Potential buyers checking out Heritage Plantation

CRESTVIEW, FL — The golfers are gone from Heritage Plantation, but maintenance on the course continues.

In late March, Steve Riggs decided to stop development at Heritage Plantation, a 1,000-acre, upscale residential and golf development 10 miles north of Crestview.

Estimating his loss at $6.5 million, Riggs turned the entire project over to creditor BB&T bank, headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C.

“Interested parties have been on site,” Riggs said recently. “Some people are interested in the golf course and some are interested in the whole project.

“I can’t tell you what the asking price is,” he added, “but the way it works is a written offer needs to be made and then the bank decides whether it wants to pursue that or not.”

The assessed value of the land is $9.2 million, according to Keith Hilton from the Oklaloosa County Property Appraiser’s Office.

Landscape maintenance continues, but just who is doing the work and how much it costs has not yet been verified. Officials with BB&T did not respond to requests for information.

But Keith Davenport of Brewton Country Club in Alabama estimated the annual upkeep for a course such as Heritage Plantation could range from a “low end” of $450,000 to $1 million or more. “It depends on the expectations,” Davenport said.

Heritage Plantation’s plans called for as many as 780 upscale homes in a gated community, with at least 25-foot setbacks. Homes ranged from 1,727 square feet starting at $359,000 to 3,851 square feet starting at $693,400.
But only 57 of the 297 sites in the first two phases were sold.

“I would have been OK with 20 to 25 lots a year,” Riggs said earlier this year. “But I think we sold one in all of 2008.”

Heritage Plantation’s semi-private, par 72 golf course can play as short as 5,600 yards or as long as 7,328 yards. The course is closed and 32 employees have lost their jobs, including Chief Operating Officer Sterling Riggs, Steve Riggs said.

Golf Digest’s January issue ranked Heritage Plantation the fifth-best new public golf course in America and the No. 1 new public course in Florida.

But there never were enough positive numbers for Riggs and his Southeastern Consulting and Development Co. So he decided “assigning the debt” to BB&T was the way to go. It involves neither foreclosure nor bankruptcy.