Owners seek $52 million for scrubland pasture

MOSES LAKE — The advertisement bills the land as “great for a Master Planned Community.”

For the last nearly three months, roughly 4,000 acres of sagebrush and scrubland pasture several miles northwest of the Moses Pointe golf course along the shores of Moses Lake have been for sale.

List price: $52,000,000.

“DEVELOPERS+ INVESTORS!!! LAKERIDGE HOMESTEAD 4000 comprises of (sic) one of the largest parcels of urban-proximity waterfront property in Washington State w/4000+ acres and approximately 5.5 miles (30,000 linear feet) of lakefront. The property has existing water rights of 3,000 gallons per minute w/multiple withdrawal points. Zoning is RR1,” reads the listing on the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

“Part of land is leased to a livestock contractor,” the listing continues.

The sellers are represented by Seattle-based realtor Valeria Burmeister with Hamburg, Germany,-based international real estate firm Engel & Völkers, which lists luxury real estate across the world.

Neither Burmeister nor Engel & Völkers responded to requests from the Columbia Basin Herald for comment. And the land is not listed on the Engel & Völkers website.

According to the Grant County zoning code, RR1 is intended to preserve very low density residential, small farms and open space, thought golf courses are allowed with a conditional use permit.

According to the Grant County assessor’s website, the one parcel number referenced on the Redfin real estate website is 140 acres and jointly owned by Jerry Chen and TD Investments, with a Seattle post office box as its mailing address. TD is also listed as the owner along with Sen-Long and Hsiu-Chuang Chen of another 78-acre parcel nearby.

However, the assessor’s website lists a number of parcels along the lakeshore as owned by CFML LLC, a corporation with a Renton mailing address and headed by Andy Chen, according to information available from the Washington State Secretary of State’s corporations website.

A search by the Columbia Basin Herald found 23 parcels owned by CFML along the southwest shore of Moses Lake. Along with the two parcels owned by TD Investments, the area amounts to 4067.6 acres with a total 2018 assessed value of $2.95 million.

While the property listing describes the land as “waterfront” with a “view” and in-street sewer, there do not appear to be any paved roads leading through the parcels, and limited access by dirt road. Several of the parcels also abut land owned and managed by the United States government.

The Columbia Basin Herald could not find anything formally linking CFML to TD Investments.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com..