The dramatic rise of golf’s star has brought a blossoming of a new lifestyle in the last 20 years: golf and real estate.
Baby Boomers have it figured out. Why buy a house near a golf course when you can live on the course with a golf game outside the front door; however, it’s a relatively new phenomenon.
Grande Dunes Ocean Club
Check out the 100 top golf communities listed in Travel & Leisure Golf magazine. Only a handful, such as Pinehurst in North Carolina and Sea Island in Georgia, are even remotely historic. A few were part of the first wave of “country club communities” in the 1970s and 1980s, but most are much newer with at least half of the communities developed in the last dozen years.
Grande Dunes Firenze
Currently only one in five is part of a planned residential golf community, but three in five are currently under construction while golf-home prices are soaring. Rising interest rates may prick the so-called housing bubble, but developers show no sign of slowing down. Many real estate experts expect demographics to keep demand strong at the extreme high end of the market, even if there were a slump in the rest of the real estate market.
Grande Dunes Golf Course
The traditional golf paradigm…living in a neighborhood and pursuing the game at nearby private or public courses…is still dominant, but from the coastal Carolinas to Florida, master-planned golf communities are booming. They draw not only locals but also passionate golfers from colder climates in search of places to retire.
Golf communities provide a sense of endless vacation right outside the door.
The Legends – Turnberry Park Villas in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
A few decades ago, when developers were putting up the first golf communities in the Carolinas, the best that buyers might hope for were ordinary fairways squeezed between multiple condos. However, as soaring markets in the early 1990s gave Boomers a new lust for luxury, there has been an explosion of communities offering unbelievable amenities with a sense of endless vacation.
The impact of this trend may be to isolate the very wealthy even further from the rest of the world; however, for those fortunate enough to live in such places, there is the sense of belonging and the satisfaction of having the vista of endless fairways outside your front door.