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The Landings Community

The Landings is many things to many people — an award-winning destination community, the “Best Neighborhood” award-winning bedroom community for Savannah, and most of all a great place to call home. But instead of tooting our own horn, read Ideal Living magazine’s profile of the community to get a sense of our successful past and our bright future:

At a time when some planned developments are struggling to survive, others, owned and operated by Home (and Property) Owners and Associations (HOA), are maintaining a steady course. The Landings on Savannah’s Skidaway Island is a good “case study.”

The Landings was one of the first high-end “amenitized” communities, having been created by a division of a paper company in the 1970s. The developer had tremendous success due to the high-end golf and amenities, thousands of acres of wetlands and moss-draped oaks, and a location minutes from historic Savannah, the Savannah-Hilton Head airport, and Interstate 95.

By the time developer land was mostly sold in the 1990s, the residents had decisions to make. To maximize flexibility and control, 3 entities were transferred/purchased from the developer:

• The Landings Club, a private club owned by members (the majority of Landings residents are Club members, but Club membership is not required), which owns and manages six golf courses (by Arnold Palmer, Tom Fazio, Arthur Hills and Willard Byrd), with four clubhouse and restaurant facilities, 34 tennis courts, 5 pools and a 48,000 square foot wellness and fitness facility.
• The Landings Association, which owns and/or manages common grounds that include forty miles of walking and biking trails, two full service deep-water marinas that provide access to the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean, 150 lagoons, an athletic field, 2 playgrounds, an observation tower overlooking the marsh and river, and dog park. The Landings Association also wholly owns the third entity:
• The Landings Real Estate Company: we’ll discuss this in a moment.

Why is that structure important? Well, while profits in general are a good thing, long-term management of a community is not always consistent with driving short-term profits. Owners with “skin in the game” have that longer-term focus, so the community is managed differently. Both the Club’s and the Association’s financial stability stems from a strategy of remaining essentially debt-free, and being proactive with capital requirements has allowed for improvements to continue unabated. Few communities in this day and age would undertake significant community enhancements like those completed at The Landings in 2009 and 2010:

• a $7.5 million dollar renovation to Tom Fazio’s Deer Creek course, which just hosted the Georgia Amateur (and which will host a national USGA event in 2011).
• doubling the size of the wellness and fitness facility — an investment so popular with members that, for the first time, fitness center visits exceeded rounds of golf in the first half of 2010 (no small feat, with 6 great golf courses).
• Rebuilding docks, an observation tower and social facilities at one of the community’s marinas.

Members and/or owners have direct control over things beyond investment: they get a say in the direction of the community, how it is marketed, and how services are delivered. For example, The Club has recently hired senior operations executives from Ritz-Carlton and Greenbrier to refine the service levels in the restaurants and the golf courses, and additional investment has been made in a partnership with the Executive Women’s Golf Association (The Landings Club’s Director of Instruction is one of the leading female PGA and LPGA teaching professionals).

It is the association’s investment in owning the real estate company that is a key differentiator, and is perhaps the single biggest means of influencing property values. In 1997, Landings homeowners voted overwhelmingly to buy the real estate company from the developer - instead of out-sourcing to a franchise real estate company. They specifically wanted control over marketing, specifically to use the real estate company as a tool in marketing to maintain property values.

“Our business cards say we are a real estate sales company, but in reality we are primarily a marketing organization,” notes Landings Company President Bill Houghton. “Sales are obviously the driver of the funding — and we work hard to generate those sale — but it is the out-of-area marketing that helps to generate incremental buyers. We get a lot of buyers from Savannah professionals — we are the top community for local physicians and their families — but our amenity offerings are world-class, so we get buyers from all over.”

Generating buyers is a particularly crucial function in the current real estate climate, and The Landings is redoubling efforts to communicate the community’s salient advantages. That continued investment has helped — in the first 6 months of 2010 there were 85 closings in the community. The community’s investment in The Landings Company helped to make that possible.

An update: since the magazine’s Fall 2010 publication: homes sales increased by 38% in 2010 over 2009, and by another 29% in 2011 over 2010. For 300 years, folks have fallen in love with Savannah — and for 40 years, many have fallen in love with The Landings, too. World class amenities, big city conveniences, small town friendliness — it can only be The Landings on Savannah’s Skidaway Island.