Sale of ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club in works
BOZEMAN – The exclusive Yellowstone Club south of Big Sky is for sale, and negotiations are under way with a Boston-based real estate and private equity firm, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The sale is likely to be completed in a couple of months, and the price will be between $400 million and $600 million, the newspaper reported Friday.
Owner Tim Blixseth said he believes the millionaires-only, gated community will continue to thrive under new ownership.
“The club will grow even at a greater pace than the past 10 years, and it should provide superb opportunity for local employment as well as subcontractor work,” he said Friday in an e-mail to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Blixseth and his estranged wife, Edra, are in negotiations with the Boston-based company Crossharbor Capital, and that Crossharbor’s managing partner, Samuel Byrne, is a longtime Yellowstone Club member.
In an e-mail to club members this week, Edra Blixseth said Byrne “is the current front-runner to become the new owner.”
She said Byrne and his company have bought land in the community and developed the club’s first “vertical, multifamily effort.” Byrne also has purchased a “significant number of YC (Yellowstone Club) golf course lots this past fall and plans to build on those in the near future.”
Should the deal be completed, she said, “I am confident that he and his team will ‘keep the dream alive!’ “
Edra Blixseth said she plans to remain a club member and was writing to other members to alert them about the upcoming Journal story. “I look forward to sharing the YC experience with our families together for many years,” she wrote.
The couple decided a year ago to call an end to their 25-year marriage. They said earlier that they had reached an agreement on how to divide their estimated $2 billion in assets, and that they both would retain ownership of the Yellowstone Club.
However, the negotiations have become increasingly bitter.
Tim Blixseth told the Journal his pending divorce was “certainly among the factors” propelling the sale.
Blixseth, a timber man from Oregon, came to Montana in 1992, when he and partners bought 165,000 acres of Plum Creek Timber Co. land in the Gallatin National Forest.
He began logging some of the land, sold some environmentally sensitive parcels to the U.S. Forest Service and completed a set of swaps with the federal government that left him and Edra in sole control of 13,500 acres adjoining the Big Sky Resort.
Meanwhile, property prices began to skyrocket in Western Montana. By the late 1990s, Blixseth announced plans to build the Yellowstone Club, where early members had to prove they were worth $3 million to join.
Today, vacant lots there sell for $1 million and up, and homes go for $10 million and up. The club also includes a private ski hill, golf course and other amenities.
The community “redefined the luxury vacation-home business in the past five years and became a Rocky Mountain refuge for the rich and famous,” the Journal reported Friday.
But it has not existed without controversy. Some conservationists resent the extreme consumption it represents; and in 2004, Blixseth agreed to pay the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency $1.8 million to settle a water pollution case related to construction at the club.
In 2006, former Tour de France bicycle racing champion Greg LeMond and some other early club investors sued Blixseth, accusing him of trying to force them to leave the club and sell their shares for a fraction of their value.
That case has now been settled, said Bozeman attorney Jim Goetz, who represented LeMond and the others. Goetz said the terms of the settlement are confidential.