Three More Billionaires Emerge From Fastest-Growing Area in U.S.
Three More Billionaires Emerge From Fastest-Growing Area in U.S.
(Bloomberg) -- Six years ago when Jim Fraser started the Beatlemaniacs Club in Florida’s The Villages, 60 people showed up at the first get-together. Now, the club has 500 members, forming what could be the world’s largest seniors-only Beatles tribute ensemble.
The Beatlemaniacs, with all their quirks, are emblematic of the explosive growth of America’s biggest retirement community, where 55-and-up out-of-towners come to enjoy retirement and shed their self-consciousness; where the landscaping is impeccable, pools are plentiful and just about everything is accessible by golf cart.
Now, the development’s wild popularity -- 120,000 retirees live on some 20,000 acres -- is minting more billionaires. The wealth of the founding Morse family hit $3 billion this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s made billionaires of Mark Morse, Jennifer Parr and Tracy Mathews, children of father Gary Morse. He gave each a third of the holding company in 2006, eight years before he died.
The family has kept tight control on the development since it began in the early 1980s. It owns the title company, builds the homes and retail centers, controls the bank where you can get a mortgage, and even owns the local newspaper, a television channel and an AM radio station.
The Villages, situated between Orlando and Gainesville, is the country’s fastest growing metro area, according to the latest U.S. Census data. “It’s a humungous economic engine for jobs, for the local economy, for the tax base,” said Al Minner, city manager of Leesburg, which is in the process of selling nearly 2,000 acres of land to the Villages.
A few years ago there was talk that the growth might come to a halt. The reason: No more land. But that turned out to be premature. The Villages is now said to be raising $95 million in municipal bonds for at least 14,000 more homes on now-barren tracts of land bisected by Florida’s turnpike, according to local reports. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The long-term future of the business may lie in the hordes of restaurants, retail and healthcare providers that anchor their communities. The Villages had built 5.7 million square feet of commercial property as of August 2016, with a further 3.3 million square feet planned.
“Their economic model is controlling all those shopping centers where all those tens of thousands of people go and get their daily needs,” said Gregg Logan, an Orlando-based managing director with RCLCO Real Estate Advisors. “Long-term, all the commercial development that they have is probably even more profitable for them than the housing.”
Disney World
There were certainly plenty of loyal customers at a bustling outdoor happy hour event at one of The Villages’s “town squares” on a recent Thursday evening. An overwhelmingly white crowd -- more than 90 percent of Sumter County, which comprises The Villages, is Caucasian -- sipped on beverages as a cover band shuffled through “Brown Eyed Girl.”
Jim Thompson, a 65-year-old who lives part-time in Dayton, Ohio, bought a home here two years ago.
“We try to describe this place to our friends and you can’t,” he said, wearing sandals, with sunglasses hanging over his pastel-colored shirt and a tuft of white chest hair bursting from the collar. “It’s the tidiest place on Earth -- this and Disney World. Every blade of grass faces the same direction.”
--With assistance from Brendan Coffey
To contact the reporters on this story: Tom Metcalf in New York at tmetcalf7@bloomberg.net, Jonathan Levin in The Villages, Florida, at jlevin20@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, David Papadopoulos at papadopoulos@bloomberg.net, Larry Reibstein, Pierre Paulden
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