Tag: Whispering Oaks Luxury RV Park

When con artists become predators

This is Eddie Sides in a recent mug shot. Would you buy a used RV from this man—much less invest in an RV park with him?

The best hustlers, as described in my last post, are the smooth-talkers—the enormously sincere and effusive spinners of all the marvels that can be yours if you would but set aside your critical faculties and nagging suspicions and buy The Dream. The very best hustlers even believe their own stories, and are as shocked and dismayed as anyone when The Dream crashes on the reefs of financial or political reality. How could that be? We’re all victims here, the smooth talkers will tell you, of small minds or insufficiently committed investors or an ignorant public that simply doesn’t get it.

But then there’s the other kind. The predators for whom there is no pretense of fair-dealing, the con men whose only purpose is to separate you from your bank account as quickly and ruthlessly as possible. And it’s unfortunately true that the RV park and campground industry, by becoming such a hot sector of the commercial real estate market over the past three or four years, has attracted both dream-weavers and pickpockets at an unprecedented rate. A key difference? The dream-weavers spin their magic around an entire community, which at least distributes the inevitable pain. The pickpockets’ victims are fleeced individually.

Take Duane and Stephanie Smith, of the Twin Lakes area in Arkansas. According to Duane Smith, a school teacher in Mountain Home, Brian “Eddie” Sides approached him two years ago with a proposal that he invest in a new RV park. At that point he had known Sides a couple of years, Smith told a local reporter, with Sides and his wife coming off “as a respectable Christian family that lived their lives with Christian values and that had done reasonably well for themselves,” owning an upper middle-class home and several expensive boats and vehicles.

Sides initially emphasized that the Smiths would not need to put down any money, but that he needed their good credit scores and financial credibility to obtain the financing he needed. That right there should have rung an alarm bell and convinced Smith to back the hell away, but Smith didn’t hear it. Perhaps he was reassured by Sides’ share of the deal, which was to kick in an initial $200,000 in proceeds from the sale of his home, which he had put up for sale.

Although that wasn’t quite what it seemed.

First, because he needed bridge funding until his house was sold, Sides prevailed on the Smiths to put up an initial $25,000 to get the ball rolling. Then it turned out that the home didn’t actually belong to Sides personally, and when it was sold, the proceeds made it into anything other than the RV park account for which they had been promised. Meanwhile, with Sides having blown through the $25,000 start-up fund, a resulting deficit in the RV park account was jeopardizing the bank loan that had been obtained through the Smiths’ good credit . . . and you can see where this is going.

Long story short—and it is a very long story indeed, meticulously documented by the online Mountain Home Observer—the Smiths got cleaned out to the tune of $334,384. That’s how much they recently won in a civil suit against Sides, but Sides already had a string of judgments and court orders against him dating back more than a decade, for various grifts and scams that netted him tens of thousands more—none of which, it seems, he has coughed up. And despite a nearly year-long effort by the Smiths to convince the Baxter County prosecuting attorney to bring criminal charges, no charges have been brought and Sides continues to skate. The Smiths, meanwhile, are teetering on the financial brink.

“The prosecutor keeps making excuses and keeps making a point to say that if he decides to file charges it’s not going to help people get their money back,” Smith recently told the Observer. “Yes, but what about holding people accountable for alleged crimes they commit—especially when it involves numerous victims and large sums of money? . . . I talk and communicate frequently with many of Mr. Sides’ alleged victims, and most simply want him to be held accountable for his actions at this point, and for closure.”

You could argue that even the skimpiest due diligence should have discouraged anyone from getting into a business relationship with Sides, so maybe Smith is undeserving of your sympathy. Putting that aside, however, there’s also unmistakable evidence that Smith didn’t have the slightest understanding of the business itself—of what it takes to build and run an RV park, much less one that was promoting itself as a “luxury” campground. As I wrote more than a year ago, the new venture was flashing warning signals right out of the gate, proclaiming that a $500 deposit would be sufficient to reserve a site—or “lock in the full year for the low price of $3100.”

“Low,” indeed.

There were lots of other disturbing clues that this was a doomed project, from Sides’ willingness to forego getting required construction permits, to the incredible amount of rancor he provoked among the project’s neighbors, to the absence of any of the numerous amenities the luxury RV park would supposedly provide. In the end, all that Sides had to show for his efforts was a dead-ended gravel road bulldozed the length of a small peninsula, flanked by a series of gravel RV pads. By the end of last summer, the whole venture was shut down. As the Observer reported, “Today, the park sits abandoned, with trash strewn about and equipment sitting out in the elements to rust. Felled trees mark the landscape alongside empty travel lots. The park is silent.”

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RVing shenanigans of the past year

No, this is not a glamping tent, no matter how much it looks like one. It’s an Airbnb rental, which means it sits not in a campground but on a residential site—along with 12 others in Minnesota.

The end of one year and the start of another frequently prompts retrospectives by those seeking closure or looking to demonstrate their cleverness. Sometimes it would be better if they didn’t.

This week, for example, the RV Industry Association breathlessly announced its “top 10 highlights from 2023!” and led off with its 2023 Vacation Cost Comparison Study. Released last April, this 125-page analysis “found” that “RV vacations cost much less than other types of vacation travel, even when factoring in fuel prices and the cost of RV ownership.” “Found”— rather than “established” or “determined”—was an apt choice of verbs, given its overtone of accidental discovery.

Indeed, as I wrote here and here, the “comparison study” suffered from several analytical errors and oversights, leading me to conclude that “the argument that RVing is an economical way to vacation works only if such a vehicle gets deposited in your driveway for free and it never suffers any mechanical issues.” But at least RVIA was touting its cost-benefit analysis in an understandable if flawed attempt to bolster sagging RV sales, which despite such efforts continued their plunge right through the end of the year. There’s less excuse, however, for RVIA to continue promoting such questionable claims today, even if in the guise of a top-ten list of the past year. That’s like the White Star Line citing the April 2 completion of RMS Titanic as one of its highlights of 1912.

Perhaps RVIA leadership is just too lazy or too innumerate to engage in a bit of critical thinking about its output. As much can’t be said for the outright grifters that the campground industry has attracted the past couple of years, few of whom can claim ignorance of the scams they’re peddling. Take Travis John, for example. As I wrote last January, John was looking to raise $8 million from 10,000 or so investors so he—and they—could buy a campground. The sales pitch included a lot of trendy jargon about non-fungible tokens and how John’s company, Campers DAO, would use “latest blockchain technology and an innovative business model to turn a membership into an NFT asset.”

Apparently that innovative business model didn’t find a lot of buyers. And, of course, the whole airy-fairy world of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible anything began wavering, culminating in the November conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried. But by then John had already retreated to a hidey hole somewhere, announcing in April an indefinite delay of the Campers DAO launch while it went about “building more value.” Not a peep out of him since.

Meanwhile, the unbelievable promise of a full year of luxury RV camping for just $3,100 a year has proven to be just that, as two of the four partners in the Whispering Oaks Luxury RV Park in Arkansas filed suit in December against the other two. The aggrieved partners averred that it is “no longer reasonably practical to carry on” the business, not least because, they allege, Brian and Stacy Sides misappropriated business assets for personal gain, bounced checks and otherwise acted in ways that “damage and destroy the business.”

How shocking was that? It shouldn’t have been. As I wrote in April (what’s with this April thing?), Sides already had a record that included defrauding three Joplin, Missouri women out of a combined $29,000 for work he never performed. But when a local reporter earlier this year asked him about the incident, he responded with the classically moronic “there is another guy that done that” riposte. It goes without saying that not a shovelful of dirt has been turned at the luxury RV park site, its website has vanished, and so has the entrance billboard.

Other fantastical campground deals announced last year remain to be played out, including a luxury (aren’t they all, these days?) RV park in Danville, VA proposed by developer Joe Cubas, whose other bright idea is to make that town a Virginia version of Sturgis, SD. And, of course, there’s the grand design by failed Florida real estate developer Ricky Trinidad to build a “white glove” RV resort in Pennsylvania covered by a massive, transparent air dome. Local politicians in both municipalities have been tripping over each other in their eagerness to welcome these so-called revitalization projects, so one can only hope a brisk winter will shock some sense into them.

The seductive—if empty— promise of a financial bonanza for the locals is often enough to mute the critics when someone proposes a multimillion tourist development, but several notable exceptions were notched in 2023. Among them was the victorious campaign in Saugerties, NY against a proposed KOA glampground under the Terramor name plate, and the less heralded deep-sixing of a $30 million luxury (yes, again) campground proposed for New Hope, Tennessee. While the Saugerties battle featured a relatively media-savvy grassroots movement in a relatively economically resilient area, New Hope is “a wide spot on two-lane Route 156 that has one Dollar General, two beauty shops and a meat processing business,” as I wrote in, yes, April. But in July, after a bit of local agitation and a petition drive, the developer backed out.

Local resistance isn’t always effective, though, if an RV resort developer has exceptionally deep pockets and the locals are slow to cotton on to what’s happening. That’s been the story in Midway, Kentucky, where town fathers initially welcomed and then belatedly backpedaled from a monster project known as the Kentucky Bluegrass Experience Resort, projected to become one of the ten largest RV resorts in the eastern U.S. When the full scope of the proposal—and how it would impact the local community—finally sank in, Midway’s city council tried to block the project by refusing to extend municipal water and sewer to the site.

That was more than two years ago, but despite the lack of subsequent headlines, the developers didn’t just go away. Instead they played the long game, culminating in October in approval of an ordinance allowing RV parks to operate private sewer plants. Such private plants had been banned a couple of decades ago, after several local mobile home parks had private systems that failed, spilling raw sewage into local waterways. But history doesn’t repeat—does it?

Finally, one more example of perseverance against local opposition deserves spotlighting. Christine Wyrobek, told by her local planning commission in May (not April!) that she could not build a glampground on her 45 acres abutting Lake Vermilion, Minnesota, went ahead and did so, anyway. She’s just not describing it as a campground. As she explained to a Star Tribune reporter in September, her 13 campsites “fall securely within the county ordinance allowing short-term rentals for fewer than 180 days on residential property—which also allows for VRBO and Airbnb rentals.” And so glampground out, Airbnb rentals in.

Just when you thought all possible blurring of the lines about “camping” had been achieved. . . .

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How many red flags can you ignore?

Enter “Whispering Oaks Luxury RV Park” in a Goggle search field, and the first entry to pop up will be for the home page for just such an establishment, together with a notice that you can secure your slot at this premiere facility with just a $500 deposit—or “lock in the full year for the low price of $3100.”

Which right there should set off alarm bells. A full year of camping for just $3,100? At a “luxury RV” park?

Actually clicking on the link should set off a second round of alarms, with the home page boldly announcing that “Whispering Oaks RV Parks [dropping the pretensions to luxury but inexplicably becoming part of a chain] will be opening on March 1st, 2023 on some of Mountain Home’s most majestic lakeside acreage”—that is, more than a month ago. That’s alarm-worthy because, while the site goes on to describe 30/50 amp full hook-up sites, 10’x12′ poured concrete patios, free wifi and numerous amenities “that are in development and are included as they are completed,” the truth is that essentially everything is in development. This luxury RV park, it turns out, has yet to get permits for water, septic or basic engineering.

That isn’t to say that work on building the 47-acre Mountain Home, Arkansas park hasn’t started. Apparently that began more than six months ago, lack of permits be damned, as developer Eddie Brian Sides of Reeds Springs, Missouri, freely admitted at a Baxter County Planning and Zoning Commission public hearing Feb. 27. Indeed, Sides had already been slapped with a notice of violation by the Arkansas Office of Water Quality back in November, which cited him for operating a large construction site without a required stormwater permit and for failing to use any erosion control methods while clearing the site.

But that isn’t all. Angered local residents claim Sides has been illegally cutting down trees on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers property, installing septic tanks without permits, lying to county officials about the timing of the permits he did pull and threatening public access to Norfolk Lake, a major recreational waterbody. And, of course, there are the more pedestrian—but very real—concerns that have been tossed into the mix, such as storm water runoff issues and inevitable increases in traffic.

And then there’s this: Eddie Brian Sides, the brains behind this venture, apparently defrauded three Joplin, Missouri women out of a combined $29,000 a bit more than a decade ago, when—operating as Brian Sides Contracting—he accepted advance payments for construction materials to repair their homes after a tornado devastated the city. When he didn’t perform the work, the state’s attorney general sued him and a Jasper County Circuit Court Judge ordered him to repay the doubly-victimized women, as well as pay an additional $16,000 in various court costs and legal fees.

Thanks to the Mountain Home Observer, a modest but plucky on-line newspaper that dug up this information, we also know that Sides was embroiled in several other court cases involving contract non-performance, suggesting a disturbing pattern of behavior. But Sides insists there must be another Eddie Brian Sides running around the Ozarks, doing bad things and unfairly besmirching his name. “That is not me,” he told an Observer reporter when asked about the various fraud accusations. “There is another guy that done that.”

Here’s the kicker. Despite all these indications that Eddie Brian Sides plays fast and loose with facts and has little respect for land use or sanitary regulations, the Baxter commissioners nevertheless voted to approve his “plans” for the RV park—just so long as he gets those darn permits. In other words, the “planning” part of the commission’s authority— in a region that hews to the idea that people should be able to develop their property any damn way they wish—seems to be limited to checking compliance boxes and not actually evaluating development proposals or the people behind them. And while local residents have been pitching a fit over the proposed RV park, their chief concern seems to be that they not lose access to the lake.

Those same local residents and their representatives will end up living with the consequences of their short-sightedness, but RVers should take heed of all the red flags thrown on this play. An outdated and clearly misleading website is only the most outward sign of a sketchy operation, but it clearly signals what the oaks are whispering: “Mind your wallet.”

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