Members buy Ventana golf club

By Becky Pallack

ARIZONA DAILY STAR  

Members of Ventana Canyon Golf and Racquet Club have purchased the Catalina Foothills resort and golf course for a bargain.

Ventana Canyon Alliance LLC paid $15.5 million for the facility, which cost $15 million to build in 1983 and last sold for $28.3 million in 1996, according to Star archives and the Pima County Recorder's Office.

The purchase includes the club's resort, called The Lodge at Ventana Canyon, which includes 50 guest rooms. Loews Ventana Canyon Resort is separately owned by Loews Hotels and was not part of the sale.

Ventana Canyon Golf and Racquet Club is at 6200 N. Club House Lane, north of East Sunrise Drive off North Kolb Road. It is one of the best-known clubs in Tucson.

Currently, it has about 800 members. But it wasn't immediately known how many bought shares in the club, or for how much.

Ventana Canyon Alliance has been incorporated since June, according to the Arizona Corporation Commission.

Alliance chairman Gerard D'Huy and board member Jerold McCoy said they couldn't comment on the acquisition for at least another week, pending an official joint statement with the seller, Dallas-based Wyndham International.

The club isn't the first to be owned by its members. Tucson Country Club, for example, always has been member-owned since 1946.

Bruce Greenberg, a local real estate appraiser, said the members jumped on a great opportunity to buy cheap from a distressed seller. Wyndham owned the property under the business name PAH Ventana Canyon.

The sale price of Ventana Canyon Golf and Racquet Club is indicative of the decline in values of many golf course properties across the country in recent years.

Local appraisers and golf course owners disagree about the cause of depreciating values. Some say resort-goers have been staying closer to home during the war. Others say there are too many luxury resorts to sustain high values.

"The golf market got overbuilt, especially the luxury side of the marketplace," said Jim Bradley, a commercial real estate appraiser and president of KB Real Estate Appraisals Inc. in Tucson.

IRI Golf Group's Arizona National Golf Club saw a 42 percent depreciation over about four years. The club sold for $13 million in 1998 and then for just $7.5 million in 2002, IRI Chairman and CEO Jeff Silverstein said.

Purchase prices have been low because courses sell for the number of rounds played on them. Since 2001, travel-related rounds of golf have been down significantly in Arizona, Silverstein said, which drives down sales and property values.

This is the fifth time Ventana Canyon Golf and Racquet Club has changed hands since it was built 20 years ago. The first owner was Ventana Canyon Associates, a limited partnership between Tucson builder William A. Estes Jr. and Houston-based Kindred Watts, a recreational facilities developer.

In 1992, Estes defaulted on a $20 million loan for the property. The lender, Phoenix-based Greyhound Real Estate Finance Co., was the only bidder on the property when it was auctioned in 1993. Greyhound, which later changed its name to the Finova Group, paid $18 million, according to Star archives.

Finova hired Phoenix-based Carefree Resorts to manage the club. Carefree then bought it for $28.9 million in 1995 and spent $4.5 million in renovations.

In 1996, Carefree sold all of its properties to Dallas-based Patriot American Hospitality Inc., a real estate investment trust. The Ventana Canyon sale was valued at $28.3 million, according to Star archives.

Struggling under its debt load, Patriot American merged with its hotel chain, Wyndham International, that same year. Wyndham has been selling off properties to pay its debts, which now total $2.7 billion, according to the company's third-quarter report.