Rob Katz just finished his first year as chief executive of Vail Resorts Inc. When the ski area operator tapped him to serve at the helm, Wall Street saw it as a sign of "business as usual" because Katz already had strong ties with the company in his role as lead board member.

But the 40-year-old has taken the company in several new directions, including moving Vail's corporate headquarters down from the mountains. As for the company's stock price? It's been on an uphill ride - from $31.71 when his appointment was announced last March to $54.52 at the close of New York Stock Exchange trading on Wednesday.

At company headquarters in Broomfield, Katz talked about his first year.

When you became CEO, you'd already been involved with the company for 14 years as a director and a veteran of Apollo Investments, the buyout firm that took control of Vail before it went public in 1997. What's different about running the day-to-day shop?

Some aspects of the job are very familiar, but the public persona is new for me. Our company has an outsized personality for its size, partly because so many people use the product. And mountain resorts are really a whole culture.

How has moving the corporate headquarters from Avon worked out?

The culture of the corporate entity needed to be a little different. It was only 200 people we moved. Thousands of employees are still in Vail Valley. I'm sure there are many people here in Broomfield who are disappointed they can't take advantage of a big powder day. But we're still next to the mountains. We didn't move to New York City.

A lot of people have the notion that ski resorts make most of their money nowadays from developing slopeside real estate. A Wall Street analyst even downgraded your stock in mid-March, saying the company's real estate "play" appears to be over for now. What's your reaction?

There are some people who started to think the company's profits come from real estate instead of skier visits. One of the things I've really tried to do is disabuse people of that notion. It's not the core of the company. We're not a real estate development company.

You've admitted that the company overshot its budget on expensive real estate developments such as the ones you've been working on in Vail's Lionshead and Jackson Hole. Why is that?

Vail had historically developed real estate as a landowner that handled utilities and roads but sold off parcels to other builders. Now we're building and selling units. We didn't have the right processes in place. (Translation: Construction costs exceeded initial estimates because some aspects of the projects were not finalized until after the building began.) But even though real estate is not our core business, we still have to execute.

We've since hired somebody with heavy experience in construction to run the development side of the company.

The price of a daily ski ticket at Vail and Beaver Creek hit $84 this year. How long before it gets to $100 a day just to get on the lift?

Everything is clearly about value. Price will become more of an issue when people get upset they are paying too much and not getting enough out of it relative to what they pay for other activities or to ski at other ski areas.