Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of business history features. To suggest future Fifth Monday articles, please contact Gwen Moritz at gmoritz@abpg.com.
Hot Springs Village is that rare, enviable 50-year-old: mature and established, but as hot as ever.
At 26,000 acres, it’s the largest gated community in North America, with a golf course, lake or hiking trail practically a stone’s throw from any spot within those gates.
The private village, brainchild of pioneering developer John Cooper Sr., was the third of Cooper Communities’ celebrated retirement and recreation meccas in the state, behind Cherokee Village and Bella Vista in the Ozarks. The early Cooper projects helped cement the retirement community industry as a postwar linchpin of Arkansas’ economy.
Cooper, a West Memphis lawyer and businessman, had “a profound impact on Arkansas,” Wayne Dowdy writes in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.
The older Americans who flocked to Cherokee Village and its successors, including Hot Springs Village, helped transform the state “into one of the most innovative and popular retirement destinations in the United States,” Dowdy wrote.
Hot Springs Village celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, to the sounds of fireworks, hammers and saws. With only about 70 existing homes available in a stock of 9,000, new construction is booming at a pace unseen for a decade.
“The housing market is extremely strong,” said Stephanie Heffer, programs and operations director for the village’s Property Owners Association. “Right now we have fewer houses for sale on the market than we’ve had in probably 40 years. Honestly, we have maybe less than 70 right now on the market, when a few years ago we had 500.”
With the COVID pandemic pushing city dwellers to consider a more roomy, natural lifestyle, Hot Springs Village expects to grow further in 2021, and plans are afoot for a midsize hotel and modest convention space on the east side.
Cooper’s 3rd Community
“We were the third master-plan community by the Cooper family,” said Kevin Sexton, the POA’s director of tourism and community affairs, describing the string of postwar developments that offered retirees and families homes and amenities nestled in the hills and forests of The Natural State.
“We have homes that cost $100,000 up to $1 million or $2 million. So, being 50 years old, we have a wide range of options for living in a big private community on just about any budget.” The village rivals San Francisco in land area, “and it’s sprawling,” Heffer said. “There really is something for everyone.”
Those somethings include 8,900 single-family homes; 171 holes of golf on eight Property Owners Association courses and the private Diamante club; 11 lakes with three swimming beaches and two full-service marinas; a 13-court tennis center, including coveted clay courts; indoor and outdoor pools; fitness and performing arts centers; and 30 miles of hiking trails.
And just as it was in the beginning, a major job for the POA is getting the word out about all those amenities, not least pickleball, a growing craze for the fit geriatric set.
(If you’re unfamiliar with the tennis-like sport, imagine pairs of mobile seniors wielding paddles and swatting a perforated ball over a low net, hooting with each new volley.)
From its birth in 1970, the village drew a warm welcome from nearby Hot Springs, which had suffered through a downturn in gambling-based tourism in the 1960s and was grateful for the economic bump.
While Hot Springs Village won over locals with plentiful jobs building roads, homes and infrastructure, Cooper’s marketers wrangled strangers with 18 million pieces of promotional mail each year. Visitors got a free stay to sample the lifestyle in exchange for a rather hard pitch, Arkansas journalist Rex Nelson recalled in his Southern Fried blog in 2015.
Nelson compared the early sales approach to “something out of the David Mamet play ‘Glengarry Glen Ross.’ ”
Male high school teachers spent their summers as Hot Springs Village salesmen, he wrote, adding that the “good ones could earn more money in three months of selling lots than they had earned in nine months of teaching.”
De Soto Arrives
Most place names in the village are Spanish, a nod to persistent tales that the 16th-century Castilian conquistador Hernando de Soto visited the area. The first big attraction was named for the explorer, DeSoto Golf Course, whose opening caused a stir in September 1972.
Designed by Cooper’s longtime partner, the golf architects Ault, Clark & Associates of Marshall, Virginia, the course was christened by Arkansas-born entertainer Glen Campbell, who hit the first tee shot. The singer and guitarist, finishing up a three-year TV variety show with CBS, talked up the 19th Hole clubhouse, and Lee Trevino added more star power with a pro tutorial for eager fans later that month.
The village’s next course, Cortez, debuted with its famed mountain views on No. 17 in 1974, followed by the Coronado course and the Casa Coronado Restaurant in 1982. Residents seized on golf as the development’s biggest draw, and they never let go, Sexton said. “Next would be the lakes, tennis and pickleball,” he said. “But it was golf from the beginning, and it still is.”
A fourth course, Balboa, arrived in 1987 with a 21,000-SF clubhouse, and Arkansas’ own long-drive champion, John Daly, opened the Ponce de Leon Golf Course in 1991. It was a bargain at a construction cost of just $3.3 million, thanks in large part to the POA’s own golf course construction staff, contemporary reports said. The Magellan course came along in 1996, the same year as the crown jewel, Diamante.
A private country club, Diamante was once ranked as Arkansas’ best golf course four straight years by Golf Digest. Operated for a time by ClubCorp USA of Dallas, more recently it was bought by members and is now managed by KemperSports of Northbrook, Illinois. The village’s eighth course, the $5.6 million Isabella, made its debut in 2000. Four years later, the Granada course opened at a cost of $5.4 million.
The lure of the links is so strong that some golfers buy lots in the village just to get POA rates for playing the courses, Sexton said.
But don’t assume Hot Springs Village is only for retired duffers, said Paul Sage, who has updated Cooper’s original million-mailer blitz for the digital age. Sage is the POA’s marketing manager. “We’re not age-restricted, and we have many families with children living here,” Sage said. The children go to two school districts, Jessieville and Fountain Lake.
The village’s own baby pictures — early promotional shots — show family outings, including boating, water-skiing and sand-castle building on the lakeside. Mottoes on early pamphlets included “Hot Springs Village … Where Happiness Is,” and “Clean and Green Arkansas Country.”
Before his career tucking communities into the mountains, John Cooper Sr. was a lawyer and businessman from the flat cotton lands of West Memphis. On vacations with his family to north Arkansas, the highlands enchanted him, and he formed an idea.
After setting up the Cherokee Village Development Co. in 1953, he followed a year later with Cooper Land Development. The company built Cherokee Village, Bella Vista and Hot Springs Village with a business plan that eventually turned the completed communities over to their respective property owners associations.
The company is no longer associated with those early projects, but it is involved in current operations at the Creekmoor development in Raymore, Missouri, and at Sienna Lake, off Crystal Valley Road in far southwest Little Rock.
Seller’s Market
While golf has declined in popularity recently, with retiring baby boomers tending toward more urban destinations than their parents preferred, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed many minds, reviving a more remote, outdoorsy ideal.
“With the pandemic, people are looking for options, and our amenities, combined with low property taxes and low housing costs, make living in this private gated community a bargain, so we’re able to attract people from all over,” Sexton said. Most residents are full time, Heffer said; others spend their summers in Michigan or Illinois, for example, but winter in Arkansas.
The vast majority of homes are single-family dwellings. The village has some townhouses “but no apartment complexes or anything like that,” Heffer said. “We have a mix of businesses inside the village and then right outside our gate. Basically, we have all the needs you would want, and we’re close to Benton and Bryant as well as Hot Springs.”
Renaissance Homes Inc. of North Little Rock is leading the construction boom, along with Carriage Custom Homes Inc. of Hot Springs and JM Allen Construction, a subsidiary of Allen Land Co. of Hot Springs Village, Heffer said.
Pat Bollier, who has sold real estate in the village for 14 years, said the market was more explosive than she’s ever seen it. “There are all kinds of reasons, from low current interest rates to wanting to get to a more rural environment, realizing that you don’t have to work in downtown New York or Dallas or wherever,” said Bollier, an agent with RE/MAX of Hot Springs Village. “You can work wherever you can get a good internet connection. And the pandemic has people looking to go rural. We’re seeing that all over the country.”
It’s a seller’s market, with demand far outstripping availability and builders moving quickly to finish hew homes. “The problem is we have people that are moving here and we don’t have enough new construction for their time frames. They need something sooner than it can be completed.”
The village is not for everyone, Bollier conceded. “If you want a lot of nightlife, or the ability to dine out late and that sort of thing, it’s not for you.”
Cooper Looks South
After John Cooper Sr.’s initial successes at Cherokee Village and Bella Vista, he was approached separately in the late 1960s by two major figures in southwest Arkansas, state Sen. Eugene “Bud” Canada of Hot Springs and Dierks Coal & Lumber Co. President Peter D. Joers.
Canada, who served as either a lawmaker or as county sheriff from 1959 until 2000, pitched an idea for a development similar to Bella Vista or Cherokee Village in the Ouachita Mountains. Joers had land he thought would be suitable, about 15 rugged miles north of Hot Springs.
After viewing the region from an airplane, Cooper bought 20,000 acres of forests, streams and lakes from Joers’ Dierks Forests Inc. He announced his plans for the development in January 1970, and by June 1, Hot Springs Village was open.
Under New Management
According to the Encyclopedia, Cooper hoped “to create a peaceful retirement community in a natural setting that would offer all modern-day conveniences without the hassle of living in an urbanized city.”
Unlike Cherokee Village and Bella Vista, which now has about 30,000 residents as an incorporated city, Hot Springs Village was gated “in order to provide security for its residents and as an experiment” to see if homes in a gated community would sell better, the Encyclopedia said.
The village also has its own private police force.
The population, just short of 2,100 in 1980, now tops 14,000. The POA, including members who have lots, numbers about 30,000, officials said. The private development is governed by a newly elected board and a new general manager, Charles King, named in June. The board unanimously chose King, previously managing director of lodging operations at Snowbird resort in Utah and a veteran of resort management in Arizona, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas.
King’s $200,000 salary was reported in a small item in the local weekly newspaper, the playfully named Hot Springs Village Voice.
With the new leadership, the village is looking forward and continuing to offer “discovery packages” to potential real estate customers, most often a stay at a village residence or its RV park, complete with restaurant dining, golf or other pastimes.
“We’ve embarked on a pretty heavy marketing campaign over the past couple of years, and it has performed really well for us,” Heffer said. “We’re seeing great success with it.”
Sexton said Hot Springs Village is the only community in Arkansas still offering such extensive packages, calling them “an avenue to allow people to come in and just let the village showcase itself. We’re seeing good conversion rates, because for us, it’s just about getting people here and letting them see how beautiful this place is.”
Anything else, a reporter asked?
Heffer was ready.
“Here’s to another great 50 years!”