Pete Dye's golf course designs have the most positive affect on house values in the immediate neighborhood.  Residents of Ford Plantation near Savannah, GA, can congratulate themselves on their wise choice.

    If you care about nothing other than how well your house in a golf course community will appreciate over time, then Pete Dye is your man.  Houses in communities with Dye-designed courses have outpaced the values over the last five years of those by Tom Fazio, Jack Nicklaus, Robert Trent Jones, Jr, Arthur Hills and Arnold Palmer.
    So says a study published last year by the Longitudes Group, which specializes in market research for the golf industry, including the $10 billion golf real estate business.  The data, which calculated market values over the last 20 years of 1,800 homes built adjacent to golf courses, was published

by Golf Digest and Business Week.  The values of the homes were compared against other similar homes in the same zip codes over one-, five- and ten-year periods.  The study focused on residences at the higher end of the market, at an average of more than $800,000.
    Homes in Dye golf course communities outpaced other local homes by a whopping 60% in the five-year timeframe.  Trent Jones led everyone over the 10-year period.  Only homes adjacent to Arthur Hills courses did not keep pace with homes in the same zip codes; however, Hills homes in the southeast and southwest, where the designer's reputation is unquestioned, outshone the local markets by more than 40%.
    Hills courses I have played at The Landings at Skidaway Island, GA and at Colonial Heritage near Williamsburg, VA, may not have the same cache as Dye's courses at Ford Plantation (Richmond Hill, GA) and The Landfall (Wilmington, NC), for example, but they are every bit as challenging and handsomely routed.  Fazio, Nicklaus and Jones need no defense here, and while I find Palmer's designs to be inconsistent and often ham-fisted (obscenely large traps on his worst layouts), I greatly enjoyed his sleeper design at North Hampton, near Jacksonville, FL.
    The top architects are not getting any younger, but they are grooming their children to inherit their firms, so expect to see the Jones, Nicklaus and Fazio names on courses for a generation or more to come.  Other new architects will emerge, and if you keep your eyes and ears open, you might just catch the wave of appreciation that comes with a design by a suddenly hot name.  Among the candidates are names like Cate, Coore, Engh, Fought, Hanse, Hurdzan, Muirhead, and Smyers. 

    Besides Golf Digest and LINKS magazine, the web site GolfClubAtlas is a good source for information about all architects, living and dead.  For a straight-up list of architects, including links to their web sites as well as lists of the projects they have designed, check out the American Society of Golf Course Architects site.

 

Homeowners on Arthur Hills courses in the southeast have seen nice appreciations in their homes.  His design at Colonial Heritage, a recently opened 55+ community near Williamsburg, VA,  is one of the toughest and best I've played in the last three years.  The par 5 14th was a brute.




       
 

Some clubs, like Glenmore, outside Charlottesville, VA, know that their future membership depends on  a vigorous junior golf program, and that if they can get Junior interested, they have the best chance of getting mom and/or dad to get out on the course more.

 

    Mark Twain, not a great friend of golf, coined the phrase "a good walk spoiled" for the game many of us love.  Today, another of Twain's famous bon mots, about himself, are equally appropriate for the game:  "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
    The latest shovelful of dirt on the great game appeared in the New York Times last Thursday, under the headline "More Americans are giving up golf."  The newspaper cited statistics about fewer total rounds played and fewer rounds by devoted golfers as signals of impending doom. The overall theme of the article was that

"men" - the Times' word, not mine - find the game too time consuming.  The 21st Century man just won't spend four hours away from his house and family, according to the Times piece.
    As we political junkies found out in the Democrat primary in New Hampshire in January, when the polls wrote off Hillary Clinton but the actual voters didn't, numbers mislead.  Or, rather, what is true today may not be true at all next week.
    Golf is hurting a little if you go strictly by the numbers.  The National Golf Foundation reports those who have played a round or more annually have dropped from 30 million to 26 million so far this decade.  And the serious golfers, those who play 25 or more rounds annually, are down about 30%, to 4.6 million.  But if you take the number of golf courses nationwide, 16,000, and apportion all the serious golfers to each one, you have a theoretical "membership" of 288 dedicated golfers per course.  Throw in the other 22 million or so casual golfers, and the game has a great base from which to build, or rebuild if you see the glass half empty.
    A little negative hysteria may be good for the game long term.  Some member-only golf clubs need to be shaken and stirred to get off their high horses and use more creative ways to attract and embrace new members.  Times are changing, and the days of entitlement in the guise of "exclusivity" are coming to an end for many clubs.  Some longtime members will not give up easily their entitlement to just walk up and play whenever they want to, without deigning to call ahead.  As membership committees try new and creative strategies to attract non-tradiitonal members, they can look forward to whining about the threat to their club's private club panache.  They need to consider that, back in the heady days, "Never a wait" meant free and easy access.  Today, it is code for "in trouble, not enough members."   
    Here are a few ideas I've conjured for private golf clubs to reinvigorate their membership rosters:

• Start a junior golf program if you don't have one, or invigorate the one you do have. Do whatever you can to get the entire family out on the course.  If the spouse is a non-golfer, arrange for a husband and wife scramble event (Captain's Choice) where the non-playing spouse putts on each green. (No, you don't need to put windmills out there.)  Try other creative approaches to get the non-playing spouse or kids onto the course.

• Your course is not Augusta National or Pine Valley, so don't act like it.  Host "Open Kimono" days. Invite local non-members to play the course, for a modest fee, and their families to use the pool and dining facilities.  Have your pro give tips that day on how to play the course.  Promote the heck out of the event, and consider holding it a couple of times year.

• Make "deals" with local real estate agents to provide every one of their buyer clients with an attractive package of club materials, including application, a coupon for dinner and a round of golf with a member. Make similar deals with listing agents; offer their clients a reduced initiation fee if they offer "free" private club membership to anyone who purchases their home.  Check the newspaper listings of all homes sold in your town and send notes to new neighbors inviting them to check out the club.

• Instead of worrying about the local high school golf team encroaching on your course from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m on weekdays, encourage them to practice at your facility and play their home matches there.  They are your members for the future; and their parents are potential members right now.  The weekly items about the golf team in the local paper are constant publicity for the club.  And a rooting interest in the local high school's team could bind the club's members.

• If you have no corporate membership plan, consider one.  Make an initiation fee attractive to local small businesses to generate dues, which are more important to the cash flow and lifeblood of the club. Consider a Small Business Day golf outing to attract new company memberships.

• Develop an outreach program to the local community, and put your director of golf at the forefront (your golf pro if you don't have a golf director).  If you are hurting for members, do you want your golf pro spending four days on a golf trip with four couples who already love the club or making presentations to the local Chamber of Commerce and others to talk up your course?  Member retention is a worthy goal, but generating new members in crunch time is more important.

• Recruit your membership committee carefully.  If you have any car dealer members, encourage them to participate.  They not only know how to sell, but they will counter other committee members who see every creative idea as an attack on their birthright of belonging to an "exclusive" club.  Pay too much attention to these nattering nabobs and you will indeed have an exclusive club...as in just a handful of members.

• Less may be more.  If your club offers extras, like a fitness center or tennis courts, that a modest few members use, consider making some tough decisions to close down the money losers.  Figure out the distractions to management, as well as the financial costs, of the lightly used amenities.

• Golf community clubs face similar challenges of attracting new members, but they do not have to look as far for a rich market.  More than 50% of those who live in golf course communities do not currently play the game. Marketing and communication costs to get at them are so low it would be silly not to make every effort to promote the game to them.  Consider adding a new set of forward tees to make the game enjoyable to these newcomers right off the bat.

    Golf has a great inherent advantage over virtually every other recreational activity except, perhaps, walking and bowling (and does anyone bowl anymore?).  You don't need a companion for a round of golf, but you can always have one if you want, a friend or potential new friend, spouse, son or daughter.  This fundamental essence of the game is still there and will not go out of style in spite of a few poorly managed clubs, or the New York Times.  
    You can find the Times article at the Times' web site.