49 Photo: Apogee Club INDUSTRY GROWTH we are involved. Everybody seems to be selling their product, real estate, memberships, hotel beds, green fees. In 2021, operators were saying that green fees were the biggest part of their business, but in 2022, they flipped and said that member play was back in a big way. You can have the best marketing strategy in the world, but if you’re not getting out there and talking to people it’s not going to help.” “I think the market has totally flipped from prior to 2008, when it was mostly new courses and mostly real estate-driven, especially in the US,” says Bowman. “You think about the design firms that were dominant then, and those that are the top guys now, I wouldn’t have believed that change. Credit is due to those firms obviously – they do great work – but when most of the work is redesigns, it changes the economics of projects. It’s hard to justify a multimillion-dollar fee on most redesign jobs in the way you might on a real estate-driven course. Clients have seen that architects who are not PGA Tour players are doing great work: it is now easier in the design world to be a smaller operation than it is to be an old-style big shop. “The biggest win for David against Goliath was when Gil Hanse won the Rio 2016 Olympic course. He beat all the big names, and it changed the trajectory of Gil’s career and was hugely important in changing the trajectory for a lot of architects.” But the biggest boom of all is in a few select warm-weather locations in the US. It is most evident in south Florida, where a remarkable number of high profile projects are under construction. Prime among them are the Apogee Club, a 1,200-acre development near Hobe Sound, to the north of West Palm Beach, backed by Sebonack developer Michael Pascucci and Stephen Ross, who owns the Miami Dolphins NFL team. The first course, the West, designed by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, should open this winter: the second, designed by Tommy Fazio and former USGA boss Mike Davis, will follow, and Kyle Phillips is at work on the third. Not far away, Ken Bakst, the developer of Friar’s Head on Long Island, has acquired a massive property of 4,000 acres and hired the firm of Whitman, Axland and Cutten (WAC) to design 36 holes and a massive practice facility (as reported in GCA July 2023). Also in the Hobe Sound area, Discovery Land is developing Atlantic Fields on a 2,300-acre site, bringing its usual recipe of a luxury residential development – with homes apparently starting at $3 million – and a Tom Fazio golf course to Florida for the first time. Just to the south, in Palm Beach County, Nicklaus Design, along with a new signature designer, Justin Thomas, are at work on Panther National, another enormous development, spread over 2,400 acres, for the Swiss billionaire Dominik Senn. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. “There are at least 15 very high-end The new Gil Hanse-designed West course at Apogee Club in south Florida, a region that has more than 10 new courses in development, to meet surging demand for high-end private golf
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=