By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

Josh Dobson doesn’t like the word “abandoned.”

 “To me that’s a definite wrong word,” said the young developer in a telephone interview last week. He was talking about the Cumberlands at Sewanee, the Southern Group’s luxury housing development in Marion County, Tenn.  

Southern Group consists of Dobson, 31, his father, Thomas, and his brother-in-law, Travis Shields. In Dade County, the company is currently developing Johnson’s Crook in Rising Fawn under the name Wild Moon, previously the Preserve.

Southern Group does not, in fact, seem to be doing much at the Cumberlands, a sprawling 6,000-plus-acre subdivision atop the Cumberland Plateau above South Pittsburg, Tenn., but the developers are in talks with the Marion County Planning Office about the project, according to Marion County Attorney Billy Gouger, and the younger Dobson says his company’s promise to run public water into the first mile of the project will be honored sooner or later. “That’s still in the plans,” he said.

But follow directions from a real estate company’s website to Long Island Overlook, a Southern Group project in Jackson County, Ala., and it’s difficult to describe what you see there without using the A-word at least once. 

At Long Island Overlook, gates hang open, grass grows up around columns, and lot-number signs are discolored from long exposure to the sun. Gravel roads crunch bleakly through recently clear-cut land, and you won’t see a soul after the second or third turn off Highway 71 out of Stevenson.

In Scottsboro, personnel at the Jackson County tax office say the Southern Group bought Long Island Overlook, a tract of land overlooking Lake Guntersville, in 2006 and sold about 10 parcels to out-of-state buyers. Construction began on two or three residences. 

Then stopped. No homes have ever been completed at the Overlook, they say. Sales ceased, and with nothing happening on the development itself, many of the parcels that did sell now face imminent foreclosure. Such was the case with the tract of land on the real estate company’s website, depicted in the photograph with this article, according to a real estate agent who declined to be identified for this article.

Alabama, said the agent, is a “buyer-beware” state, with few rules and regulations in place to protect investors or oblige sellers to deliver on promises. By contrast, Marion County, boasts planning regulations and performance bond requirements that may yet affect the future of the Cumberlands at Sewanee. In Dade, a performance bond ordinance is under consideration and may pass as early as September, but it cannot be applied retroactively to the Southern Group project nor to Sequatchie Pointe, the J.J. Detweiler project atop Sand Mountain whose spectacular failure engendered it. 

Josh Dobson, asked about the Overlook, agreed that things hadn’t moved that fast either there or at the Cumberlands. “For them to just sit out there is not good for us as developers and it’s not good for the people that bought in there, either,” he said. “It’s really something that we at Southern need to be more focused on. We still have a tremendous asset out there.”

He said that 40-50 lots had been sold at the Overlook – “I know it’s a lot more than 10. I know that for sure” – and admitted that the company had to some extent neglected the project in recent years since buying the Johnson’s Crook property and focusing on that. “We just got busy,” he said.

Anyway, he said, second-home developments always take longer than regular housing projects. “These mountain communities, they’re not like your typical subdivision in Trenton or something where you build five homes and then you look up and there’s another 30 or 50,” he said. 

And, he pointed out, in developments like these, buyers didn’t want another 30 or 50 houses around them to begin with. “The whole idea when you’re buying it is it doesn’t feel like you’re in the middle of Kimball,” he said.

What buyers do think they’re getting when they purchase at Long Island Overlook and the other Southern Group projects is an interesting question. If their concept of the developments comes from the Southern Group’s website, www.sreland.com, “the whole idea” may not line up that well with reality. 

On the website, Long Island Overlook is listed as having paved roads, underground utilities and public water. In recent months Southern Group has, in fact, begun work on laying water lines, and the Overlook could have public water within 13 months or so, but for the present the amenities listed simply do not exist. 

Asked for comment, Josh Dobson said marketing companies put together the website and he never went to it, himself. Buyers were given purchase agreements, he said, and made to sign off acknowledging a more realistic idea of what they were getting. “In real estate, your purchase and sales agreement is everything,” he said.

Dobson said that Southern Group would soon begin marketing more aggressively at the Overlook, and that meanwhile Wild Moon/the Preserve at Rising Fawn is going well, with construction of a wellness center and clubhouse due to begin as soon as final bids are in, and construction loans ready to close on several residences. Wild Moon continues to operate vigorously as an equestrian and rental resort, he said.  “One bright spot in this bad economy for us has been the rentals,” he said.