Webstar Hanging Forge Atlanta Hopes On Seller Financing

Webstar Technology Group, the penny-stock company vying to become Atlanta’s next major developer, may have at most three months to pay off the loan its subsidiary took out to purchase a 10-acre site in downtown Atlanta in the waning days of 2025.

According to a Dec. 12 loan document filed with the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority, Forge Atlanta Asset Management LLC, a partially owned subsidiary of Webstar, was given $33.7M in seller financing by McCall Railroad LLC for the sale of the Forge Atlanta site.

The purchase price was disclosed as $34.5M, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The loan represents nearly 98% of the value of the purchase price.

The loan has a maturity date of March 2, 2026. It grants Webstar a possible extension to April 1, according to the document. 

Fulfilling those terms may be a tall order, according to one Atlanta expert on distressed real estate. 

“This is, for all intents and purposes, an option,” said Henry Lorber, an Atlanta-based distressed real estate expert and head of Henry Lorber & Associates. “It’s a hope by the developers, whomever they may be, qualified or not, that they can put the two pieces together … to buy this property.”

At the end of September, Webstar disclosed it had just $7,789 in cash and $607,960 in assets, according to an SEC filing. 

Webstar announced Dec. 17 that it and its joint venture partner, Urbantec Development Partners, entered into a purchase and sale agreement with McCall Railroad LLC for the Forge Atlanta site. The site straddles Castleberry Hill and Downtown Atlanta along Whitehall Street. 

McCall Railroad is the entity that owns the site. It was previously home to the headquarters of Gourmet Foods International. Both Gourmet Foods and McCall Railroad are owned by Russell McCall.

The seller’s listed brokers, SSG Realty’s David Branch and Peyton Stinson, didn’t respond to a request for comment by deadline. 

“The current structure provides Forge Atlanta Asset Management the time to advance construction financing discussions with institutional capital markets partners, which are intended to replace the seller financing as the project moves into its next phase,” a spokesperson for Webstar CEO Ricardo Haynes told the Atlanta Business Chronicle, which first reported on the financing.

Haynes declined to comment to Bisnow “beyond the disclosures made in the company’s press release” when reached by text on Monday. 

Webstar will ultimately build a more than 8.4M SF mixed-use destination valued at more than $3.7B on the site, according to the Forge Atlanta website. Webstar projects that the development will produce $4.5B in profit and a 121% internal rate of return over the next 20 years. 

The site says the project will be financed using traditional financing and crypto tokenization.

Webstar executives previously said they are attempting to line up financing this year for the $756M first phase of Forge Atlanta, which would include a 300-room hotel, 600 luxury condominium units ranging in price from $750K to more than $2.4M, and 60K SF of retail and entertainment space.

Lorber said a lender would likely only fund up to 65% of the land’s purchase price.

“The harder part after you get the lender in place … is to find equity to do this. That’s the real issue in real estate right now,” he said. “The hard part is finding somebody in effect to take the risk … and I know any number of developers with pretty good reputations having problems sourcing equity.”

Webstar emerged on the Atlanta development scene last year when it announced its plans for an Atlanta megaproject before it even had the site under contract. In August 2024, it announced that it was pursuing a $650M amusement park in Commerce, Georgia, called Bear Village, which was set to encompass a water park, hotels, timeshares, retail and a 15,000-gallon freshwater aquarium. 

Even as the publicly traded firm was trying to raise money for the project, its deal for the land had already collapsed, an investigation by Bisnow revealed, a fact it didn’t disclose to investors until after the investigation was published. 

Bisnow also uncovered a corporate paper trail that securities law experts said was concerning, including SEC filings replete with spelling errors and executives with unverifiable résumés and a lack of discernible experience with large-scale projects. The company has also been working with a developer who was fined by the SEC for alleged fraud relating to a different failed amusement park development. 

In 2025, Webstar posted a net loss of more than $363K through September, according to SEC filings, and listed no income.

“I’ll be impressed, but I’ll be stunned if this deal closes and is a qualified success in five years,” Lorber said. “These guys, they don’t have pockets, and therefore I believe this won’t likely ever occur, but I’ve been proven wrong before.”