These are the general categories of equipment found at all golf courses:
Golf course maintenance is more complicated than mowing a lawn and turning on the sprinklers at night. In this guide, we’ll review important aspects of golf course maintenance, the chemicals greenskeepers use to treat turf, and the risks of falling behind on preventive maintenance (PM) tasks. We’ll begin by defining golf course maintenance.
Managing golf courses are a challenge for even the most experienced operators. Golf courses are a unique business where an artificial outdoor playing environment has to blend with nature and appear as natural as possible. Designing a course that makes golfers feel they’re part of the landscape while focusing on lowering their score is no easy feat.
That’s a diverse spectrum to handle, but golf course maintenance gets done daily at thousands of courses across America. Golf courses are far too complicated for single individuals to maintain. Larger facilities, such as championship 18-hole golf courses require a complete team to keep operations smooth and functional.
Top-Dressing Equipment: Top-dressing is an indispensable component in maintaining a golf course. Sand applicators are common and serve to spread regulated amounts of surface dressing to fill voids and help water seepage across greens, fairways and tees. Blowers and vacuums are also common top-dressing machines.
Maintaining an average 18-hole golf course – which is larger than 70 football fields – takes work and lots of it. The average 18-hole course may also have dozens of bunkers, a few miles of cart paths and many other course features. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of work to maintain all the different components.
Profitable golf courses are generally selling for six to eight times EBITDA, while courses that aren't profitable tend to sell at 0.8 to 1.4 times revenue.
In California, an average 18-hole golf course sprawls over 110 to 115 acres and conservatively uses almost 90 million gallons of water per year, enough to fill 136 Olympic-size swimming pools, said Mike Huck, a water management consultant who works with golf courses statewide.
On an encouraging note, Sageworks' data show that even though golf courses have negative margins, they have strengthened steadily since 2008, when the average net profit margin was about -9%.
“This means an 18-hole course of all short par 3s could be built on as little as 30 acres, while an intermediate length or executive course of 18 holes of par 3s and 4s would require 75-100 acres, and a full size par 72 course would need 120-200 acres.
Ways To Raise Money For Your Golf Course. The most common income streams are green fees, membership fees, pro shop sales, and food and beverage sales. While increasing membership fees or green fees might seem like a good way to increase revenue, it might put off more golfers than the additional income earned.
Water use varies significantly by agronomic region. An average 18-hole golf facility in the Southwest region uses an average of 4 acre-feet of water per irrigated acre per year. An average 18-hole golf facility in the Northeast region uses an average of 0.8 acre-feet of water per irrigated acre per year.
Courses around the U.S. suck up around approximately 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for irrigation. That's about 130,000 gallons per day per course, according to the golf industry.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. golf courses consume more than 2 billion gallons of water per day, and since one in every 17 of U.S. courses is located in arid and semi-arid California, our 921 courses consume a sizable chunk of that total daily.
Golf is on the decline in America. That reality has finally smacked us in the face like a two-by-four. The number of core American golfers (those playing eight rounds or more per year) has fallen between three and 4.5 percent every year since 2006.
The actual construction time for a golf course from ground -breaking to opening can be from one to two years, depending on the weather and amount of equipment used. But today it often takes an additional one to two years to obtain all of the permits and required approvals before construction can begin.
150 acresAt the individual level, an average 18-hole golf course covers 150 acres, approximately 100 (67 percent) of which is maintained turfgrass. This area is predominantly comprised of rough (51 acres) and fairways (30 acres).