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Northland Properties owns and operates hotels, restaurants, resorts, and the Dallas Stars NHL hockey team.
Northland Properties is a Canadian family-owned company that runs hotels, restaurants, resorts, and a professional hockey team. If you live in western Canada, you have almost certainly slept in one of its beds or eaten in one of its restaurants without realizing the same family owns both.
The hotels are the biggest part of the story. Northland owns and operates the Sandman Hotel Group, a chain of mid-priced hotels across Canada and into the United States and Europe, along with the upscale Sutton Place hotels and the budget-friendly Sandman Suites. On the restaurant side, it owns chains like Denny's Canada, Moxies, Chop Steakhouse, and Shark Club, so a single company is collecting money from both the room and the plate. It also runs the Revelstoke Mountain Resort and the Grouse Mountain ski area in British Columbia, which means lift tickets and ski rentals flow into the same pot. The flashiest piece is the Dallas Stars, the NHL hockey team Northland bought in 2011. Owning a sports team is a strange business: the team itself rarely makes much money, but it gives the owner a famous public face, and the arena and surrounding real estate can be worth far more than the hockey. That mix of steady hotel cash flow and a trophy asset is unusual for a private company, and it shows how the family thinks — reinvest in things they can control and keep for the long haul.
Northland was started by Bob Gaglardi, who got into the hotel business in the 1960s and built it into one of Canada's largest private hospitality companies. His son Tom now runs it, and the family has kept it private rather than selling shares to the public. That privacy means it can make long-term bets — buying resorts, expanding the Sandman brand, and holding the hockey team — without answering to Wall Street every quarter. The trade-off is that it is harder to see exactly how much money the empire makes, which is common for private companies. Still, the formula is clear: fill hotel rooms, feed the guests, and let the sports and resort pieces add glamour and real estate value on top.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026