Agents seek new life for Hollister property

A 110-acre property in Hollister once slated for a resort and water park is now on the market for $10 million. The property is among a handful of failed plans for much-hyped developments in the Branson area prior to the recession.

Courting developers
Coldwell Banker Vanguard commercial real estate agent Wally Nattinger is one of three listing agents for land next to the future home of Ozarks Technical Community College’s Table Rock campus. Local marina owners, the Gage family, and the owners of Wisconsin-based Wilderness Resorts in Wisconsin Dells, had big plans for the land before it was turned over to a cluster of banks.

Nattinger said the developers, via Hollister Interchange Development Co., spent $21 million on the property during early site development following a February 2008 groundbreaking. The owners planned to build a $250 million resort featuring a four-acre outdoor water park, a 75,000-square-foot indoor water park and 400 two-bedroom condos. Plans called for a mix of retail, eateries and hotels, including a Wyndham Garden Hotel, Cold Stone Creamery, a convenience store, a pharmacy, a multiplex cinema/bowling center and fast food restaurants.

Hollister Interchange Development Co. partners Justin Gage, James Gage and Jerry Crumpler joined brothers Pete and Pat Helland and Tom and Tim Lucke, founders of Wilderness Resorts, to develop the plan in Hollister, but it never took flight.

Nattinger said financing tied to the project fell through, and now the property is owned, in part, by Madison, Wis.-based BB Syndication Services Inc., which represents the interest of 29 community banks. Owner representative Eric Swanson of BB Syndication Services did not return calls for comment by press time.

Now, Nattinger has teamed with fellow Coldwell Banker agent Mark Patrick and Hannah Textor of Hannah Textor Brokerage LC to shop the property to prospective buyers.

“It was repossessed by the banks, and we began talking with them last month and finally got all of our marketing materials ready to go (on May 14),” Nattinger said, adding the property is being marketed through broker search Web sites Xceligent.com and LoopNet.com.

Nattinger said there has been land cleared and roadwork completed on the property, which he said has 3,750 feet of frontage along U.S. Highway 65 and Birch Street in Hollister. Businesses near the interchange include Lowe’s, KFC, Harter House, Dollar General and O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Gage’s Long Creek Marina LLC, which was operated by the Gage family, in June filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Missouri. David Schroeder, a Springfield attorney representing the marina company in court, said the Hollister property was not a part of the filing. Justin Gage could not be reached for comment by press time.

Hollister City Administrator Rick Ziegenfuss, who worked closely with HIDC during the planning process, said he thought scrutiny by lenders amid a tough economic environment handcuffed the project.

“I think the plans are still viable plans. It was an entertainment district, and it had a lot of very positive aspects to it. It was dependent on third-party financing in the 2007 and 2008 time period,” Ziegenfuss said. “It was a victim of the times.”

Branson dreams
The Wilderness Resorts park is not alone as a big-ticket Branson area development that never materialized.

In 2008, Highlandville-based Sanctuary Development Group LLC hired national firm Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services to sell Sanctuary on the Lake, a $225 million, 267-acre mixed-use resort development planned south of Hollister on State Highway 265.

Ziegenfuss said the development was purchased a year later by Gary Hall of Las Vegas-based Bentley Investments of Nevada LLC, and now is dubbed Talon Ridge. He said the first log cabin has been built, and a water tower and some infrastructure was put in place, but the pace of progress has been slow.

Empty, unfinished castle-like custom homes dot the south side of Highway 76 just east of Branson West in Indian Ridge Resort Community. Jim Shirato and Donald Snider, whose companies are involved in Indian Ridge, have said issues with financing were behind the inaction that has characterized the development for years. In March, Shirato and Snider were ordered by a federal judge to pay $215,000 and $100,000, respectively, for violations of the Clean Water Act.

Shirato, owner of Indian Ridge Resort Inc., and Snider, owner of Denver-based North Shore Investments LLC, broke ground in 2005 on the planned $1.6 billion, 850-acre development in Stone County. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency charged that between August 2006 and June 2009 the developers failed to abate, control or slow erosion from the construction site.

In November 2011, Shirato told Springfield Business Journal it had been difficult to comply with federal and state environmental regulations because the project’s funding was frozen in August 2008 after regulators shut down the development’s lead lender, Topeka, Kan.-based The Columbian Bank and Trust Co.

Further east on Highway 76, a 40-acre theme park sits unused aside from a church, which utilizes a theater on the outer edge of the property. Herschend Family Entertainment opened Celebration City on the Highway 76 strip in 2003, spending $40 million to revamp the former Branson USA theme park, which opened in 1999. The sister park to Silver Dollar City remained vacant throughout the recession, having been closed since the end of the 2008 season.

Lisa Rau, a spokeswoman for the Herschend company, said while the economic downturn was a factor in the close, company officials had been dissatisfied with the performance of the park long before the recession.

“We believed the theme lacked consistency,” Rau said of the nighttime theme park that walked visitors through multiple eras. “We just weren’t entirely enthralled with the way we had developed it.”

Rau said the property is not currently for sale, and Herschend Family Entertainment plans to further develop the theme park in the future. She said talks in the past have included the construction of a large aquarium, but there are no solid plans in place.

“There will be, some day, something beautiful and wonderful on that property, but (the company) is not at a point where it can proclaim what that would be,” Rau said.