"We're seeing a lot of tires getting kicked by the Chinese"
/E. Scott Reckard of the L.A. Times says there are signs of a third wave of golf course purchases by Asian investors, this time from China.
"We're seeing a lot of tires getting kicked by the Chinese," said broker Jeffrey Woolson in Carlsbad, managing director for golf and resorts at real estate services giant CBRE Group Inc. "They only recently came forward and started buying. They do love golf, so it makes sense."
The influx is restoring the fortunes of some unprofitable clubs such as Dove Canyon, where Pacific Links has committed $6.2 million to refurbishments after buying the property last year.
The investments also mark the third wave of golf course purchases by Asian investors. Unlike the Japanese and the South Koreans before them, the Chinese are buying at the bottom of the market. But they are entering an overbuilt industry that has suffered from declining American interest in golf since well before the Great Recession drove many courses into bankruptcy.
As for better understanding the Chinese interest in golf, author and blogger Dan Washburn's book The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream is reviewed by The Economist.
He tackles these great themes indirectly, by interweaving the stories of three men whose lives were affected by the golf boom. One is Mr Zhou, whose rise from peasant to professional golfer is, as Mr Washburn puts it, “the stuff of movies”. Hugely talented but utterly skint, Mr Zhou struggled for years to make a living playing a rich man’s game. He travelled to tournaments on slow trains because he could not afford to fly and slept in sordid flophouses miles from the courses.
When he earned enough to buy a flat in Chongqing, he urged his parents to come and live with him. They would be able to rest after 60 years sweating in the fields, he said. Finally they agreed, and came and filled his flat with live roosters. But they were homesick for their dirty village. As soon as their son flew away for a tournament, they went home to their friends and their corn. Anecdotes like this bring China to life in a way that outlandish-but-true statistics—some 250m peasants have moved to Chinese cities—cannot.
