Company acquires Parks of Berkeley

MeadWestvaco spends $40M on 4,500-acre tract where homes are planned

MeadWestvaco Corp. owns hundreds of thousands of acres of South Carolina forestland, harvesting occasional sections for its paper and lumber operations.

But the Richmond, Va.-based packaging giant bought its latest wooded tract with an eye on capitalizing on future residential growth in Berkeley County.

On Tuesday, the company announced the $40 million purchase of the Parks of Berkeley site, a 4,500-acre tract that is approved for more than 13,000 homes.

The sale frees up the previous owner to focus on a separate development that has been approved for nearly 6,000 homes a few miles away.

Ken Seeger, president of MeadWestvaco's community development and land-management group, said the purchase gives the paper company a prime tract that is "in the logical path of growth."

The company owned the site until 2005, but decided it was worth repurchasing it at a much higher price from Crescent Resources LLC. MeadWestvaco does not plan to make any major changes to the development plan already approved for the land.

"We didn't have a foothold in Berkeley County in terms of a premier location for development in the future over the next 20 years, and we felt that Parks of Berkeley would provide us that," Seeger said Tuesday.

MeadWestvaco hopes to break ground at the site in two years, after studying the land and conducting market research. It will likely take 20 years to complete.

The Parks of Berkeley tract is situated among other massive planned communities, such as Cane Bay and the Daniel Island Co.'s Carnes Crossroads project, which is expected to build its first homes early next year.

The site also is near the Wildcat tract, which is owned by Crescent Resources, the Parks of Berkeley's former owner. That 2,032-acre property has since gone through the county's planning process and could one day hold as many as 5,778 homes. Sixty-five acres are zoned for commercial development.

"The concept fits well with the plans for Cane Bay, Carnes Crossroads and The Parks at Berkeley," John Roach, Crescent's director of land investments, said Tuesday in a written statement.

Crescent Resources, an arm of power company Duke Energy, bought the land for The Parks of Berkeley from MeadWestvaco in March 2005. At that time, the paper giant was unloading property it no longer needed and was not interested getting back into the land development business.

When it was known as Westvaco Corp., the company was involved in the creation of Crowfield Plantation subdivision in Goose Creek, the Ashborough subdivision in Summerville and the commercial area along Trolley Road. It later got out of that business in the Charleston area.

But about a year and a half ago, it jumped back into the development game by announcing the proposed development of East Edisto, a 70,000-acre swath of land that stretches from Summerville to Ravenel along the Edisto River.

Plans for that project call for two industrial hubs, several village-like areas and thousands of homes.

MeadWestvaco owns about 390,000 acres of land throughout South Carolina.

The Parks of Berkeley site hasn't changed much physically under Crescent Resources' ownership.

Seeger said MeadWestvaco's familiarity with the land was advantageous in that it helped execute the sale quickly. The company had expressed interest in repurchasing the site throughout the last year. It was within the last 40 days that Crescent Resources agreed to sell.

But regaining control of the property was costly for MeadWestvaco. The $40 million sale price is nearly twice what Crescent Resources paid for the land in 2005, when the property changed hands for slightly more than $20.96 million, according to county land records.

Seeger said the higher value was fair, noting that the previous owner created a detailed master plan for the property that already is approved by the county.

"We feel that from the standpoint of our long-term strategic plan, it makes more sense to buy something that's already entitled at what we feel is a favorable price rather than find something else we might need to spend two to four years on before we can do something with it," he said.

Reach Katy Stech at 937-5549 or kstech@postandcourier.com.

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