OBITUARY: PAUL OSTER 1959-2025

University of Virginia English Professor Mark Edmondson, 73, had an essay in the Wall Street Journal this week where he contemplated,  ‘What age, retirement? When do you hang it up?’

His position: I’ll keep working as long as I can do my job reasonably well. 

And then he writes, “I was encouraged in this wish to go on by my grad school advisor Harold Bloom, who kept churning until the end, writing books well into his eighties. It’s said that he was dictating more criticism on the gurney that carried him to his final operation. He said that he never thought about death and that he would never retire. “They can take me out by the heels,” I heard him say. “By the heels!”

When I spoke to Deanna Lantieri this week about her former boss, colleague, friend and mentor Paul Oster, she said that Paul was working until the very end – wrapping up personal affairs, closing deals, answering texts from clients. 

She said one client had been texting him for the final month thinking that Paul was answering these texts from his office rather than from a hospital bed. 

Paul, ever the stoic, would certainly never have let on that he was dying. Those around him were certain of a recovery, buoyed by his general good nature. 

Paul Oster was a second generation real estate broker with family roots in Los Angeles dating back to the 1800s. He graduated from UCLA, where he was a member of the Theta Xi fraternity, in late 1981. He immediately moved to Mammoth to be a part of the original Chart House restaurant team.  

That’s where longtime friend Casey Elliott met Paul, who was working as a maitre d’. 

As Casey recalls, in that post-earthquake period, there was a sign at the entrance to town saying, “Last one out, turn off the lights.” Everyone else was leaving, but ever the contrarian, Paul was arriving. 

The party was just getting started. 

And it was a party Paul never took for granted. 

As Casey said, Paul’s chest was literally a roadmap of scars, the result of many surgeries. He had been diagnosed with leukemia at 19, and was fairly compromised at a young age. 

Which made him preternaturally suited for Mammoth, and for real estate. If you’d already stared down death, an earthquake, a recession, a market correction, a town bankruptcy – this was just noise. Nothing to panic over. Paul resolutely believed in Mammoth and its prospects.   

As Elliott said, “I bought four income properties and a house from him. I agreed with his assessment that so many long-term indicators were pointing up. When everybody was selling, I was buying. 

I live in Arizona now, on the Colorado River, thanks to Paul engineering a 1031 exchange. He did me right [from start to finish].” 

After stints in the restaurant business and commercial and residential property management, Paul moved into full time real estate sales in 1986. He passed his broker’s exam later that year and shortly thereafter led the RE/MAX office in Mammoth.  

Paul sat on the Mammoth Lakes Planning Commission from 1990-98 during an intense period of resort planning which ultimately led to the Intrawest involvement as well as many other “foundational” planning issues in Mammoth Lakes. More recently, Paul sat on the Mono County Property Tax Assessment Appeals Board from 2004 to present. Paul’s involvement in volunteer and community activities spanned four decades in Mammoth Lakes.  

Paul was an admitted workaholic but found time to ski almost daily in the winter and mountain bike in the spring, summer and fall.  

When not active in Mammoth Lakes, Paul could be found deep sea fishing in the Pacific Ocean. He boasted of his 500+ fishing days on the Red Rooster III out of San Diego. He was a member of the 300# Club.

“When he came back from a trip, he had fish for everybody,” said a wistful Elliott. “And if he invited you to dinner, you showed up. He was a great chef.” 

 In terms of his personal life, he was a bit of an enigma. He was a lifelong bachelor – never married. But knowing Paul, one might guess the reason he never married was because he was so practical and probably viewed it as a poor investment!

He was also … he just liked things the way he liked them. Lantieri recalled one time when Paul was out of the office, and staff decided to change things up and rearrange the furniture. 

He walked in, took one look, said he’d be back in two hours, and that he wanted everything restored to just as he’d had it before. 

He was a minimalist. Hated clutter. But paper wasn’t clutter – it was an extension of the analysis and computation going on 24/7 in his brain. 

His real estate blog inspired devotion, even obsession. You wanted to know how Paul looked at things. 

As I wrote in the year-end issue, “Paul began contributing columns to The Sheet in 2009. 

At the time, this was a big deal. For those still eager to dismiss the paper as a sophomoric rag, Oster lent instant credibility. His columns were cerebral and insightful. Paul spoke truth.”

Over the past few days, I’ve reread many of these columns, his clever personality channeled into them. He was the only guy who could get away with submitting 1,700-word columns because he was the only guy you’d read for 1,700 words and hang on every one of them. 

Most people, when they submit a piece of writing, they ask how long it should be. I tell them to write until it gets boring, and then stop. Which generally occurs within 600 words or so. 

Over the past 16 years Paul must’ve published 125,000 words in The Sheet – which represents a fraction of what he produced for his blog. 

As you’ll see, he wasn’t afraid of calling out anybody. 

A few excerpts. From February 14, 2015:

Mammoth Lakes was recently referred to as “laughingstock” (according to CEO Rusty Gregory) because theTown won’t relax certain longstandingdevelopment standards to incentivize development. Relaxing standards is an industry and nationwide debate.

The Ski Area wants developers to be incentivized to develop properties (namely because the Ski Area’s masters own a large chunk of the developableland). But these development properties have poor-to-marginal (compared to other major resorts) lift access. Any smart developer would demand the completion of a modern and competitive gondola system to service these proposed development properties.

Frankly, without a quality gondola system the properties are devalued. This thinking is so typical of why Mammoth has slipped from a “Top 5” resort to barely staying in the top 25. That is why we are a “laughingstock” … By not completing the gondola system they are poorly serving their own hospitality guests and compromising the cash flow in the bed base they manage and operate.

In drought periods Mammoth now expends massive energy to make snow to create pathetic access trails to the bed base. A place like Whistler simply provides gondolas to let their guests ride over all of that and get to the good runs.

I chose this next excerpt because it appeared in the July 5, 2014 issue but may as well have been written yesterday. 

Which speaks to Paul’s general outlook on things – that issues tend to circle back on themselves. That nothing is ever quite unique. 

I include this based upon a story which recently appeared in timeout.com ranking Mammoth as the 4th most expensive ski resort in the U.S. 

The top 11 were: Aspen Snowmass, Beaver Creek, Vail, Mammoth, Steamboat, Jackson, Breckenridge, Park City, Big Sky, Keystone, Sun Valley, Deer Valley.

“Let’s face it, with today’s “hall of mirrors” economy, massive public and private debt, and an ever expanding Federal Reserve balance sheet, serious inflation is expected by many. We are probably already seeing it despite what the government says. It feels real to me. They keep changing the CPI calculations to keep us confused. There is good reason to doubt any “numbers” today. And some will argue that the stock market and real estate values aren’t going up, it’s that our dollars are worth less. And if you look at the Fed’s own chart of the declining velocity of money, there is also argument for disinflation.

But I have no doubt the threat of inflation has driven many real estate acquisitions in Mammoth in the past few years. People with discretionary cash (and stock market profits) are looking for real assets to protect against inflation. There really are property owners in Mammoth who simply have cash “parked” in a piece of local real estate. And oftentimes high-end real estate. It is one way they hedge against possible inflation. And they know they have a place to spend New Year’s (if the snow is good). They also know they have a place to escape to if “something” ever happens around home. 

The folks in charge think that because steak has become too expensive that I am fine eating soy-burger. They think that is perfectly acceptable and does not impact the quality of my life, and does not represent inflation. But substitution effect does help Mammoth in many ways. If the cost of vacationing goes up, vacationers look for more affordable alternatives. Mammoth can do well in this regard (it has in the past). Rather than fly to the Rockies to ski, they drive to Mammoth instead. Rather than drive the motorhome to Canada, they can rent a condo in Mammoth. While Mammoth isn’t a cheap place to vacation, it can be done intelligently and frugally. Mammoth condos with full kitchens and the myriad of online rental opportunities makes it even easier.”

*Based on the timeout.com stats from the Dec. 31 story, sure seems like Mammoth is pricing itself out as an affordable alternative. 

Finally, Paul and I shared a general skepticism about the amount of money the Town has and is pouring into marketing. From the Labor Day issue 2019:

Some months ago (March 9, 2019 to be exact) The Sheet published a graph and data showing the marketing dollars spent and the TOT collected in the past 20 years (and my brain can go back at least 30 years on this subject—anybody remember Ralph McMullen?). Evidenced in the graph and data, there is little (if any) true return on investment on the extraordinary marketing expenditures of the last 10 years. My business professors warned against working beyond the law of diminishing returns. The Town fathers seem almost enamored with it.

But The Sheet left out a couple of critical data points in their analysis. One is inflation, and the other is the population growth of California. I bought a brand new 4 bedroom / 2.5 bath, 3-car garage home from John Hooper 20 years ago for $330,000. It would cost three times that today. A premium four wheel drive truck has more than doubled in that time. And California has grown by more that 10 million people in the past 20 years (an approx. 33% increase). Do any of them come to Mammoth? Of course they do, they get bombarded with Mammoth marketing everywhere they go. And half the people in SoCal have some sort of Mammoth sticker on the back of their car.

So while the TOT numbers look great, in actuality they have simply kept pace with the societal trend lines including inflation and population growth. The maturation of the resort as a whole hasn’t hurt either. If you put Mammoth Mountain’s revenue numbers on the same graph you would see a similar trajectory. The Town marketers might argue they helped this, but MMSA was pulling down massive skier visits long before the Town incorporated and had a marketing budget.  

But what has helped facilitate all of this the past ten years are all of the local condo owners who have upgraded their properties and made Mammoth’s guests feel comfortable; like staying at someone’s mountain home. The Ski Area’s consultants Hart Howerton reminded us a few years ago that we are ~1,000 transient beds short in this community. How many new “hot beds” have been developed the past 10-12 years? Almost none. Even the newest and possibly the nicest hospitality facility in Mammoth, the Westin Monache, is undergoing a major and costly “refresh.” 

Marketing is one thing, providing quality accommodations is another. The newest generation of STR property owners have simply supplied the guest demand.

And finally, from Thanksgiving 2014: 

Twenty plus years ago I wrote a column where I quoted the line “We are looking for something that has already found us.” It was true then, and it is true now. Our corporate masters will continue to drive for profits any way they can. The environmentalists and government officials, and Mother Nature, will push back. In the middle is a wonderful balance. Unfortunately, we rarely recognize it for what it is. Maybe more geotourists and great micro brews will help us see more clearly. We need to be thankful and appreciative of what we have. The “next” thing isn’t our salvation.

Paul Oster passed away on December 21, 2025 in Orange County California, surrounded by his family, after a brief illness. He is survived by his mother Mary Lou Oster, brother Joseph Oster, sister Monica Havert and four nephews – Matthew Oster, Andrew Oster, Thomas Havert and Daniel Havert.

– Lunch