TOUR: “Oh,here goes a wave. So we've got two surfers. One's going right, one's going left. We got a gentleman maybe in his fifties that's just ripping on a shortboard right now, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 turns and he terminated just a little bit early on that wave.”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: It's a sunny Saturday, the sand is glistening, the waves are crashing - the perfect day for a surf.

TOUR: “You can hear and see the waves. It's right front and center so you can't miss the view”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Cole Cannon, with his long hair and tan skin describes the waves as they hit at regular intervals, the perfect barrel as each surfer drops in and rides it out. Just a surfer dude and his perfect day in the ocean, right?

TOUR: "It's this just, amazing contrast between Red Rock and what almost looks like bohemian water from The Bahamas with these different shades of blue and teal. And the sand, beige colored, floor that we have on this lagoon. So that contrast couldn't be more stark 'cause I'm looking at just this beautiful backdrop of desert behind us far to the east.”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Thanks to Cole Cannon, lead developer of Revel Surf, the best waves aren't just off the coast of California.

TOUR: “It's a very transformational come from this very red rock desert to quite literally this beach oasis in the middle of Mesa, Arizona.”

(Scoring In)

BRIAN MAUGHAN: This is Built: Commercial Real Estate’s Leading Voices. I'm Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer at Fidelity National Financial. And we are riding the waves of bold real estate ideas for our seventh season.

Revel looks like a coastal surf spot, but it's a man-made lagoon and wave machines in the middle of the desert. Cole reads like a surfer but …

(Score Out)

COLE CANNON:  I love surfing. It's a very fun, aspirational, very challenging sport, but I'm kind of bad at it. And I think that actually makes me a little bit of a sympathetic surf park developer because most people are bad at surfing. I, I don't come watch me surf. You'll be disappointed.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Though Cole Cannon may look the part of surfer, that's not what led him to become the lead developer of Revel Surf park.

COLE CANNON: Don't tell anybody, uh, but I'm an attorney by trade, so I don't like to broadcast that too often. I just didn't have the focus to just be only an attorney, so I wanted to be a developer myself. And, I started developing projects actually in my first year of law school. My first project was a series of townhomes in downtown Salt Lake. And I've made a career of building projects that are a little bit ziggy, if you will, while everybody else is zagging.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: The zigging started for Cole early on - when he was a kid in the landlocked west who craved surf, sand and Disneyland

COLE CANNON: So I was just a Utah kid in a single parent home that always wanted to go to the beach. I had been on American Online and I had discovered this amazing place called Orange County.

And at this amazing place there was Disneyland and there was beaches and there was promenades. And it was like the best place I'd ever heard about. And I said, mom, we have to go to this Orange County place. Eh, we can't afford that son, so maybe later. It's a big disappointment in that sense.

And what kid doesn't, you wanna go play in the waves? I didn't have a lot of those opportunities, uh, in my childhood.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Fast Forward to 2019- Cole is a father of 6 young kids living in AZ. He wanted to give them the chance he never had and also maybe fulfill his own childhood dreams too.

COLE CANNON: I felt like I was built to do this, but it wasn't by accident necessarily. But, I just had to be committed to the vision that we all set out to build, which is something unique for the Southeast Valley, to bring a little bit of heaven to these kids who couldn't have access to the beach 'cause they're landlocked kids. 

BRIAN MAUGHAN: But rather than move to the ocean he'd always dreamed of. He brought the ocean to them .

COLE CANNON:  So if you were flying over at 30,000 feet, you'd look down and see this beautiful oasis of bright blue covering what looks like sand. It's technically a geotextile fabric covered with an epoxy lining, but it looks like sand. So it's this beige sand with this light and dark blue hued water lagoon. That's about 2.2 acres

BRIAN MAUGHAN: While the park is something of a dream realized - it wasn't just built on dreams, Cole is a savvy developer and saw that this was fulfilling a practical need for young families like his looking for something to do with their kids that the whole family would enjoy.

COLE CANNON:  I moved here from Utah in 2016 and I thought, man, this is the best state in the union, but there just needs to be more to do. Right? For us Young's families, I found myself commuting 30 minutes to go find a trampoline park, for example. So I live actually 15 minutes away from this project. Site number two, I, I think often of, you know, this life is short. You got one life to live and how are you gonna spend it?

A surf park, a beach that mom can enjoy reading her book in the shade on the beach where the kids are fully lifeguarded away from her. And maybe dad's out there surfing. I'm talking about my family, right? And uh, I just, in my gut, felt like there's so many families who have the same challenge that I do.

TOUR: “So I'm looking at a couple kids who are playing in this little tide pool. It's about 20, 30 feet wide by about 200 feet long, and it just creates a fun little swim zone. For kids to get splashed around. And I've seen little, little kids in life jackets that are nine months old, and I've seen adults sitting on our little sandbar letting these six inch waves just hit 'em, cool 'em off, knock 'em over. And there's nothing more relaxing than the sound of water. It's kind of euphoric, frankly.”

COLE CANNON: We've got a beach grill, we've got cliff diving lagoons. And then outside of the aquatic resources or assets, you have traditional commercials. So we have Vietnamese food, we have Indian food, we have, nail salon, a massage parlor. We have Aveda hair salon, also IV drip infusion, so it fans out to this more traditional shopping center.

Because again, we're trying to create a hub where everybody has got something to do, right?

That they're gonna come, you build it, they're gonna come.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Cole had experience with water-based development projects and saw they were a good financial bet.

COLE CANNON: So right before we started building the surf park, I had just finished building two water ski lakes with 58 homes on it up in Montana. So that was a pretty powerful introduction to aquatics and liners and the excavation and the water rights and all those fun things.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: But despite his experience, there was still a steep learning curve to get from lakeside development to building his own surf paradise. Cole describes the next phase as like two great foods coming together...

COLE CANNON: And I met a guy, named Matt Gunn, who's my partner here on the surf phase. This combination of this kind of peanut butter and chocolate moment of me meeting Matt, I was always interested in surf technology. I couldn't find one I really liked. He had some beginnings of that technology And he had been tinkering with some wave technology in his backyard. and we went and looked at it, we refined it, and we built the first model in his backyard.

It was a one to eight model about the size of a driveway, if you will. And we flooded his neighbor's house twice, building this thing. I don't think the neighbor talks to him to this day. I'm serious. This is a big problem, right? We've said, sorry, we've fixed everything. But yeah, it's still a problem.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: They had the idea but not quite the skills to execute it. Until they met John Bushey

COLE CANNON: You got Matt, the surfer, called a lawyer, and we have one engineer named John.

And John's brilliant. He's probably built more wave machines than anybody on earth, but he never built a surf wave machine. So one mechanical engineer, one surfer, one lawyer. And uh, we set out to build this, this project.

So there was a lot of this. It was almost like uh, building an airplane while you're flying it, you know, uh, most people have capital to just build the prototype first in a laboratory somewhere and then go commercialize it.

And uh, we took this little mini version that we had in his backyard and we biggie size it to what I'm looking at as we speak. It's producing waves as we speak.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: This is not your typical waterpark wave pool.  The waves at Revel are truly remarkable and, most importantly, surfable.

COLE CANNON:  We have two wave features here on Revels site and one is what's commonly known as a river wave, and the other is a traveling lagoon wave. So the traveling lagoon wave is what I've been talking about for the most part. you paddle out, like you're out in the ocean,

Here comes the wave, I catch the wave. I stand up and I surf, maybe 300 feet on this wave. It's about a 12 second ride for the surfer. Anywhere from 10 to 15 seconds depending on, the size of wave that they're riding. You might get people out there on the big lagoon riding a foam board for beginner waves or advanced surfers riding the barrel wave with more short boards out there, fiberglass boards. So that's the big lagoon. That's what most people would traditionally associate with surfing.

TOUR: “We're standing on a platform that's actually 17 feet deep below it. We've got 15 variable fans up there sucking the water outta the lagoon, the 17 foot basin that's beneath us, and then it just drops.

So the gravity has the water fall down. This river section hits what's called a hydraulic jump, that the jump is only about seven inches tall, but it ends up creating a three foot wave.”

COLE CANNON: Then we have this really cool thing called the river wave. It's a company called Unit Wave Pool out of Germany, and this is a 17 foot deep basin.

COLE CANNON: It's a 10 meter pool, so it's about 40 feet wide And what it does is it recirculates the water. So the water gets pulled up by some VFDs, some big fans, more or less, and that water drops down and it goes over a hydraulic jump and it creates a standing wave. So now the surfer doesn't paddle into it.

They literally sit on the edge and they just stand up and all of a sudden they're on a wave. Very similar, Two flow riders that you might see on cruise ships and things. The big difference is this is an actual wave, a deep water wave that allows surfboards with fins on it. So now the surfer can just practice his or her cuts back and forth, and they're getting 90 seconds surf time in one turn, and they could get 10 of those in an hour.

TOUR: “And I just asked. One of our lifeguards, Jonah, to jump in for us. So he is sitting on the edge, he's got the board under his feet and he's off.”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: While there's no competing with the real thing, Cole did see an opportunity in making the whole surfing experience a little more user-friendly.

COLE CANNON: So Mother Nature does waves best, right? I surrender to Mother Nature. She did it first and did it best. The challenge with Mother Nature is she gets to pick when she's gonna make waves and when she's not. So you could literally go weeks, without having a good swell.

And then when the swell comes, guess who's out there? You and about a thousand other surfers. And so all of a sudden you're battling with a lot of these surfers who can be very territorial. Every bad thing's gonna go wrong to all of our kids. They don't. But that's the perception. And I appreciate that concern as a parent. So I'll first start with the kids' experience, it's stressful as a parent going to the natural beach 'cause you just don't know what you're gonna get.

My kids rarely ever see me surf because when I'm at the Beach. In nature, I'm attending to them to make sure that they stay safe and they don't get carried away or anything else like that. in contrast to a surf lagoon, now it's fully lifeguarded. You get one surfer per wave.

That's a very important distinction from nature. And that instantly changes the culture. I'm not competing with you for this wave, so all of a sudden I'm gonna cheer for you.

I'm gonna give you a pointer. I want you to catch this wave because it's no skin off my back. Maybe you're gonna help and give me a pointer when it's my turn, right? So we're all kind of, you line up and then here comes John's wave and here comes Cole's wave. And here comes Matt's wave and we take our turns.

And that creates a, I think a, a really healthy culture.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Being able to control the waves - both their size and frequency, also make the whole experience more accessible for a range of levels.

COLE CANNON: The actual wave amplitude and the predictability of the wave is the other thing that wave pools are really great at, because we can produce the same exact wave 300 times in a row if we want. We have a beginner hour. The advanced people leave, the beginners come in and we turn the wave amplitude down. and that allows the surfer to practice that 360 or get that barrel right that they've been trying to do.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: For professional surfers who need to get their reps in, this type of controlled environment can be a really valuable and efficient way to train, but it also just helps any customer feel like they're getting a lot of bang for their buck

COLE CANNON: We want people to say, yeah, I got my money's worth. That was amazing. We find that the customer satisfaction is very high because we limit the number of surfers we have in our pool to make sure that they're getting their 12 waves per hour. We just wanna be worn out. That's a pretty good goal.

There's only maybe 10 people at most, and they just wait 10 minutes, And they're up again.So they might pay $70 an hour to surf on that river wave, and they'll pay on average about a hundred dollars an hour to surf in the main lagoon.

The highest amplitude of the wave, and it's only for about two or three seconds of the wave.It can get six feet high. So that's the highest moment of it. And then it'll collapse and then it'll, be four foot wave, three foot wave, two foot terminate, down to zero of course.

We also let kids and adults for that matter, get boogie boards and they can boogie board. At no additional cost on the leftover waves.So when the surfer rides the wave from the deep end towards the shallow end, they'll terminate maybe 50 feet from the actual shore, and then from that point, the little boogie boarders can get on and just ride the leftovers. And that's been a big hit out here.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: These waves are the main attraction were no small feat, or pricetag.

COLE CANNON: We had bought the land. I went out on a limb and funded what we call the prototype wave. We had built several million dollars of wave technology and I turned on the wave.

And we're expecting to see this beautiful six foot wave and we get like an 18 inch wave. I gotta break it to my wife, I lost our life savings, right on this little tiny wave. and what we learned quickly is that we built an instrument and we didn't know how to play it yet. So then the computer programming on how to control our machine is what made it a lot better. and then we were able to get that wave to push all the way to six feet, which was awesome.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: After the success of that first wave, Cole was off to the funding races.

COLE CANNON: Then I called some of my other friends. I said, Hey guys, I've made you a lot of money over the years in land use and development and everything. It's time to just hold your breath. We're gonna build a surf park. What? Well, what's a surf park? Yeah. Don't worry about that. Just, uh, you make the check payable here.

If you lose money, I'm gonna lose money. I  promise. All for one, one for all. I won't take it to single dollar to everybody has the money to pay back. And my dear friends, bless their hearts, they took that, that risk with me, uh, with their eyes wide open. And so we were able to get most of it done. So I thought to myself, now that I have this big lagoon built, surely a bank will come in and finance the nice stuff. The cabana I'm sitting in right now, the restroom buildings, the beach grill, the sand on the beach, the things that aren't very risky.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: But to Cole's surprise, the banks said no. All of them

COLE CANNON: 94 banks told me no. So we just determined there's no chance. We're gonna get bank financing to finish this project.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Once again, Cole called up a friend. Or...a friend of a friend.

COLE CANNON:  Then we went and got some mezzanine debt from yet another friend of a friend who helped us finish the project. And now that we're operational and now that we have revenue and are operating at a very healthy profit margin, the banks are lined up to refinance some of our equity.

TOUR: “So, to the south of us, we're building what's called a restaurant row, which is about 55,000 feet of restaurants, med spas, um, skate shops, you name it. And so we're very much in the midst of a construction site out here. Sure it's outside the fence, but the dust sometimes isn't, and the sounds aren't either. We do our best with water trucks to dampen that dust and it works pretty well. So that's a little obnoxious to deal with, but we all know that fun things are coming and that's all gonna compliment this beach.”

COLE CANNON: The whole project is 40 acres, two hotels, office building, 120,000 feet of flex, 80,000 feet of retail. That project costs $320 million is our forecast. We're about $120 million into that currently. The surf phase, which is the anchor of the whole project, which is only 4.5 acres. That's with the sand, the beach, the cliff diving, the surf lagoon, all that stuff. That price tag is about 42 million bucks. And we are a bargain at that. I drive the loaders myself.

I've laid conduit myself. Matt's been out here sweating in these hot summer nights. So we really got scrappy on how we built this thing a lot with our own hands, with our own team. And so $42 million is expensive as that sounds. That might be the least expensive surf resort in the world. And there's, I think about 20 of these worldwide.And there's only three of 'em in America right now.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: The novelty of Revel Surf is undeniable. But there's also been some pushback for that very same reason.

COLE CANNON:  People think, oh man, surf pool in the middle of Arizona, how irresponsible are you? We're in a drought, and those are natural criticisms. The truth of the matter is, the property, which I'm sitting on right now, used to be an alfalfa field. So when I bought it, it was actually very green, very lush, I did the math the other day, and we are actually, as a result of building all this commercial space, the lagoon, the hotels, when everything is built, we will consume 94% less water than the alfalfa field consumed.

If drought is your thing, agriculture and golf courses are maybe a better target for you than surf pools. Our surf pool itself, because we recirculate all of the water through our closed filtration system, the only real loss we have is evaporation loss, which is significant in the summer months, but very modest in the winter months.

COLE CANNON: And the equivalent, if you want to put it in terms of golf courses, basically the equivalent of one hole of a golf course. So it actually is very water-conservant. When you think in terms of what we call gallons per user. If you think how many users get to enjoy that one hole of a golf course, well, you compare that to the thousands and thousands of people who are enjoying our lagoon, the gallons per user is minuscule compared to soccer fields, compared to golf courses and everything. So we're very conscious of that. We try to educate our population when it comes to water. We care about the conservation of water and we're trying to use as little of it as possible.

Another metric I'll give you is to fill up our lagoon is about 4 million gallons, all in. But we hope to really never empty our lagoon, but once a decade, right? That if we're emptying our lagoon, something's gone wrong and we've had to fix something at the ground floor or whatever.

So all the repairs that we've had to do on our wave machine, we have actually done suBrian Maughanersible. We put on scuba tanks and we get in the water and do it. We can weld under water. We don't wanna empty this lagoon, we don't want to waste this water.

TOUR: “So we're over here at the Cliff diving Lagoon, and you see a little bit of construction out here to your west. What we're gonna do is take down the fence and build two sand volleyball courts. We actually ran out of sand, so you can see they're half filled with sand right now, but we've got more sand coming from Florida and we're gonna have night lights on.”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: When it comes to surfing, water isn't the only element. Sand is a huge part of the beach experience. So Cole became something of a sand connoisseur

COLE CANNON:  So I was a sand snob for two and a half years. I shopped for the right sand. I went to private islands on cruise ships and I took little samples of their sand, don't tell 'em, and I'd bring it home to my sand purveyor and I'd say, okay, we like this, but it's a little too dark, to get that right mix, that it's pliable enough that.

With water added to it, you can make a sandcastle. It's light enough that it's not hot. It's, dark enough that it's not blinding, it's not dusty enough that it creates a flume of dust that gets in your filtration. All these things you have to consider. Just when I thought I would never find my perfect sand, we ended up finding it in the panhandle of Florida of all places. And we get a lot of compliments on our sand.

People love it. Kids love it. Me and my partners don't love when the sand ends up in the lagoon, but that's just the reality. To see kids like, get buckets full of sand. Just take it from the sand and dump it in the lagoon. We're like, no, you know?

TOUR: “We're already being approached by high schools who need sand volleyball training. Apparently there's a shortage of those out here in the Southeast Valley, so we're excited to add that. On the east side of the lagoon over there by the river wave we walked by, we're also gonna be adding four pickleball courts under shade.”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Already Revel surf is becoming far more than just a spot for surfers, expanding to create a whole complex that caters to a wide community.

COLE CANNON: We have a six acre, 122,000 square foot industrial flex building that will have electric go-karting, bowling, movie theaters. a thing called KTR, which does Ninja Parkour, trampoline, skate ramps, razor riding, all that fun stuff for the teenagers.

We have two hotels that are not yet built, but plan to be built that go up against the lagoon. One's going to be 151 key hotel and the other will be, 144 key hotel.

TOUR: “We're looking at the Beach Grill right now. And the Beach Grill is a place that whether or not you buy a beach pass, you can come have a really great tacos, really great burger. So a lot of our guests are actually not guests of the park. They're just coming here to have a good view and have a good meal.

So our lunchtime gets really busy around here. Good music. It's fully mystified, right? With all these misters, we have shade structures on either end that come down so you'll get a healthy mix of people from the public just came to eat and folks who were on the beach for the day pass who wanted to come break from surfing to come have some lunch.”

BRIAN MAUGHAN: And if you thought, one surf park was bold, think again.

COLE CANNON: We're gonna take our newfound skillset and we're gonna go to McKinney, Texas, which is, north of Dallas. And just an amazing city council, economic development directors, they're standing behind us on permits and expediting things, and just been super supportive.

And it's just really refreshing to see this hard work pay off where people now can see the vision. 10 is our career goal. Currently that's what the team's vision is set on and to accomplish, that there's gonna be a lot of simultaneous builds happening.

I had a Hawaiian guy in tears, give me a hug and say, Cole, you don't know me, but you know my name's Malachi and I am terrified of sharks and I'm from Hawaii. He said, you know how bad it is to be terrified of sharks and be from Hawaii. He said, that stunk growing up, but you've changed my life by building this great place. Thank you. And I'm not taking all the credit. I've got an amazing team. I've got amazing partners who've talked about some of them.

So our goal is to necessarily build some legacy that people can just have that community, have those memories, have that reservoir and that's really fulfilling. That's a good life to me. Way better than building storage units.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: He hopes Revel will continue to expand to provide access and opportunity to kids like him - ones from the midwest or rural plains or desert south,  who dream of the faraway ocean,  but may never have the chance to get to the real thing.

This big bold dream of Revel Surf has made possible what he never thought would be. And who knows...

COLE CANNON: A gold medalist surfer from Arizona. I see that in the future.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Thanks for tuning into this episode of Built! Stick with us this season as we explore more bold ideas—like transforming a brewery into luxury housing, a non- profit battling homelessness in creative ways, and spotlighting more bold projects from across the nation.

BRIAN MAUGHAN: There’s so much more to explore from our past seasons—so if you missed an episode, go check it out! You’ll find Built on all major podcast platforms. And if you enjoy the show, don’t forget to leave a rating or review

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Special Thanks to Cole Cannon and his entire team. Also thanks to our location producer: Kyle Decker

BRIAN MAUGHAN: Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Emmanuel Desarme and Josie Holtzman. Our Senior Producer is Sandra Lopez- Monsalve and our editor is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

I’m Brian Maughan.

Thanks for listening to BUILT—where we explore bold developments in distinct markets, reshaping our BUILT world.