By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter
Darrell Pardue never spreads gossip.
“I normally don’t repeat anything I hear over here,” said the proprietor of Rising Fawn Hardware, interviewed last week at his store. “I listen, but I don’t ever say.”
Yet somehow, despite Darrell’s tightly sealed lips, his store on Highway 11 has become the place to go in south Dade for those seeking knowledge. If a goat wanders into your yard, call Darrell and he’ll tell you who has lost one. Finishing your supper at the Depot Diner, glance across the road at the hardware store and you’ll witness a group of citizens gathered outside, mostly male and mostly wearing overalls, engaging patriotically in the free and unfettered exchange of information so vital to Western-style democracy.
It was, therefore, to Darrell that the Sentinel posed the question: What is happening in Johnson’s Crook? Why was the sign that said The Preserve gone, replaced with one that said Wild Moon Ranch and Resort?
Darrell wasn’t sure. The place was under new management, he thought. “I don’t know what it’s going to be,” he said. “Is it going to be a development? Is it going to be a recreation?”
“Water park,” a man leaning on the counter answered with quiet assurance – and with, as it happened, no basis in reality whatsoever.
There’s a reason Darrell doesn’t repeat everything he hears at the store.
For those who, unaccountably, don’t get to Rising Fawn often, Johnson’s Crook is a bowl-shaped cove where Lookout Mountain turns sharply to the east. Scenic, wooded and peppered with cave entrances, the Crook is bisected by Newsome Gap Road, a county road unpaved for much of its path up the mountain, and historically uninhabited.
The Southern Group, headed by Marion (Tenn.) County-based developer Thomas Dobson, his son, Josh, and son-in-law, Travis Shields, bought the Crook in 2006 after unsuccessful attempts in the 1990s by another company to develop it, and after equally futile efforts by conservation and caver groups to win it federal or state protection. The Dobsons planned a luxury second-home community called The Preserve at Rising Fawn, and began selling lots.
Work proceeded briskly. The Southern Group’s Travis Shields reported on progress at Dade County Commission meetings, and an eminently visible equestrian center – 55,000 square feet – sprang up at the development’s entrance.
Then, this year, things changed. Though the Southern Group stopped showing up at Commission meetings, it suddenly had a new and disturbing presence at the county courthouse – a stack of liens on unsold lots for $300,000 in unpaid real estate taxes, penalties and interest.
What had gone wrong? “Well, when they had the big stock market drop, everything slowed down with it then,” opined Darrell at the hardware store.
But Josh Dobson, 31, interviewed last week at the equestrian center, says the economic downturn did not in fact seem to affect the family business much – at first. “You read the papers, you watch the news, you understand what the market’s doing, but we had been almost immune to the market,” he said. “When the banks started changing and the policies started changing, we kept going pretty good.”
But the Preserve was not, after all, to escape the crash unscathed, as the Dobsons learned last fall. “We ran a huge marketing campaign down in Atlanta and also over in Birmingham, and normally, spending those kinds of funds and that kind of effort, we would have been just bombarded with clients coming up to the area,” said Dobson.
They were not.
The lukewarm results of the blitz forced the company to stop and regroup, said Dobson. “We really needed to take a deep breath here and see how to progress,” he said.
Then the Dobsons heard a presentation by CW Craig Associates, marketing and development consultants out of Tampa, Fla. Impressed, they invited the consultants to visit in October, things clicked, and by February CW Craig had taken over practical management of the Preserve, rebranding it Wild Moon Ranch and Resort.
“I contend that everything good happens under a wild moon,” says eponymous CEO C.W. Craig, who coined the name for the way the Crook lights up under a full moon.
Craig, 58, claims among his past accomplishments consulting gigs with Marriott and Disney. Keren Davies, 32, the other half of the team, is chief operating officer and, incidentally, Craig’s wife. Their job is, as Craig puts it, “to go in and take a look at properties and determine what the highest and best use of that particular property is.”
What is the highest and best use of Johnson’s Crook? “We’re turning it into a resort,” said Craig.
Though building lots at the project are still selling – about five a month on average, to the tune of $175,000-250,000 – the team felt it prudent to expand into the leisure field as opposed to the pure luxury housing market. “The vacation industry as a whole has taken a hit, but it certainly hasn’t taken the hit that second home ownership has taken,” said Craig.
Therefore, the Southern/Craig partnership engaged American Resort Management to help book guests and oversee maintenance, and began encouraging lot owners to build homes suitable for participation in a rental program aimed at housing the transient vacationer – and, incidentally, at recouping the owner’s construction dollars.
Keren Davies explained the concept: The slowed economy had people putting off building plans, when for the development to work hammers needed to swing now. “That’s where we started repositioning last October, to become more of a resort environment so that these folks can go ahead and build that home, but now we can rent it for them,” she said.
Participating lot owners build their homes according to certain specifications – no indoor/outdoor carpet in the living room, say – which will make the properties attractive as rentals. Amenities have also been added to give vacationers something to do once they get there. In addition to the equestrian center, a wellness center and expanded clubhouse are also in the plans.
To what extent is the business model a reality? Wild Moon will not officially open until next May, but unofficially, says Davies, the resort began renting cabins six weeks ago and is up to about 35 percent occupancy on the weekends. Presently there are 28 rental units, about 15 of which are new construction, and they fetch from $85 to $350 a night depending on size and location. A few weeks ago, Volkswagen honchos booked the resort for their executive retreat. “It’s exceeded my expectations right now,” said Davies.
On the equestrian side, she said, the resort is already busy, with trail rides, lessons and rodeo-style events. There are about a dozen horses on site, with more available as needed on the Dobson family ranch. Cost to ride is $35 an hour including trail guide, or $15 per day after the first hour if you bring your own horse. To book, visitors may call (706) 462-2669 or visit the website at www.wildmoonresort.com.
But though Craig and Davies plan to start work on the new clubhouse and wellness center in August, and to break ground for 10 new rental-program cabins within the next few weeks, construction at Wild Moon is at a de facto standstill right now. Though 200-odd owners have bought 300-plus lots, the vast majority have yet to build anything at all.
Why? Josh Dobson insists that infrastructure is in place. “We’ve over delivered on our original promise,” he said.
But at the hardware store, Darrell has his doubts. “The water’s not done,” he points out.
Well. The Sentinel inquired.
Doug Anderton, general manager of the Dade County Water Authority, says Darrell is pretty much on the money. “They have definitely not tied on to our system,” he said.
Though a preexisting existing water line serves the bottom of the Crook, said Anderton, the Dobsons never began construction of a new line they planned to run up the mountain to supply lots at higher elevations, an expensive engineering feat they had earlier discussed with Anderton but one about which he has heard nothing for some six months.
Anderton says he doesn’t know if buyers were promised public water and fire protection when they signed on the dotted line, but: “I can’t imagine someone buying one of those lots that wasn’t given that promise,” he said. “I think I’d be getting a little worried if I had bought a lot down there.”
Whether buyers are worried or not is an open question. The Sentinel’s solicitations for information from a cross-section of them yielded no replies, and neither have any approached Anderton with water questions, he says. Two real estate agents contacted by The Sentinel, one in Florida, one local, sounded distinctly worried, though both found it contrary to their interests to be quoted for this article.
But Wild Moon’s Keren Davies is not worried at all “Water’s not a problem anywhere,” she said.
Lot owners at the higher elevations who wish to build homes and/or participate in the rental scheme, she said, are free to drill individual wells or band together to share them. The resort is, in fact, thinking of adding public water to some areas, she said, but is no way legally obliged to do so. “It’s things that we are looking at, reviewing and opting to do, not things that we are required to do,” she emphasized.
Josh Dobson plans to address the Dade County Commission at its July 2 meeting on various issues including the water question and the tax liens gathering dust at the courthouse. More will be revealed then, he promises.
Meanwhile, he, Davies and Craig wish to remind Dade how much Wild Moon is bringing into the county – 30 jobs at the resort, sales tax on cabin rentals, and increased business for places like the Depot Diner and Rising Fawn Hardware. “Me being a local, that excites me tremendously, that we’re having this huge positive impact on this community,” said Dobson.
At the hardware store, though, the consensus is that Wild Moon hasn’t been around long enough yet to determine just what impact it will have. “They’re all new now,” points out Darrell. “I don’t know how it’s going to be. You can give me a month and I’ll tell you.”
And when Darrell speaks, the wise listen.