Resource Land Holdings targets $300 mln for fifth fund

The firm hopes to keep the size of its fund close to its predecessor, Resource Land Fund IV, which closed on $316 million in commitments in 2010. The firm’s Fund III drew in $175 million, with its first investment in 2006 and Fund II raised $51 million, with its first investment in 2003, according to its website.

Resource Land Holdings said it steps in as a “source of opportunistic capital” and often invests alongside local partners and entrepreneurs, especially during times when “economic cycles create situations where capital is nearly inaccessible,” according to its website.

Among its recent transactions, Resource Land Holdings put the Makalei Gold Club on the Big Island of Hawaii up for sale for $6.9 million, according to a press report in April. The firm acquired the property in 2014 as part of a larger 1,600 acre transaction. It’s not clear if the property has sold.

In 2013, the firm paid $20.7 million to buy the assets of D&L Energy in a bankruptcy auction, according to a report. The deal included D&L’s interests in pipelines, operating agreements, real estate and equipment, according to a press report. All told, D&L held more than 30,000 acres in the Marcellus and Upper Devonian shale.

Also in 2013, the firm moved its headquarters and its 15 employees to Denver from Colorado Springs, Colorado, to help it recruit more talent.

“Young investment bankers think of working in New York, Chicago, Los Angles and maybe San Francisco, Denver or Houston, but Colorado Springs was not on that list,” Joe Leininger, founder and partner of the firm, told The Denver Post at the time.

In 2003, the firm purchased Sacramento River Ranch in California, along with Wildlands Inc., according to a report on the property by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  The 3,960-acre farm along the Sacramento River in Northern California produces walnuts, wheat, corn, sunflowers, as well as environmental mitigation credit sales to buyers in the Sacramento metro area.

Resource Land Holdings lists several transactions on its website including a limestone business in Texas, a coal mine in the Midwest, citrus land in Florida and an apple operation Washington State, but no details on when the deals took place.

The firm did not return an email.

Leininger, partner, founded Resource Land Holdings in 1998 after a decade of personal investment in real estate in the Northwest. He also spent 10 years as an independent trader in the Eurodollar Option pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, according to his biography on the firm’s website.

The firm also employs two other partners: James Geisz, a founding partner of TGV Partners and a graduate of Harvard Law School, before he joined Resource Land Holdings in 2000; and Aaron Patsch, who joined the firm in 1998.

Action item: Report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sacramento River Ranch, an investment of Resource Land Holdings. http://www.usda.gov/oce/environmental_markets/files/Sacramento_River_Ranch_Brief.pdf