Andy and Jan Ammons retain majority share of new company
Andy and Jan Ammons have sold part of their ownership in Heritage Golf Club to Traditional Golf Properties and formed a new corporation, The Heritage Property LLC, to manage the Heritage course, all part of a $3.7-million deal.
“This way we do not have to be involved in day-to-day operations,” Ammons said Tuesday, but he and his wife, Jan, own and control more stock in the new corporation than anyone else. Ammons is president of Ammons Development Group in Raleigh. Heritage Golf Club is an 18-hole semi-private course that threads through the middle of the subdivision Ammons created, Heritage Wake Forest.
And, he said, it will be the same familiar faces on the management staff. “Everybody was fired, everybody got rehired at the same salaries, the same jobs, but now they have better benefits in a larger organization, and it’s more of a professional organization.”
The longtime general manager, John Spiess, left recently to take a job with a larger golf course near Atlanta, and Ammons said it was a good time to make a change. As Ammons told Amanda Hoyle with the Triangle Business Journal in a July 29 article, “We decided that rather than hire a new general manager, we’d hire a new management firm. It’s hard to be a one-man band in the golf business and I’ve known these guys for years.”
Traditional Golf owns or manages about 19 golf properties in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Those in North Carolina are the semi-private Falls Village Golf Club in Durham, Preserve at Jordan Lake in Chapel Hill land Chapel Ridge in Pittsboro. Because of the change, members of Heritage Golf Club will have reciprocal privileges to play at all Traditional Golf clubs.
During the telephone conversation Tuesday, Ammons said he could not say more about the change when he and the Gazette editor spoke on July 18 than that he was refinancing the golf course. “We were in the middle of the deal. I wanted to tell my staff first and that hadn’t occurred yet.” He added that the change is better for the staff members involved, the club and the area.
Hoyle, he said, probably found about the deal when she checked real estate transfers in the Triangle area, which she does on a regular basis.
Heritage Golf Club opened in 2001, the first amenity in the future Heritage Wake Forest subdivision which has grown from an original 750 acres to over 2,000 and now extends into Rolesville. Ammons built the golf course and the major roads through the subdivision, about an $8 million investment, as he began planning and selling lots in distinct small communities. Heritage has won many local, state and national awards for its master plan, its landscape design, and the amenities – two swimming pool complexes, tennis courts, many neighborhood playgrounds, 100 acres of open space, a fishing pond with an observation deck, three school sites, and commercial business centers.
Jud Ammons, Andy’s father and a well-known, well-respected Raleigh developer, bought the 1,100 acres of the Marshall-Stroud Dairy – Emmitt Marshall and his son-in-law Phil Stroud – in 1986. With his sons Andy, David and Jeff, Jud Ammons spent weekends planting pine trees on the pastures and former corn fields. He tore down the barns and silos and emptied a smelly pond. The land lay fallow until the late 1990s when the town commissioners approved Andy Ammons’ plan for Heritage.
