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Huizenga Sells The Floridian

Thursday, April 8, 2010 Comments
Wayne Huizenga has sold The Floridian Golf & Yacht Club, his private golf club in Palm City, Fla. The buyer is Houston businessman Jim Crane. The price? $25.6 million, according to Florida real estate records.

Jose Lambiet has the details here and here.

Huizenga ran The Floridian like a true benevolent dictator. The club's approximately 200 members (who included Jack Welch, Dan Marino and Rush Limbaugh) were hand-picked by the Waste Management billionaire personally, and informed of their annual membership renewal by letter each August (how did you know if your membership was revoked? you didn't get a letter). Of course, the price was right: memberships were free and there were no annual dues.

That will reportedly change under Crane. Existing members (and new ones, since Crane hopes to expand the club) will be asked to pay a $25,000 initiation fee and $12,000 in annual dues. 

According to Lambiet, Huizenga paid $750,000 in 1996 for the land on which The Floridian resides. But Huizenga later told Business Week that he spent $75 million developing the club, which includes a clubhouse, three guest cottages, deepwater docks and, of course, its Gary Player-designed golf course. 

-- G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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Membership Group Buys Stone Eagle

Saturday, April 3, 2010 Comments
Stone Eagle, in Palm Desert, Calif., has been saved. The details are in this story in The Desert Sun.

The private 18-hole club, featuring the only Tom Doak-designed course in the Palm Springs area, has been shut down for about a month, and in foreclosure since the beginning of the year. But 14 people -- seven couples, six of them members at Stone Eagle -- have bought the club for cash. The story doesn't include a price, but recent reports said a larger group of club members was trying to raise $12 million to buy it.

Stone Eagle opened in 2005. Memberships cost $100,000, and the story claims the club had 190 members at the time of the foreclosure. The new ownership group has made no announcement regarding membership structure in the future. But local officials are just pleased the club has a future.

From the story: "The purchase and reopening of the club provides some much-needed good news for golf courses in the valley, which have been hit with dwindling membership and a drop in players as a result of the recession. 'It's terrific for the whole desert,' said Tom Cullinan, general manager at Stone Eagle. 'Golf is our lifeline.' "

-- G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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'People Are Cutting Golf Out of Their Diets"

Monday, November 23, 2009 Comments
Roger Vincent had a story in Sunday's Los Angeles Times about the difficult state of the golf course and golf real estate business in this country. Having read a similar version of this story more than once in the last 12 months, I would say there wasn't a lot that was new here, other than an update on where we are with course closures in the U.S. in 2009 (114 through September, according to Vincent and the National Golf Foundation, offset by 44 course openings).

Still, it's a worthwhile read, since it pulls together all of the relevant statistics and details about the struggling golf business, as well as focuses specifically on the Southern California market. Imagine, for instance, being able to buy a Los Angeles area country club of $6.5 million (as Vincent reports of Chevy Chase CC in Glendale)? You couldn't get a bathroom in Malibu so cheap...

-- G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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At Doonbeg, Business is Up

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 Comments
Doonbeg is bucking the trend.

In a tough year for the travel industry in general -- and golf resorts in particular -- officials at the luxury golf property in Ireland (which features a much acclaimed Greg Norman-designed golf course) released some very strong business numbers this week: rounds played are up 1,500 in 2009 compared to 2008, and overnight stays have increased between 45 and 50 percent.

How did Doonbeg pull off these kind of improvement in the teeth of a recession? The old-fashioned way: It lowered prices. On room rates. On golf packages. On membership deals.

Ireland's Sunday Business Post has the complete story on Doonbeg's strategy, and its results, here.

"Obviously rates are down, but we are still bringing people into the resort during the recession," Doonbeg's general manager, Joe Russell, told the Post. "The key thing now is value, and we have altered our offering and introduced more offers and more deals. The result is that we have remained very busy, albeit at a reduced margin."

-- G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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Nancy Berkley on the FedEx Cup and Liberty National

Monday, August 31, 2009 Comments
As I was following the coverage of the Barclays, the first event in the PGA Tour's Playoffs schedule, I was particularly intrigued by the "Deeds & Weeds" related angle: the host site, the very private Liberty National GC, which cost $250 million to build, charges a $500,000 initiation fee and (according to some reports) needs at least another 100 members in order to become financially healthy.

I thought about trying to write something up summarizing this side of the story. But then I read this column by Nancy Berkley's on Cybergolf.com and decided she had already done it for me.

-- G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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America's First Course Goes on Sale

Sunday, August 16, 2009 Comments
Oakhurst Links, a nine-hole course in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., billed as the "birthplace of American golf," is for sale. Asking price: $4.5 million. 

"I think I've been custodian long enough," Lewis Keller, Oakhurst's 86-year-old owner, told The Associated Press. "I think a new [owner] would ... be very nice."

As this story explains, historians credit Oakhurst with opening for 1884, and remaining a functioning course until about 1910, when the family that owned the estate where it was built let it go fallow. Keller bought the property in 1959, but didn't decide to restore the course until 1991.

Oakhurst is a throwback to the way golf was played in the era in which it was built. The layout measures 2,235 yards. Golfers play it using hickory-shafted clubs, gutta percha balls and mounds of sand instead of wooden tees. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

-- G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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New Resort Community Opens in Monterey

Thursday, August 6, 2009 Comments
It's been quiet on the new golf development front lately. Until today.

The former Fort Ord courses on the Monterey Peninsula, Bayonet and Black Horse, were recently re-opened after a $14 million renovation -- a good friend of ours played the Bayonet last week and said it was terrific -- and now comes word that a resort and residential neighborhood that is part of the project is set to open.

The Enclave at Cypress Grove is a 400-acre planned community that will eventually include homes, condominiums and a 330-room resort and spa. The first phase of the development is a parcel of 29 homesites, which have just been released for sale. Details are in this release here.

We wish them luck. Maybe they won't need it -- Monterey is Monterey, after all -- but it can't hurt.

-- G.R.

Posted by Geoff Russell
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Saving Verdugo Hills

Wednesday, August 5, 2009 Comments
In the July 20 issue of Golf World, we published this story by Geoff Shackelford about Sharp Park, a public golf course in Pacifica, Calif., that has drawn the ire of environmentalists who think the golf course is a bad use of the land and should be closed down.

As a golfer, I liked this story, from the Aug. 3 issue of the Los Angeles Daily News, much better: It chronicles the efforts of a Southern California community, Sunland Tujunga, which is fighting to keep a developer from turning a 49-year-old golf course, Verdugo Hills, into a housing community.

As the story explains, the developer, MWH Development/Snowball Investments, says it is willing to sell the 58-acre golf course back to the city, but only at a substantial profit. MWH bought the course in 2004 for $7.6 million. According to the newspaper, the developers opponents have said it wants at least $20 million to sell it back.

The local county supervisors have kicked in $1.7 million to start a fund to buy the land, so the effort has a ways to go.

"We're the last community in the city of Los Angeles that is the gateway to Angeles National Forest," Tomi Lyn Bowling of the Sunland Tujunga Neighborhood Council told the Daily News. "And we want it to stay a rural space that isn't Valencia, for lack of a better example."

--G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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Wheeling and Dealing in Richmond

Sunday, August 2, 2009 Comments
Read many of the stories about private golf clubs these days, and you would think they were a dying breed. Then you read an article like this, from Thursday's edition of the Richmond, Va., business publication Richmond BizSense, and you realize maybe the only thing about golf clubs that's dying is the old way of doing business.

The story gives a positive overview of a number of clubs in the Richmond and northern Virginia area that have managed to maintain -- and in some cases even increase -- their memberships through a variety of creative and flexible marketing programs. Among the deals: a waiver of initiation fees in exchange for a two-year commitment to membership; two memberships for the price of one initiation fee; and membership in two different clubs for the price of one initiation fee.

Stonehenge G&CC, which normally charges a $4,000 initiation fee, recently started a "Refer a Friend" program. Two individuals or two families can join at the same time and split the $4,000 initiation fee. Mike Cooke, Stonehenge's membership director, said the program has helped keep the club's membership at 490, just 30 shy of capacity.

"I don't think we're ever going back to 20 or 25 years ago, when people would stand in line to get into clubs because we had something that was very difficult to access," said Michael Persinger, the membership and marketing director at Meadowbrook CC, another of the clubs profiled in the article. "The competition is stiffer for the golfing dollar, the pool dollar and the tennis dollar."

--G.R.

Posted by Geoff Russell
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Golf's Economic Woes Make the CBS News

Saturday, June 6, 2009 Comments
Looking for proof that the golf economy is actually struggling? On Saturday's edition of the CBS Evening News, correspondent Jeff Glor filed a story about that very subject, focusing mostly on The Hamlet G&CC on Long Island. You can watch the video (and read a transcript of the report) here.

-- G.R.
Posted by Geoff Russell
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