"Golf-Home Owners Find Themselves in a Hole"

While the PGA Tour Commissioner sees golf as “growing and thriving,” the Wall Street Journal’s Candace Taylor details a growing crisis in the golf course real estate community world. (Thanks reader JB for sending.)

As younger generations do not take to golf or have little interest in golf course-fronting homes, values are plummeting and closures are commonplace.

“There are hundreds of other communities in this situation, and they’re trapped and they don’t know what to do,” says Peter Nanula, chief executive of Concert Golf Partners, a golf club owner-operator that owns about 20 private clubs across the U.S. One of his current projects is the rehabilitation of a recently acquired club in Florida that had shut one of its three golf courses and sued residents who had stopped paying membership fees.

More than 200 golf courses closed in 2017 across the country, while only about 15 new ones opened, according to the National Golf Foundation, a golf market-research provider. Florida-based development consultant Blake Plumley said he gets about seven phone calls every week seeking advice about struggling courses, from course owners or homeowners’ associations. He said most of those matters end up in court, and predicted that the U.S. is only about halfway through the number of golf-course closures that will eventually occur.

Growing and thriving…