Chevy Chase Bank Puts Lowes Island Club Up for Sale

by C&RB Staff (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
September 2008
 

Chevy Chase Bank is selling Lowes Island Club, a private country club in Sterling, Va. with two championship golf courses overlooking the Potomac River. The bank put the club on the market in late August. The asking price: $18 million.
 
“We’ve gotten an enormous amount of interest and have gotten some offers already,” said Jeff Campbell, Senior Vice President of Bethesda-based Chevy Chase Bank in an article in the Washington Business Journal.
 
Lowes Island Club was part of Cascades in Potomac Falls, a 3,000-acre, mixed-use project planned by developer Robert Kettler, the major owner in Kettler Inc. and its predecessor companies, KSI and Kettler & Scott. Kettler took on massive debt for the project, financed by Chevy Chase Bank. With the economy in a downturn in the fall of 1990, Kettler was forced to give ownership of the partially finished project to the bank through a deed in lieu of foreclosure. The bank sold off chunks of the project over the next few years, getting rid of all but the country club by 1997.
 
“We were not interested in owning a golf course,” Boyle said. “But we wanted to complete the course and facility, build up the membership and get it launched and stabilized before we disposed of it.” Boyle added that the club is profitable and this is “the right time” to sell it.