By Catherine Reagor | The Arizona Republic
The developer who invented the concept of upscale living around world-class golf courses in Scottsdale three decades ago is now building on one of the last residential parcels in the northeast Valley city.
Lyle Anderson plans to build 250 custom homes and a resort on 223 acres next to the Golf Club Scottsdale. Plans for the community, called Sierra Reserve, began to take shape at the height of the housing boom and have evolved in the years since. The community at Dynamite Road and 118th Street is Anderson’s smallest development so far, and his first since 2008.
In November of that year, his longtime lender, the Bank of Scotland, ran into financial problems and took control of four of Anderson’s largest developments, including Superstition Mountain in Apache Junction. It’s taken some time for Anderson to weather the storm, but he is back on familiar ground.
Sierra Reserve is located between his first desert-style golf course community, the 860-acre Desert Highlands, and the 8,000-acre Desert Mountain, with its six Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses.
Sierra Reserve backs up to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve on land that has recovered from damage in the 23,000-acre Rio fire in 1996. He describes the project as a culmination of everything he has learned in his 30-plus-year career of building custom homes and upscale planned communities in resort destinations from Hawaii to Scotland.
Anderson, who is 70, also said Sierra Reserve is not his last project.
If you’d like to discuss real estate matters, contact RLG founder Jordan Rose, jrose@roselawgroup.com
