The owners of Hana Ranch, a 4,500-acre oceanfront property on Maui in Hawaii, have put it on the market for $65 million and are seeking a conservation-minded buyer who will preserve the remote rural land.
Hana Ranch Partners LLC — which includes San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, heirs to the Getty Oil fortune and several Montana ranchers — recently listed the ranch with Dan Omer of Island Sotheby’s International Realty, who is the ranch’s former chief operating officer.
The ranch owners had started thinking about selling in the past year or so, but did not actively market the property.
The majority owner of Hana Ranch Partners is the Ronald Family Trust A, a Getty family trust whose principal beneficiary is Gordon P. Getty, son of the late billionaire J. Paul Getty and No. 503 on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people.
Getty’s partners are Montana ranchers Roy and Susan O’Connor; Susan Miller and Elon Gilbert, also of Montana; Jim Miller and Shiwei Gao of Berkeley, Calif.; Joseph and Victoria Cotchett of San Francisco; and Shea Halligan of San Francisco.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is considering a run for California governor in 2010 to replace Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, owns 1 percent interest in the partnership. Newsom’s father, retired Judge William A. Newsom, is the trustee for the Getty trust and a member of the executive committee.
The ranch, which surrounds the tiny town of Hana and separates it from the ocean, comprises some 3,000 acres of pasture land and 1,500 mauka acres of forest preserve reaching the 2,200-foot elevation on the slopes of Haleakala. There also is a two-bedroom plantation house with ocean views.
Founded in 1944 by a retired San Francisco industrialist, Hana Ranch has changed hands three times over the past 25 years.
In 1989, a Japanese group, Keola Hana Maui, purchased the ranch and the hotel for $63 million and set off a six-year battle over a proposed golf course and homes around the course, dividing resident families into those who wanted development and those who wanted to preserve Hana’s rural character.
“It really put us into a civil war in Hana,” English said. “It was a big fight; it split the community right down the middle.”
The development never materialized and bursting of the Japanese real estate bubble in the early 1990s made it doubtful the project would move forward. Meridian Financial Resources bought the ranch and the hotel as one unit in 2000, divided the two, sold the ranch in early 2001 to Hana Ranch Partners for $24 million, and sold the hotel to Passport Resorts, which also owns the historic Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur.
When it bought the land, Hana Ranch Partners told the community it would continue the cattle operation, which has seven full-time employees — General Manager Amber Starr and six cowboys. The group also said it would sell large lots of land with possible deed restrictions to provide a return on its investment but that it would conserve open spaces and that it would provide land for affordable housing.
In July 2002, Oprah Winfrey and her former trainer, Bob Greene, purchased more than 102 acres on six parcels from Hana Ranch Partners for $15.5 million and planned to build three homes on the land. However, nothing has been built to date, and there have been no permits of any kind issued since Winfrey and Green bought it, according to a Maui County web site.
