Beach businesses up for sale

• Elevator

This grain elevator from the early 20th century, shown here Jan. 16, is one of four businesses for sale in Beach. Others include a restaurant, a grocery store and a truck repair shop.

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As Beach grows with oil field overflow, some business owners are calling it quits to move closer to family and hoping fresh entrepreneurs will have as much success as they have.

“I think that there’s a lot of interest in Beach right now,” said Debra Walworth, Prairie West Development Foundation executive director. “Simply because we’re kind of outside the chaos a little bit.”

Not only does the city’s growth make it an ideal place to run a business, its location is a boon, being a common place for road trippers to stop, she said.

“Beach seems to be a halfway point for a lot of people that are travelling,” she said. “I think that a lot of the businesses are helped here simply because we are that first stop coming from the west. And after you travel across the state, if you’re coming from the east, it’s a pretty good break point.”

The city of 1,019 at the 2010 census is growing because it is getting overflow from the Oil Patch, Home and Land Real Estate Agent Sally Abernethy said.

“Up until this point there were things to rent. Now we are very, very short of rent space,” she said. “And there are definitely no homes at this point to buy.”

Abernethy has four Beach businesses listed, in addition to a few residential listings.

A turn-of-the-20th-century grain elevator, the Doubloons restaurant building, a corner automotive shop and the Beach Food Center are all for sale through Abernethy, who is also selling the Shamrock Club steakhouse in nearby Wibaux, Mont.

For Jim Kary, owner of the Beach Food Center, and Janeall Gehring, owner of Doubloons, family motivated their decisions to sell their businesses and not a lack of success.

“Our family is in Utah,” said Gehring on Friday by cellphone while driving through Montana on the way to her new home. “They’re going to be grown and gone by the time, so we just said, ‘Nope we’re gonna move closer to family.’”

A move also inspired Jim Giggey to sell the elevator that he fell in love with.

“We had a construction business and we used it for storage and we used it for a personal campground area if we so wished,” he said.

In a town where residential units, especially those for rent, are limited and because Golden Valley County experienced population growth in 2011 for the first time since 1950, it’s a good time to own a business, Abernethy said.

Beach is a quiet, well-kept place to live, she said. There are a lot of amenities not often found in a town of around 1,000.

“Beach was very forward-thinking a couple of decades ago and put good, sound zoning in place,” Walworth said. “I think they’re a little bit ahead of some of the other communities that have just now in the past year had to give some thought to that process.”

Abernethy said investors might be interested in Beach businesses, but no major grocery chain has made an offer on the Beach Food Center.

Kary hopes that another family will purchase the grocery store because he and his wife were able to play very active roles in their children’s lives while running the supermarket.

“For me and my wife, I think it worked out really well,” he said. “We were able to do everything we wanted to do with our kids.”

Their youngest child and only son graduates from Beach High School in 2013, and the Karys plan to stay in Beach for at least that long, longer if the Beach Food Center doesn’t sell by then, he said. They plan to move to the Bismarck area to be closer to their grown daughters.

The Doubloons building, which was named in honor of the Beach Buccaneers, is being leased by a Chinese restaurant that takes up about half the building, Gehring said.

The Gehrings were able to get the building, which has the proper hook-ups to contain a laundromat, a multi-use permit so it could become apartment(s) or offices as well, she said.

“We’re leaving the opportunity open for others,” she said. “There is no ice cream in Beach and there is no laundromat in Beach.”

Tags: for sale, oil patch, news, business, beach, growing, oil