C. Brewer puts remaining
properties up for sale

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By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.com

C. Brewer & Co. said today its has listed all of its remaining properties, a total of 67,000 acres on Maui and the Big Island, for sale with the Hawaii branch of C.B. Richard Ellis, a worldwide real estate firm, and hopes to get some $300 million for the properties.

J. Alan Kugle, Brewer's chief executive officer for real estate, told a news conference today that it is hard to estimate the price because the value will vary widely if it is sold in many small pieces and would be less if it is sold to only a few buyers in large parcels.

When the company was purchased by a largely Hawaii-based group of investors in 1986, the lands were appraised and the value was more than $300 million then and Brewer hopes it will get a price "certainly in that magnitude," Kugle said.

"That probably was not retail value," he said.

The Maui lands are 20,000 acres owned by Brewer subsidiary Waikiki Agribusiness, around Wailuku and stretching from the south shore at Maalaea to the north shore beyond Waihee. About three-quarters of the acreage is conservation land.

The Big Island lands consist of two parcels. One area of 19,000 acres starts outside Hilo and runs 20 miles north along the Hilo-Hamakua Coast. Another area is 31,000 acres in the Kau district.

Kugle said that ideally, the company would like to sell the 67,000 to just a few buyers but the market will dictate how it moves.

Joe Haas, managing director of C.B. Richard Ellis Hawaii, led off the news conference by saying the announcement would "rock the real estate world in Hawaii" because it appears to be the largest amount of land ever offered at once by as single land owner.

Kugle said the lands have not been listed for sale before, although Brewer has talked to potential buyers. Smaller properties, totaling about 3,000 acres, have been listed for some time with Prudential Orchid Isle Properties and some parts of that have been sold.

Brewer announced in May of last year that it would liquidate over a period of years, selling off its land holdings piece by piece. The investors who bought the historic company in 1986 in a $200 million leveraged buyout are getting on in years and agreed to sell the assets to get some return on their investment.

Chairman John W.A. "Doc" Buyers, who led the group that had brought Brewer's ownership back to Hawaii, announced at the end of July that he had arranged to buy the company's 14,000-square-foot headquarters building -- the Wainaku Executive Center overlooking Hilo Bay -- as well as some of its operating units, including Kilauea Agronomics, which has a guava orchard and processing plant on Kauai, and a Seattle-based juice distributor.

Buyers also picked up some land on the Hilo-Hamakua Coast to develop "health and wellness and assisted living facilities."

Those transactions involved only a tiny part of Brewer's land holdings, however, and the land is mostly unused now that the sugar industry is dead in the islands except for Alexander & Baldwin Inc.'s operations on Maui and the Gay & Robinson plantation on Kauai.

Founded in 1826, Brewer was one of the historic "Big Five" companies that dominated Hawaii's business community for many years.