When Walt Disney bought land in Anaheim California, he was limited in how much land he could purchase with his company’s finances, and the amount of land originally hoped to be sufficient was quickly found to be inadequate. As a result of the popularity of Disney Land other attractions and vacation related businesses bought land around the park effectively limiting its expansion.
Needing more space and knowing they could increase Disney profits by making Disney more accessible to those East of the Mississippi, the company decided to buy land in Florida, a climate similar to Southern California, but knew quite well that when word got out that Disney was buying, the owners of the orange groves and swamp land would have demanded top dollar for their land and this would mean that Disney would be in the same position as in California, unable to buy the amount of land to prevent encroachment and allow expansion because of cost, and this would have sunk the project.
To get the land at dirt cheap prices, when land in Orlando began changing hands, the identity of the actual buyer was hidden as multiple fake companies were established to buy it.
Local landowners were happy to sell their land for the prices they were offered not knowing how much more they could have gotten and only found this out long after the papers were signed and sufficient land bought. It would stand to reason that local government had some awareness of the dealings and let it happen because of the future economic advantage and perhaps because of silence bought by greased palms.
People began to notice the sudden interest in land that was being bought up by what they assumed were unrelated companies, speculating that some large industrial companies, like Ford, might be coming to town.
In spite of denying it was the purchaser after a grocery store clerk told the Orlando Sentinel about a number of men from California who had started coming to get sodas at his store, and a waitress said she had seen Walt Disney in her café, people began to suspect the real buyer was Disney.
Paul Helliwell, an attorney for Walt Disney Productions, recruited the president of the First National Bank of Orlando to help with negotiations with landowners telling him that he was representing a client whose identity would have to remain secret until all the land purchases had been made.
Such agreements are not made without some advantage to the keeper of the secret.
This resulted in setting up fake companies such as the “Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation”, the “Latin-American Development and Management Corporation” and “M.T. Lott Real Estate”, a little taste of Disney humor.
Miami real estate agent Roy Hawkins was the person who was recruited to make the offers on different tracts of land in the area and he used a real estate company, Florida Ranch Lands Inc., to make the purchases.
Hawkins then contacted an Orlando real estate firm expressing an interest in two large tracts of land and swore them to secrecy about who it was that was interested in the land even as they were not told who the buyer actually was.
Real estate agents then spread out in Orange and Osceola counties negotiating to buy land and offering paltry sums to people who thought $107 an acre was a lot of money not knowing how much more it was actually worth. The easy land buy was also the result of those who may have fallen for the old line, “I have some land for sale in Florida”, only to find the land bought sight unseen was a swamp or a plot of land they may or may not ever get around to building a retirement home on and wanted to divest themselves of a bad investment. The worthless swamp land they had been swindled into buying became the land whose sale was a second swindle.
The Disney Company was able to continue buying more tracts of land and keeping its identity secret by delaying the recording of the deeds on the first two purchases of properties until it had gotten more land under contract because, once the deeds became public record, everyone would’ve known who was buying the land.
The company also made purchases in cash to eliminate a paper trail.
Because of the California scuttlebutt that the obvious need for Disney’s expansion would call for a location in another state with weather similar to Southern California, the Disney lawyer and the Miami real estate agent went to Martin Andersen, the publisher of the Orlando Sentinel. Whether he had known of the sale before being approached or learned of it when approached, the publisher kept the secret to protect the economic bonanza that would come to Orlando and said nothing.
When the first purchase of 8,380 acres of swamp land was recorded, an article in the Orlando Sentinel only speculated on what the property was going to be used for and who bought it, and later the paper published an article addressing the Disney rumor but dismissing it because Walt Disney said publicly that he was not interested in having a park on the East Coast even as the publisher knew he certainly did.
Florida Ranch Lands completed deals with 47 other landowners, purchasing 27,400 acres for over $5 million from 51 landowners for the average price of $182 an acre.
The Orlando Sentinel’s Florida magazine editor, Emily Bavar, ran a story claiming when the smoke cleared Disney would be found to have been the buyer who could have certainly paid the landowners more, and this forced the truth to come out.
This news resulted in land prices skyrocketing in Orlando, in some cases up to $80,000 an acre as opposed the $182 Disney paid which at the time had seemed like a lot to the orange growers and swamp owners.
Although it was an economic boon for the city and state, Disney’s presence started the building of other theme parks in the area and the people who had lived there before Disney were eventually forced away as property being bought to capitalize on the new tourist catered more to that industry than the people who had been living there and had to move on.
While Disney, a weaver of dreams and fuzzy fiction, was buying up property and people experience displacement, the public impression was that real estate companies were the good guys buying bad properties with their offers presented to people glad to get rid of a bad investment as the best they could get for their land, there were locals on the ground, the agents and newspaper publisher for example, who knew what was happening and for whatever advantage it afforded them kept the secret.
Could civic leaders have been so clueless as to have this happen around them without them being aware to any degree?
The three-story apartment building in New Bedford up on Elm by County Street was sold by Standish Associates to TI Partners V the fifth in a string of LLCs that appear to be subsidiaries of another real estate company, Terra Incognita Partner.
Research by a local news outlet found that the State filings list the LLC’s legal point-of-contact as Registered Agents Inc and that the company’s signatory, Mauricio Rauld, is a California lawyer whose firm specializes in real estate syndications, a group of investors pooling their money to buy real estate to build real estate empires.
Terra Incognita has been buying other apartment buildings in New Bedford, but, as with Disney, it’s true identity and those of the other LLCs connected to it in the area are not known.
Who is buying New Bedford, and who is benefiting from all the gentrification either directly by profiting off insider real estate investments, having their palms greased, or with plans to move on using their alleged acumen in rebirthing a city as proof of their worth, while the refugees they create for this are fanning out in search of housing?
New Bedford seems to be the new Orlando. Companies, many from out of state, are being allowed to buy up the city like Disney got to do with Orlando without the people of the city knowing who actually owns it.
Which suits are benefitting from selling out us “Great Unwashed”?
And who gets invited to the buyer reveal party?
New Bedford, the Orlando of Massachusetts.
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