Cliffs Communities founder Jim Anthony was one of the 40 friends of Tiger Woods invited to the fallen star’s mea culpa session on Friday.  Anthony has been extremely generous in his comments about Woods since the Thanksgiving night accident that precipitated the unraveling of the golfer’s reputation.  No one in the room at PGA headquarters, save for Woods, may have more at stake than Anthony as Woods seeks to repair his personal life and prepare to return to competitive golf.  Anthony has asked his property owners to provide up to $100 million to help him finish the Woods course and other amenities at High Carolina, and the golfer’s continued participation in marketing the community, as well as designing the course, is critical.

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        Residential construction costs in the southern U.S. are much lower than a few years ago for a few good reasons:  Builders are trying to keep their workers employed and their cash flowing; and material costs are at their lowest in years because demand is so far down.  I met with a realtor at the Currituck Club on the Outer Banks of North Carolina last week, and he told me homes in the area are being built for between $120 and $140 a square foot, compared with as much as $220 in 2006.  I have had similar conversations with realtors and developers throughout the southeast, and they report similar numbers.  A new 3,000 square foot house, dressed to the nines, should not top $500,000 to build.  With developer and resale lots at their lowest prices in 10 years, the total cost of a new home is competitive with even the most aggressively priced resale homes.

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        Take an outstanding Rees Jones 27-hole golf course, a 3 BR “craftsman” cottage with views of the course and a lagoon with the clubhouse beyond, a short golf cart ride to the beach, and free golf membership, and you might expect to pay as much as $1 million.  Now put all that on an island reached only by ferry, and how about the entire package for $399,000?  That is the price of the described home at Haig Point, on Daufuskie Island, where prices continue to fall.  If island living is for you, you may never find a better deal than that...except elsewhere on Daufuskie.  Contact me if you are interested.

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        Some of our favorite towns in the southeast are on the BestBoomerTowns.com list of "Top Places to Live."  They include:  Aiken, SC; Asheville, NC; Athens, GA; Chapel Hill, NC; Charlottesville, VA; and Pinehurst, NC.  I have visited golf communities and played the golf courses in all these areas and would be happy to make some recommendations about the best ones in the area.  Contact me, and I will be happy to furnish you with some ideas.

        Tiger Woods said all the right things at his non press conference on Friday…and then some.  We would have all been okay with just five minutes of scripted mea culpas and without his righteous indignation about the media, which seemed out of place and hypocritical.  After all, until the accident and bimbo eruptions, Woods owed his privacy and his “Privacy” (the huge yacht and symbol of his wealth) in large measure to the media’s free and adoring promotion.  Some members of the media, according to reports, were aware long before Thanksgiving night of Woods' extra curricula passion, and they knew it wasn’t hiking the Appalachian Trail.  The accident, and the National Enquirer, forced their hand.

        During the tightly choreographed conference with 40 of his close friends and a few hand-selected media representatives, the main

        One of Woods’ female employees cried during the presentation.  Was it her boss’ words, or regrets she hadn’t said something to him during his years of debauchery, or guilt for possibly having been the handler who bought an airline ticket for one of Woods mistresses to fly to Australia to be with him?  Is there a clinic and therapy for enabler addictions?

        In a few weeks, Woods will emerge from his sex addiction therapy and declare himself a new man.  Waiting for him, like a faithful girlfriend just outside the prison gates, will be his coterie of enablers.  If ever there was a public figure defined by the company he keeps, it is Eldrick “Tiger” Woods.  He will not truly be cured until he fires the lot of them.

        Cliffs Communities developer Jim Anthony is trying to persuade his property owners that they should help him finance the Tiger Woods golf course and other amenities at High Carolina, the latest in his string of communities.  In two years, The Cliffs

        Recent public comments by Mr. Anthony are not going to make his fundraising job any easier.

        “We hired Tiger for his expertise, not his endorsement,” Anthony told GSA Business, a Greenville, SC, area publication.

        Any observer with a modicum of common sense knows that Tiger was hired precisely for his endorsement power, not his design ability, which is totally unproven.  Consider that:

        1) No one has played a Tiger Woods designed course yet; all three have been held up for a grab bag of financial and environmental reasons.

        2) Unlike Jack Nicklaus and other current and former players turned golf architect, Woods has not apprenticed with a professional golf designer.  And…

        3) The Cliffs’ web site features a video of Woods and Anthony talking as much about the community as they do the golf course.  Woods talks about looking forward to bringing his family to High Carolina.

        One Cliffs owner told me that since he is not a golfer, Anthony may have an untutored notion of “expertise” in golf design.  He may think that a great player is, by definition, a great designer.  But he hired the highly experienced Jack Nicklaus and Tom Fazio for their designs at other Cliffs Communities and paid them millions of dollars less than the $20 million he reportedly paid Woods.  (Nicklaus and Fazio typically charge $2 million in design fees.)

        Cliffs property owners are praising Anthony for “opening up the books” in order to persuade them that the bond he is floating -– at 12% annually for seven years –- is not good money after bad.  The Anthony/Woods agreement may prevent public disclosure of the fee and related details, but before Cliffs residents entrust $100,000 or more each to their developer, they need to ask some very hard questions about why High Carolina must be finished now, and why a post-scandal Woods will help sell more properties than the pre-scandal phenom did.

        At the annual meeting of the property owners association of Pawleys Plantation last week, the biggest controversy was over whether to sign up for a three- or 10-year contract with the cable television company (the 10-year contract would have saved everyone about $4 per month).  After about 15 minutes of discussion, it occurred to one of the members of the Pawleys Island, SC, community's board that one of the property owners, a cable TV executive from Canada, was sitting in the first row.  They invited him to address the question.

        “The technology is changing so fast,” he told the more than 200 property owners in attendance, “that it may not make sense to lock yourself into a long contract” to save a few dollars a year.

        The spontaneous applause told the board all it needed.  They will be signing the three-year contract.

        The incident is a good reminder that much expertise is lying in the weeds in planned developments, and that boards would do well to tap the inventory of knowledge and experience of their own residents. 

        That not only makes good sense; it is also good governance.