“When Mitch Steller first moved into his house on a lush 117-acre golf course in Southern California, ‘this was like the Garden of Eden, having a golf course in my backyard,’ he said. Today, his Poway, Calif., home overlooks dry, dead grass in place of a once-verdant fairway. The golf club closed in 2017.
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281. When Mitch Steller first moved into his house on a lush 117-acre golf course in Southern California, “this was like the Garden of Eden, having a golf course in my backyard,” he said. Today, his Poway, Calif., home overlooks dry, dead grass in place of a once-verdant fairway. The golf club closed in 2017. ...
For some, it is paradise lost. Lou Altieri, a 68-year-old who paid more than $1 million for a house at Kensington Golf & Country Club in Naples, Fla., in 2005, likened his initial experience of living in a golf community to being “on a cruise ship all the time.” When he joined the club, he said he was told he’d get a partial refund of his $45,000 initiation fee if he left. But when he decided to resign from the club several years later, he was told there were about 60 people ahead of him on the “resign list,” each with a membership that had to be sold to a newcomer before Mr. Altieri could receive his refund.
Forty years after developers started blanketing the Sunbelt with housing developments built around golf, many courses are closing amid a decline in golf participation, leaving homeowners to grapple with the consequences. People often believe a course will bolster their property values. But many are discovering the opposite can now be true—and legal disputes are erupting as communities fight over how to handle the struggling courses.
In 273 counties analyzed by Realtor.com, homes with the word “golf” in their listing description were on the market for a median 75 days , 14 percent higher than the median for their respective counties and 27 percent higher than the nationwide median. The median listing prices for these golf homes were about 25 percent higher than those in the overall counties, and the price per square foot was about 2 percent higher. In some counties, such as Palm Beach, the median price per square foot for a golf home was actually lower than the overall county.
Designed as a way to guarantee more cash flow for clubs, so-called mandatory membership can end up harming home values by narrowing the pool of potential buyers . “What we are consistently seeing is that those properties, all else being equal, are selling way below what they should be selling for,” says Ken Johnson, a real-estate economist at Florida Atlantic University.
When a golf course closes, it causes distress for people who live on the course, many of whom paid a premium for a location overlooking the links. “We all paid more money to have a golf course lot, and to have that taken away just doesn’t seem right,” said David Jacobson, who owns a home on Edmond, Okla.’s now-closed Coffee Creek Golf Course. After the public course was sold and closed in 2017, the Coffee Creek homeowners association filed a lawsuit against the new owners claiming that they have a duty to continue operating a golf course on the site. The suit is ongoing.
In Lake Worth, Fla., the Fountains of Palm Beach community in the early 2000s made it mandatory for all of its homeowners to become members of the Fountains Country Club, located within its gates. As the original owners of homes in the Fountains started dying or moving out, mandatory membership made it difficult to sell their homes, says Fountains homeowner Sharon Harrington, who also works as a real-estate agent in the area.