Sun News - The former Robber’s Roost golf course in North Myrtle Beach is up for sale again after the developers that shepherded through a master plan to reinvent the property fell victim to the economic downturn. The property’s original owners, Tiente Limited Partnership and Burgess Investments Group Family Limited Partnership, took back possession of the property after foreclosure late last year and are now actively marketing the roughly 100 acre property that has thousands of feet of frontage on U.S. 17. The property will likely sell as three separate pieces, though the owner would prefer to sell it all together, said Macon Lovelace, a broker for NAI Avant, who is marketing the property. "It’s just more likely that in today’s development environment that you have two different types of developers that go in there,” he said.
Lovelace said that the company has reached out to active mixed-use developers it has relationships with to tell them about the property. “We’re aware of a handful of tenants who are interested in being in the North Myrtle Beach market and were waiting for this type of location to become available,” he said. Given the current lagging economy, the development is likely to be completed in stages over time and be driven by tenant demand, Lovelace said. “Nobody is going to buy this on a speculative basis, as is with any raw land and developments occurring anywhere right now,” he said. Previous developers created a planned development district for the area and got all of the approvals from the planning commission and city council. That planned development district will now be the foundation for any future development. The city approved the plan in 2009, but the recession put the development on hold, leaving the former golf course overgrown. The development district divides the property into three specific sections: a town center, village shops and a residential community.
The goal was to create a walkable community and the town center would be a similar concept to The Market Common in Myrtle Beach, said Greg Duckworth, the founder of Environmental Concepts, LLC, which developed the plans. Duckworth is also a North Myrtle Beach city councilman. A lot of work went into studying traffic patterns and addressing the concerns and needs of the existing neighboring residential communities, Duckworth said. The town center is designed to have a movie theater, a large anchor retailer such as Kohl’s, and several smaller retail and restaurant spaces. There would be residential or office space above the stores. The town center, which is envisioned as a more urban area, would also have a central lawn area to be used for gatherings, concerts and other activities. It is one of the many green spaces in the development, which proposed several parks and planted buffer areas separating the commercial and residential areas. Nearly 20 percent of the development was slated to be kept as open space. The plan was for a few businesses right along U.S. 17 and several live-work townhomes in the town center area as well.
The village shops area would have a few stores along U.S. 17 and then a number of small shops, such as boutiques, gift stores, hair salons around a lake. The residential neighborhood was designed to have 164 single-family home lots that averaged 6,233 square feet. There would be a total 394 residential units in the three phases. “It has to be neighborhood friendly,” Duckworth said. “There is a lot of passion on all sides of this situation.” Pat Dowling, a spokesman for the City of North Myrtle Beach, said that plan in place is high quality and the city would like to stay close to its guidelines. Lovelace said that any potential buyer will know that they have to work within the zoning in place, but some changes will likely have to be made and would go through the traditional approval process. The existing plan may not be feasible in the current economy but any changes would have to conform to the planned development district and be in line with its character, he said.
The city will consider changes, as it has in other projects, on a case by case basis, Dowling said. In response to market conditions, the city has allowed developers to tweak plans to build different types of properties as long as they fit the character of the area. “This council has proven that if a quality alternative is presented they will act on it,” Dowling said, but added that they would want to make sure that it was a quality project and wouldn’t dilute the developer’s financial commitments to the city, including building new roads. A potential buyer for the property approached the city recently and wanted to buy a strip shopping center, Dowling said. The city said that requests to amend the planned development district to allow for it would be denied and that type development wouldn’t be allowed on the property, he said. “There are a lot of established neighborhoods in that area, a lot of them are around what used to be a golf course so we have to be careful about how we impact them,” he said. The former Robber’s Roost, despite any potential challenges, is an important project in a critical area in the city, Dowling said. “Ever since it was abandoned or ever since it became economically infeasible to accomplish, it’s just been a challenge to upkeep,” he said. “We would certainly like to see it developed in a quality manner.”
