May Motor buys Putt Putt Golf site

South Campbell location puts dealership in heavy automotive dealer strip

by Jeremy Elwood

SBJ Reporter

jelwood@sbj.net

Michael May, owner of May Motor Co. in Springeld, hopes to hit a hole-in-one with a new location.

On Oct. 26, May acquired 1.42 acres at 3240 S. Campbell Ave., formerly the site of Putt-Putt Golf & Games, for about $900,000. The new lot will replace the current May Motor location, 925 S. Glenstone Ave. May hopes to be up and running in the new location, weather permitting, by the end of January 2005.

Putt-Putt owner Judi Powell, who declined to comment on the sale, closed the miniature golf course after 31 years in operation. Bill Beall brokered the transaction.

May said that general South Campbell area known as auto dealer row with all the car lots doing business there has been in his sights for quite a while. May Motor will join 14 car dealers in a 15-block span along Campbell, between Primrose Avenue and Wayland Street.

Don Wessel Oldsmobile Honda was one of the rst car dealerships to open in the area 26 years ago. Wessel said he welcomes the new business.

"They sell only used cars, so they won't really affect us that much," he said. "But we welcome the new trafc. We were really out in the country when we moved here. Campbell was two lanes when we moved here in 1978. People stood there and said My God, you're out in the country. You've got to be where the people are.' But we said Just give it time, and they'll get here.'"

May Motor will be nestled between Cars Across America, the most recent to set up shop there having opened in March, and The Auto Shoppe.

John Hansen, The Auto Shoppe's general manager, said the pre-owned car sales company is not overly worried about the new competition.

"If there were something you could do to change it I'm sure it wouldn't be rst on your agenda to go get more car dealers and put them here, but you've just got to deal with it," Hansen said. "Our attitude is that it brings more people in to our dealership. Our advertising dollars go quite a way because we have 50,000 people cross in front of us every day. So the new place building next to us is just going to bring in more people."

May's new lot will end up being a $1.3 million to $1.4 million investment, including the cost of clearing the lot and eventually building a new showroom, which won't happen for about 18 months. A modular ofce will be used in the interim.

May said getting that prime location was not easy.

"Getting a piece of property that's actually zoned (highway commercial) is kind of difcult," May said. "Even though there are car lots up and down the street, they're not all zoned HC, and you have to have that zoning to be able to move a car lot in there (now). We knew that the Putt-Putt had the HC zoning."

The 62,000-square-foot lot is about double the size of May Motor Co.'s current lot, a fact not lost on the owner.

"We sometimes have 75 to 80 cars, but you can really only put about 65 on the (current) lot properly, and that's really squeezing it pretty tight," May said. "Out there, I think we should be able to stock 100 or more pretty easily. We've been cramped here for several years, and Springeld has been very good to us it seems like our customer base is growing year after year and we just need room for more automobiles."

May said that the process of opening a car lot is not as simple as it was when his current location was turned into a car lot in 1973.

"Back then you bulldozed the service station, pulled the tanks out of the ground, asphalted and went on," he said. "And you could take the asphalt right up to the street. Now you've got to have a surrounding green space area, so actually part of the lot that's paved now won't be. We'll have to literally put in the shrubs and canopy trees, there has to be 10 feet of green space all the way around, and it has to be 20 percent overall green space."