Developers behind a master-planned community with a golf course designed by Tiger Woods have reduced the number of homes in the project
FORT WORTH, Texas — This article was originally published by our content partners at the Dallas Business Journal. You can read the original article here.
Developers behind a master-planned community under construction near Fort Worth with a golf course designed by Tiger Woods have reduced the number of homes and made other revisions as they move forward with the project.
The 914-acre, $100 million gated community in Aledo, dubbed BlueJack Ranch, was revealed in October. The community is being developed by the people behind BlueJack National, which was founded by Andy Mitchell and Kristin Mitchell and PGA Tour player JJ Henry. Woods helped design the first championship golf course in 2014 with BlueJack National within a 767-acre residential community in Houston.
BlueJack Ranch was initially planned to be a roughly 625-home gated community with an 18-hole golf course. Amenities included a “working dude ranch” with eight horses, longhorns and miniature donkeys, a spa and wellness area, pools, tennis/pickleball courts and a family entertainment center. Since then, Andy Mitchell, co-chair of BlueJack Ranch, said he’s scaled down the number of homes to about 590 to make the community less dense and to give residents more space.
At its core, the Mitchells say they are focusing on the lifestyle elements of the community first. The main difference between BlueJack Ranch and the BlueJack National is the ratio of people making the ranch their primary home, he said. The ranch already has members who put money down on a lot.
“Now we expect more than half of this to be primary residence, and then the other probably 20-30% of the club permanently to be that, ‘Hey, this is my ranch home that I go outside of Fort Worth, outside of Dallas, it’s my second home,'” he said.
The next big milestone for the community is building the working ranch, which he said will be completed early next year. The ranch is one big differentiator between this and BlueJack’s other development, Kristin Mitchell said. The developers wanted to create something that fit the culture of the area and landscape. The land used to be a working ranch known as Kelly Ranch. Occasionally, the Mitchells will still find old horseshoes on the property.
“We noticed how different it was from BlueJack National and all the topography, and it was more rugged and interesting,” she said. “So we felt strongly about differentiating the two clubs.”
Another big difference, they said, was a development they are calling BlueJack Town, a commercial development that leads up to the gates of the community the duo hopes to fill with boutique retailers and a farmer’s market that will be accessible to the public. The Mitchells are talking to businesses in Fort Worth and Dallas.
“I really want to be intentional and local and find things that you can’t just buy anywhere at Nordstrom or online,” Kristin Mitchell said.
The golf course is making progress, too. Infrastructure for the development is already in place, Andy Mitchell said, and they are re-platting properties and expecting to plant grass for the golf course in June. They’ve cleared the land for the first nine holes of the course, and are now working on the back nine. The good news, he said, is construction crews haven’t hit a lot of rock along the way.
“We’ve got really good soil, the water rights and everything else was already secured, so we’re way ahead of where we probably people think we are,” he said.
The BlueJack team is about a month away from the design portion of the course, where Woods will make design decisions such as how the greens should be shaped.