'Beauty vies with location'
Gerald G. Barton, Chairman & CEO
LANDMARK had a single goal from the beginning. As a company, we did not intend to be the biggest, although we intended to be big. We did not expect to be the richest, although we expected to be rich. We had the simplest of goals -- we wanted to be the best.
LANDMARK's HISTORY dates to 1971, when we formed a company to focus on 'lifestyle' communities. I quickly realized that one way to build a sense of place was to build a golf course. In a properly developed community, you have to have a place to commune, and a golf course is perfect. The better the golf course, the better the sense of community.
First and foremost, you need the right site to succeed. The old real estate axiom was 'location, location, location.' Now it's 'beauty, beauty, beauty.' Then as now, Landmark's guiding principles are service and nature.
Our mandate is to seek out the prettiest sites available, ones that offer personal and financial safety as well as reasonable access. Unfortunately, as far as the U.S. is concerned, all the best sites have been taken. At the few excellent sites that do remain, the environmental constraints cannot be overcome. Therefore, Landmark has begun to seek opportunities overseas.
We have great faith in the Caribbean. Roughly half the golfers in the world are American, and for them, the Caribbean islands offer exceptional beauty, a care-free lifestyle and easy access, basically a four-hour flight from most major East Coast cities. In addition to our project at Apes Hill Club in Barbados, a spectacular community with a two-way view of the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, we're looking closely at Antigua, St. Lucia and Grenada as sites for future development.
Outside the U.S., the fastest-growing markets for second-home communities are found in Germany and Scandinavia. In a way, their situation parallels that of the post-World War II economic recovery and ensuing prosperity in the U.S., which gathered steam in the late 1950s and took off in the 1960s. People decided they'd rather be warm than cold. They'd rather be outside than inside. The East Coast crowd began moving to Florida, while folks in Chicago and other Midwest cities emigrated to Phoenix and later to Palm Springs.
The same atmosphere exists today in the European Union, which is larger and richer than the U.S. People of means are looking for a place in the sun, but at present, there are very few high-quality options on the Continent. Spain's Costa del Sol and Portugal's Algarve are chockablock with new developments, but high quality is scarce.
To succeed in this business, you need to be the most convenient, the cheapest or the best. There's a vacuum in Europe right now that we'd like to fill. We're looking in Spain, southwest France, Italy and Montenegro. The key for us is finding a good local partner, someone who is respected financially, culturally and socially.
What makes Landmark special is our passion for quality and our attention to detail at every step of construction and management. As a vertically integrated compa- ny, we control every phase of a given project. We're a 'cradle-to-grave,' one-stop shop, and we limit ourselves to three projects per year.
Our bottom line is this:
We don't want to do anything that doesn't have a chance to be great.
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