Correction: The joining fee for a 10 Fitness club is $59. The wrong figure was given this column.
Medical testing’s loss is a fitness club’s gain.
The 22,000-square-foot building at Cantrell Road and Rebsamen Park Road has been vacant since February 2010, when Axient Research, a pharmaceutical-testing facility, closed its doors.
That happened after a survival-of-the-fittest legal struggle between Jennings Osborne, the flamboyant businessman, and “affiliates” of the immensely wealthy, button-down Stephens Inc.
Osborne had sold his Arkansas Research Medical Testing in 2004 to those investors, who renamed it Axient Research. Osborne died in July 2011.
Club Haus Fitness is to open at that location in early June, said owner Stuart Walker, whose first Club Haus Fitness is in Fayetteville.
Club Haus (pronounce it house, says Walker) will hire 30-35 employees, including 10-12 full-timers.
It will fill the slot between the low-cost operators and the top-of-the-gym operations. The monthly fees reflect that: $65 for individuals and $95 for families, plus a joining fee of $99, which will be waived for the first 150 members.
Little Rock Athletic Club, Little Rock Racquet Club, North Little Rock Athletic Club and the Downtown Athletic Club - which are owned by “affiliates” of Stephens Inc. - charge quite a bit more.
The Little Rock Athletic Club, the granddaddy of the clan with a “quasi-country club atmosphere,” charges $85 for monthly dues for an individual and a joining fee of $300, according to Frank Lawrence, president and chief executive of the four clubs.
At the low end, 10 Fitness, as the name suggests, offers memberships for $10 a month for individuals, plus a $99joining fee and $30 annual fee, according to a manager at the Rodney Parham gym, one of six in central Arkansas.
The current Little Rock/ North Little Rock AT&T Yellow Pages lists about 50 forprofit and nonprofit clubs.
That, of course, does not include the LA Fitness club that is to go in at the Park Avenue mall in midtown Little Rock on University Avenue. The 47,500-square-foot facility is one of 300 in the chain. Its website says (for now) the joining fee is $99 and the monthly charge is $29.99, no contract. Courts and heated lap pools are included.
Well, what’s the fiscal health of the physical fitness industry, which includes about 30,000 clubs in the United States?
Good, according to the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association.
Revenue in 2011 was $21.4 billion, up from $20.3 billion in 2010.
This may surprise you: Households whose annual income is less than $25,000 constituted the largest segmentof health-club membership - 37 percent - followed by households with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000, at 18 percent.
Change in the number of clubs in the South grew 12.8 percent between 2008 and 2012, to 11,358 from 10,067- the biggest growth of any region - while Arkansas’ number fell 4.8 percent, to 251 from 263.
Well, is there room for everyone in the Little Rock market?
The association doesn’t address that, but it is pumped, saying that “new and mature clubs can coexist and deliver the support, services and value that consumers crave.”
Business, Pages 65 on 04/28/2013