“Why is every good new course in the most obscure place?” “There are no golf courses being built outside of Florida, you’re wasting your time trying to do business on the West coast.”
You may have shared a similar idea or even heard these commonly-held beliefs thrown around in the golf business. Do these trends have any truth behind them, or are they simply unfounded gripes within the industry?
Downgrain parsed through the data to find out.
The Methodology
In addition to providing the deepest and most accurate data on existing golf facilities in America, Downgrain monitors all golf course development projects currently in progress.
We recently compiled a list of the 71 new golf course locations being built right now in the U.S. However, we did not simply analyze every golf course in development, full stop. To get a true sense of the prevailing trends in new golf course development – the headwinds and hurdles that come along with bringing a project from idea to reality – we focused only on the net-new places where golf is being developed. This is land that has never seen golf before, brand new locations joining the rolodex of tens of thousands of facilities where people can play golf.
So you won’t see anything about the bevy of new courses in development at existing golf facilities. But why did we exclude them? Because expansion projects are relatively immune to the puts and takes of development due to their operators’ ability to skirt established land ownership and zoning situations to create them.
Let’s dive in.
The Red Tape of Building in Blue States
Golf facilities are opening more in right-leaning, or red, states* than they have historically. Red states are the home to 77% of upcoming openings, compared to 64% of the locations already offering golf.
What are the reasons for this?
“These markets are seeing development because of good land that is available, the availability of water and less restrictions, which make for easier permitting,” Kemper-Sports CEO Steve Skinner recently told Golf Inc. Magazine.
Left-leaning, or blue, states have historically been more challenging places for golf course builders to build in. Environmental conservation is more of a key issue for blue voters, and in turn is of more interest to state and local government officials. Consider the unwelcome hurdles for builders that that brings:
- As Skinner alluded to, environmental reviews in blue states are likely more thorough and permitting processes are more rigorous, making projects more cumbersome.
- In regions where rainfall is sparse, like California and Colorado, the cost of water, due to scarcity, as well as scrutiny on water usage, are higher.
This has been the case for quite some time, too. Going back to at least 1992, California stood head and shoulders above states like Texas and Louisiana in Golf Course News’ survey of the most difficult states to obtain proper permits to build. Even legendary course architects Robert Trent Jones and Pete Dye lamented the difficulty in getting a green light to build new courses in the Golden State. Jones, a California resident, commented that “it’s brutal to get anything built there. It’s 60-percent open space, but that doesn’t matter to the environmental movement.”
All of this is to say, opening a new course in California instead of Texas is less strategically and economically viable, as builders face higher costs and a more uphill battle in getting a project off the ground – or in the ground.
* Measured by whether states cast their electoral votes in the 2024 Presidential Election for the Republican (red) or Democratic (blue) nominee.
Where are These Courses You Speak Of?
Depending on who you ask, you might buy into the idea that new courses are only opening in the middle of nowhere. Fried Egg Golf readers may remember this article, which concludes that “the 2020s have been overloaded with new, far-flung private clubs trying to be the next Sand Hills or Ohoopee.”
Overloaded? Maybe. But is that really all that’s being built? Has the development of new golf sites pivoted entirely to remote locales? The data says … not quite. In fact, it shows that new builds are moving in the opposite direction and becoming more urban and suburban.
Is that due to an increase in new facilities in metropolitan areas, or simply a decrease in new courses in remote regions?
Why is that?
The pandemic-era golf boom concentrated golf demand in urban and suburban areas, which made metro development more attractive, with higher population density driving more consistent utilization. At the same time, we’re seeing a disappearance of the legacy archetype, the small-town daily-fee or municipal course. These are typically 18-hole layouts in low-density markets, with limited competition but also thin, hard-to-predict demand, aging infrastructure, and frequent reliance on subsidies. New development has started to favor compact formats like par-3 courses, often only 9 or 12 holes, which better fit the footprints available within metro areas.
Some other interesting takeaways:
- The percentage of new golf facilities opening in U.S. metropolitan areas is actually higher than what currently exists. Right now, there are 2.7 golf facilities within metro areas for every golf property outside of a metro area; in the new set of golf facilities, the ratio is actually 3.1. That’s growth of more than 15%.
- Of the 30 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, just nine have a new golf site in development (16 new sites). And the only one of those courses that will be open to the public is the semi-private Storm King Golf Course in Westchester County, outside New York City.
The Grass is Greener
If you were to think about a Venn diagram of U.S. regions that are A) warm weather, B) right-leaning, and C) heavily populated, you’d probably start with the Southeast and the South.
So it’s no surprise that the Southeast region has the highest number of new golf facilities set to open in Downgrain’s dataset, with most of these in either Florida (10) or South Carolina (7). The South region has the second-most facilities in development, and 14 of the 16 are in Texas.
There are several reasons why these regions might need even more golf courses.
First, new golf course locations seem to be following the same pattern as domestic net migration. The 2023 U.S. Census showed that Florida had the highest net domestic migration (from 2006-2019), with nearly 150,000 more people moving in than moving out. Sure enough, Texas ranks second, with more than a 100,000-resident upswing.
Florida has long been a retirement destination, and retirees play lots of golf. Meanwhile, the Lone Star State is a golf hotspot and becoming more so, with the PGA of America even moving its headquarters to Frisco in 2018.
Most of the courses on the heavily populated northeastern seaboard shut down for the winter, pushing many avid golfers and snowbirds to make their way to warmer locations to get their golf fix. With short, direct, and often very affordable flights, the most accessible destination is the Southeast.
While data isn’t conclusive about whether true snowbirding is meaningfully growing in popularity, there’s yet another trend at play: the pandemic-created shift in remote work has enabled more people in their 40s and early 50s to spend time in warm-weather states, especially ones like Florida and Texas that don’t collect income taxes.
Following the Money
While we may have debunked the theory that new builds are only in remote places, we can’t do the same for the sentiment that most new golf facilities are private clubs.
Golf’s reputation as an old-money sport looks like it’s here to stay. The reality is a majority of the new golf facilities are opening as private clubs, and even the courses open to the public are increasingly hosted at resorts.
The economics of golf have long dictated that private courses are significantly more profitable to operators than public courses. Beyond that, the path to fundraising tends to be easier, as capital can be raised at the outset of the project rather than from daily fees charged once it’s opened.
Efforts to grow access to golf have been largely successful, but like most things in our society, the game will always go where the money is.
So if you believe your product or service will make a new golf construction project easier, you can count on Downgrain to show you where to look. Learn more about the data in the Downgrain platform today.