McLear sells Meredith properties to national firm

MEREDITH — Reality set in for Rusty McLear on Friday as he cleaned some crumbs off a table in a library room at the Church Landing hotel.  

“I’ll have to stop doing this,” McLear said.

He no longer owns the place.

After spending 36 years building, owning and operating hotels, restaurants and shops that have changed the face of Meredith, he has sold Hampshire Hospitality Holdings to TPG Hotels & Resorts, a major national firm based in Rhode Island.

“The company is sold,” McLear said in an interview at Church Landing. “It closed this morning at 8:45. So it’s done.

“We approached them. My partners and I are all almost 73 and this is a very big property with lots of buildings in northern New England and I think we have about 325,000 square feet of space and it’s all wooden and a lot of it very old.

“The capital expense and upkeep has grown significantly. In order to keep the buildings in the kind of condition we have to keep them in, we either needed to partner with somebody bigger or sell to somebody bigger. And I’ve never worked for anybody else, so I figured I wasn’t going to be a very good employee.”

McLear said the sale involved properties, including Church Landing, Inn at Mill Falls, Bay Point at Mill Falls, Chase House and Mill Falls Marketplace, that have a combined assessment of about $25 million, and the sale price “was well north of that.”

Historic hotels

McLear said the sale was driven by economics.

“If you look back at history, which I did, and you look back at the Mount Washington Hotel, the Mountain View Grand and Wentworth by the Sea, those were all big wooden buildings that were beautifully built,” he said. “It wasn’t really that times changed, it was that things got more and more expensive.

“The families that ran them, while they were substantial, they weren’t tremendously wealthy. They weren’t big, big companies that owned those. All big companies own them now. There’s a reason for that.”

TPG has more than 60 hotels and nearly 18,000 guest rooms under management coast to coast, a workforce of 10,000 people and $850 million in annual revenue, the privately owned company says on its website.

McLear said his hotels have sales, including food and beverage, of about $19 million annually. His equal partners in Hampshire Hospitality Holdings are Edward Gardner, Roger Gauld and Fred Ford.

The company employed 150 people, who have all been rehired by the new owners. McLear expects TPG to make significant improvements.

“I know they’re going to invest a substantial sum rapidly to upgrade the property, to fix those things that need to be fixed, and there are more than I would like to admit,” he said. “It needs a little bit more tender loving care than I am able to give.”

Ralph Izzi, the vice president of public affairs for TPG, did not immediately return a call for comment.

Not slowing down

McLear enjoys being a businessman, enjoys new ventures and doesn’t lack for irons in the fire.  

“We still have Hooksett (Welcome Centers). We just agreed with Irving Oil to start building new Common Man roadside gas stations and convenience stores for them and we started construction this morning on one in Plymouth and we’re doing one in Manchester and we’re doing one in Merrimack and then we’re going to roll them out all over New England.” 

McLear is also on a state panel that will determine the future of the old Laconia State School property. He has been a driving force in suggesting that a sports complex has potential for the site. A hotel for families, similar to a Holiday Inn Express, might be needed, and McLear said he might be interested in participating in something like that.

Although he has plenty to keep him busy, McLear admits to mixed emotions about selling the Meredith properties that have been so intertwined with his life and that of his wife and children.

“We’re here every day of the week, every week of the year, except we take off maybe 10 days a year for vacation,” he said. “We’re here seven days a week and just love it. People come from all over the world to stay here and we get to come down here every day, and it’s a pretty good gig.

“This was such an interesting project because this is such a small town that this really became identified with the town and I think the townspeople, or at least I always hoped, the townspeople were really proud to have this as part of their community.”

McLear said he has purchased a couple of other pieces of property in Meredith and has plans “to do some new projects.” He declined to say more, other than that they won’t be used for a hotel.

Getting a start

He has come a long way since 1983 when his company spent $500,000 to buy an asbestos mill that dominated the viewscape in Meredith, then a sleepy town on a quiet end of Lake Winnipesaukee.

He was a psychology major in college, but realized the hospitality industry was his passion. He worked in real estate and started a restaurant before buying the mill.

“It’s interesting, $500,000 was a lot certainly,” he said. “The cleanup of asbestos was about $87,000. The demolition of the factory was about $60,000.”

Money went a lot further back then. As an example, his company spent $1.8 million to create the Bay Point hotel. A complete refurbishment this year cost $1.6 million.

Good returns

McLear said he has realized a good return on his investment.

“Oh yeah, it’s been a very good business,” he said.

And, he has nothing but praise for those in Meredith who helped along the way. 

“This was a real and true partnership with the town, the town’s people, the planning board, the planning department, frankly Meredith Village Savings Bank helped us mightily in the beginning and when there were big bumps in the road like ‘87, ‘88, ‘91,” he said. “They were there to help us, so it’s been a great almost community effort to make this work.”