A more than five-month run-up in the price of Maui Land &Pineapple Co. stock got interrupted Thursday by a big sell-off that sent shares tumbling 30 percent.

MLP shares fell from $27.35 Wednesday to $19.20 Thursday. On Friday the company’s stock price edged back up less than 1 percent to $20.05.

Despite the drop, shares of Maui Land stock are still up 179 percent from $7.20 at the end of last year.

There were no major developments announced by the Kapalua-based company since the surge began building in February, other than routine financial reports issued in February and April.

As a practice, Maui Land does not comment on trading activity in its publicly traded stock.

The biggest holder of Maui Land stock is Steve Case, a Hawaii-born billionaire who founded AOL and bought a 41 percent stake in the company in 1999. Since then Case’s stake has increased to about 63 percent.

Generally, Maui Land has been selling real estate assets and reducing liabilities in recent years as part of an effort to reverse huge financial losses in 2008 and 2009 that contributed to its stock falling from a peak above $40 a share in 2005.

As of April the company had whittled down its debt to $1.2 million from $137 million in 2008, and more property sales including 630 acres of Upcountry farmland are still planned. Maui Land owns about 23,000 acres on the Valley Isle.

Thursday’s stock price drop was driven by extraordinary trading activity. Investors traded nearly 1.4 million shares that day. That compared with a daily range of 41,490 to 415,271 shares earlier this month, and more typical volumes of a few hundred or a few thousand shares before the run-up began in February.