Bill Gates gobbling up Florida farmland
Bill Gates gobbling up Florida farmland
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Bill Gates
Posted: Wednesday, October 22, 2014 3:30 pm
By Amber Vann / CNHI News
LIVE OAK, Fla. -- The investment company that manages the wealth of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, has been acquiring gobs of farmland in north Florida the past two years, real estate records show.
Lakeland Sands Florida, a subsidiary of Cascade Investments LLC, which oversees the Gates fortune, recently bought more than 4,500 acres in Suwanee County near McAlpin, an unincorporated community just south of here.
The price: $27,961,144.69, according to court records.
The farm land was sold by Seldom Rest Inc., an agriculture and forestry company based in Donalsonville, Ga. John S. Bailey, the company’s vice president, declined to comment on the transaction.
Lakeland Sands has also acquired an abundance of properties in other parts of Suwanee County and in Hamilton and Madison counties, which abut the Georgia border, since 2012, public records disclosed.
Brothers Chris and Allen Heine, owners of Oak Hammond LLC, sold 400 wooded acres in western Suwanee County to Lakeland Sands for $800,000 in September 2013, not knowing who was behind the purchase.
The brothers said they had owned the land as an investment and cleared it of trees before the closing at the request of the buyer, assuming Lakeland Sands was either in the timber or farming business.
Chis Heine said the brothers simply “didn’t know the buyers personally.”
That’s the way Michael Larson, who oversees the Gates real estate investment empire, wants it.
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