the market for a one-bedroom flat, but found those within their budget small and charmless. “It made us wonder whether or not the market had peaked – and we were treating this as an investment as much as a holiday home, so it seemed pretty dumb to be buying at the wrong end of the cycle,” Newman says. “Then we started to fret about the snow.”

It’s a common concern. This winter, the Alps are having a better season than average, snow-wise – although skiers in the Portes du Soleil region of France and Switzerland last week endured temperatures of 12C and rain – but long-term worries about climate change and a rising snow line are taking the shine off many resorts there.

It was no wonder, therefore, that Newman’s ears pricked up when he heard about Kicking Horse, in the Canadian Rockies. Opened in December 2000, above the blue-collar town of Golden, in British Columbia, it is one of a new breed of Canadian ski areas with big ambitions. By the standards of Alpine resorts, it’s tiny – offering just 2,750 acres of skiable mountain (compared to about 25,000 acres on offer in the Espace Killy, the ski area shared between the French resorts of Val d’Isère and Tignes).

It has ambitious plans to grow, however, and, just as important, it has proper, consistently cold winters. The average temperature in January is -10C, and in April -4C, and it receives an average of 6.5 metres of snow each winter – compared with about 5 metres in Val d’Isère. Combine this with the steep terrain on offer in its high mountain bowls, and it is one of the best resorts in North America for more advanced skiers and boarders.

It’s also inexpensive. Newman and Gregory met the representatives of Kicking Horse and their UK property agents, Pure International (020 7331 4500, www.pureintl.com), at the 2007 Ski Show at Olympia, in west London. After a weekend trip in the autumn, they bought a one-bed, 62-square-metre flat off plan in November, for £133,000. The expect to take their first ski trip there early next year.

They’re not the only Brits buying into the resorts of Canada right now – and with good reason. The mountainous interior of British Columbia may be a long way from home – direct flights from London to Calgary or Vancouver, the nearest international airports, take almost 10 hours – but in many respects, this is skiing’s new frontier. It was colonised by heli-skiing operations, who whizz their clients to and from the mountains in choppers, and still operate in vast tracts of land several hundred thousand acres in extent. Developers of more traditional resorts, however, have long eyed the area’s terrain and climate – and, in recent years, they’ve been busy.

Two hours’ drive to the west of Kicking Horse is Revelstoke. Plans to build a resort here were first hatched 25 years ago, but it wasn’t until last December that the first lifts finally opened – part of a £500m project to develop it into a rival to Whistler, currently the biggest ski area in North America.

If anything, Revelstoke is an even more tempting prospect than Kicking Horse – thanks to the superb, devil-take-the-hindmost skiing offered by its mountain, and to its super-snowy climate (a whopping 12 metres a season on average).

From a British perspective, its remoteness is a problem – the nearest airport is at Kelowna and, to reach it, you need to change planes in Calgary, making for a 20-hour journey, door to door, from London. That hasn’t stopped a flood of interest. The first two phases of construction sold out quickly and, when the third and final phase was launched on March 1, £18m worth of property was snapped up. The mountain-property specialist Erna Low (020 7590 1624, www.ernalowproperty.co.uk), one of two agents handling UK sales, has reported one client signing up for four ski-in, ski-out flats.

Is all this excitement justified? From a skiing perspective, yes. This is one of the world’s empty quarters: wild, dramatic, underpopulated and home to mountains that offer masses of variety and a real sense of adventure. They’re not quite as mighty as the Alps, but the more reliable climate compensates for that. What’s more, the growing number of resorts here means you can always take a day trip to another mountain for a change of scene – or, if you can afford it, jump in a helicopter.

The clincher for many investors at the moment appears to be the strength of the Canadian economy, especially in neighbouring, oil-rich Alberta. The spiralling price of crude has made the mining of its oil-bearing sands profitable again, and the local economy is in great shape: the unemployment rate is just 3.2%. It’s part of a wider commodity-based boom that has seen Canadian GDP rise by a healthy 2.7% per year over the past two years, according to the Bank of Canada, and prices of new houses up 6.2% in the year to December, according to the government-run Statistics Canada.

There are, however, clouds on the horizon. Growth is expected to slow this year, as a stronger Canadian dollar and weaker US economy take their toll. Prices of new-build property in Revelstoke, in particular, are aggressive: a 65-square-metre, one-bed flat costs £235,000 off plan – quite a lot of money for a resort that, whatever its potential, has only two lifts and a handful of pistes.

Still, investors don’t seem to be put off, and it’s not just the ski-in, ski-out properties that are attracting interest. “Prices of existing homes in town have risen by about 300% in the past five years,” says Cynthia Kidd, an estate agent at Re/Max, which is based in the resort (00 1 250 837 5121, www.revelstoke-realty.com).

In any case, buying your own place in the mountains is rarely driven by pure economic logic – as Newman and Gregory discovered in Kicking Horse. “Originally, we saw our property as an investment, and intend to rent it out to other skiers through our website, www.kickingcabin.com,” Newman says.

“But the fact is, we can’t wait to get out there and test Canadian snow ourselves. We both love to ski, and try to take a couple of holidays on the slopes each winter. The thought of having our own place out there, in the wilds of British Columbia, is almost too exciting for words.”

What’s the story in the States?

The market may be booming in Canada, but things are very different south of the border – as the baleful effects of America’s sub-prime crisis spread to even the upper reaches of the country’s property market.

House prices in Aspen, Colorado, a favourite haunt of the super-rich, have exploded in the past few years, but even there things are slowing down, with both prices and sales volumes dropping back sharply in recent months. “We’re seeing a lot of price-cutting at the moment,” says Drew Sakson, a broker with the Sakson Mortgage Group in Aspen.

Away from the established resorts, the trend is more pronounced. Take the Montana resort of Moonlight Basin, which, with its neighbour Big Sky, offers the largest combined ski area in the USA. In recent years, both have seen a furious spate of upmarket property developments, but those luxurious homes are proving hard to shift, and a backlog of unsold property is growing.

Developers are responding with some attractive inducements, but it is a moot point whether or not now is the time to enter the US market. Sakson, though, is cautiously optimistic. “In Aspen, we tend to come in late to a soft market and leave a little earlier than most,” he says. “I see the market here bottoming out around late summer or early autumn this year.”

American beauties

One of 10 recently upgraded chalets in the Alpine Meadows development at Moonlight Basin, Montana, this three-bedder has a wraparound deck with valley views and a garage.

For sale for £1.03m through Montana Real Estate Company; 00 1 406 995 3992, www.mtreco.com

A 3,000 sq ft, three-level, fourbed cabin with mountain views, a whirlpool tub and a heated garage, at Spruce Peak, in Stowe, 45 minutes’ drive from Burlington airport, Vermont.

For sale from £1.2m through Erna Low Property; 020 7590 1624, www.ernalowproperty.co.uk

This five-bed, four-bath property at Kicking Horse has 2,800 sq ft of living space, a ski-wax room, a hot tub on the sun deck, a solid-maple kitchen and in-floor heating throughout.

For sale for £702,000 through Pure International; 020 7331 4500, www.pureintl.com

A one-bedroom, 585 sq ft flat at the Revelstoke Mountain Resort – one of 5,000 properties to be built there by 2023 – near the ski slopes and with use of a communal gym and an outdoor heated pool.

For sale for £239,000 through Erna Low Property; 020 7590 1624, www.ernalowproperty.co.uk/revelstoke

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