New Saddlebrooke GM restyles development

In October, he brought in a new general manager to help him manage the growth and plan for the future.

“I couldn’t do it all by myself and had to have a little bit of help,” Lorance said. “Sales … weren’t at a level that I thought that they should be. I wear a lot of hats and felt that I needed professional help in the sales and marketing area.”

That help came in the form of David King, a master-planned community management veteran most recently from Florida.

That the two men met, however, is purely chance.

King was visiting Branson last September to meet with another developer for a similar job, and on his way back to Springfield and the airport, he stopped by to check out Saddlebrooke.

Lorance offered to take King on a quick tour, and within an hour, King said, he knew he wanted to go to work at Saddlebrooke.

“When we met, (Lorance) knew I was being recruited for another company,” King said. “We ended up spending (about) five hours together that first day, and he asked me ‘What would you change?’”

Among his suggestions that day were a new logo, which already has been changed under King’s guidance.

“The old logo was a piece of a sunset … and Saddlebrook was written … in a Western-type font, and I said it was hokey,” King said. “It looked like it should say ‘saloon.’”

Waterfalls and townhomes

A new logo, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the changes King is working to bring about.

Among them, he said, is a waterfall feature at the entrance of Saddlebrooke, which straddles U.S. Highway 65.

Working from an original design by Genterre of California, King and Lorance now are teaming up with local firm Fitzwater Design to update and fine-tune the waterfalls, which will be 16 feet high and up to 100 feet long on either side of the entrance. Completion of the waterfall feature is slated for July 1.

“We’re talking about 120,000 gallons (of water) a minute that’s flowing,” King said.

King also would like to add townhomes to the development.

The townhomes, he said, would be in a gated area within Saddlebrooke, where about 400 single-family lots already have been sold and about 40 homes already are finished and occupied, with construction under way on another 20.

“That will bring another market that (we’re) not tapping into,” King said.

Developer Lorance believes homeowners already vested in Saddlebrook would be open to the addition of townhomes

“Now, we’re not interested in time-shares or nightly rentals … but certainly townhomes or carriage homes or something of that nature has always been in our plans,” Lorance said.

King said Saddlebrook will likely start looking at architectural drawings for the townhomes by the end of the year.

Elsewhere in the development, King would like to change the existing covenants so that home-size minimums vary depending on where they’re located in Saddlebrooke. The current single-family square footage minimum is 1,800 square feet.

He also raised prices: Lot sizes vary, King said, but most are about three-quarters of an acre. Lot prices now start at about $56,000, up from $39,000 in 2003. The average lot price, he said, is about $78,000. Home prices, he said, start at $375,000.

‘A thriving community’

Lorance is the mayor of Saddlebrooke, which was incorporated as a Christian County village in August 2003 and is governed by a volunteer board of aldermen.

In terms of planned changes for the development, Lorance said he’s personally most excited about a new church, which will be attached to a community and fitness center. Lorance’s family has donated the land for the church, and King said design work will begin by the end of the year.

The new church will look historic, reminiscent of a little white country church on a hill, and its services will be nondenominational.

Bringing a house of worship to Saddlebrooke is something Lorance has thought about since the very beginning of the development.

“To be a thriving community, you should have a church,” he said. “My father and grandfather and my uncles were instrumental in building the church where I was baptized in the early 1950s, and I just feel very strongly that that’s going to be an integral part of Saddlebrooke as a community.”

The church will be open to the community – and not just Saddlebrooke families.

All of the changes, King said, are simply part of the job he was hired to do.

“I’m absolutely giving (Saddlebrooke) a total image change,” he said. “We’ve got to start thinking bigger.”