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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Clarke who wrote (10668)	6/1/2000 2:09:00 AM
From: Paul Senior	Respond to of 78958

Jim, my take on Alico (ALCO) is that it is a Florida business 51% owned by the Ben Griffen family. It is a farming/ranching operating company in southwest Florida with about 140,000-150,000 acres of land. These parcels are difficult to evaluate - impossible for me. Some are near growing communities, some more distant. Mr. Griffen apparently runs the company his way, so there is the issue of owner/control vs. the small shareholder. Several land sales have been announced. Some of the sales do not have definitive closing dates. (They will go to 2001 or beyond.) It's unknown to me what Alico will do with the proceeds from those sales. ALCO is a stock that is chronically undervalued. And imo, very likely to remain so. To me, it's not a matter of determining the fair value of the underlying assets. There've been analysts that I recall from the mid '80's on saying the thing is undervalued (e.g. A Mr. Lily from one of the regional brokerage firms then who was a specialist in valuing these things, & Marty Whitman within the past couple of years.) As an indicator, I'll guess fair value might be about $22-50. (That seems pretty safe -gg-.) The stock's going for about 15+. I look at ALCO as limited upside and limited downside. What I see is a stock which has some support due to the assets of the company. Buying close to 15 to me means there is a chance to see yet again 18-25, a range of prices that one has often seen with this company. Aside. Perhaps it's best to be diversified with these Florida real estate companies. And so I do own CTO which I purchased after it showed up in the media and here in Feb. as a possible Warren Buffett holding. I'm also looking now at Avatar Holdings (AVTR) which is partly in Florida. Paul.

To: James Clarke who wrote (10668)	6/1/2000 1:46:00 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78958

James, I have a value oriented stock broker friend that is constantly touting me on ALCO. He owns a large position. I spend a lot of time in Ft Meyers and have actually driven up and down Alico Road to take a look at the land. Lots of cows :-) Seriously, the story was that they owned a lot of land near where a university was just developed. They had donated the land where the university was built to the state. So one would expect a significant appreciation in the value of the land surrounding it. My friend is constantly throwing out huge values based on his conversations with management. I casually looked at the numbers, various land sales the company did etc... a few years back. I may have even touted Alico as a possible value on this thread quite awhile back when I was researching it. I never bought it though because it seemed to me that the controlling shareholder was not particularly anxious to realize the value if it is in fact as high as some people believe. He sells a little from time to time and distributes it as an extra dividend. I suspect there's value there, but I will remain an observer unless I see some indication that something is going to happen soon. Wayne