Home on the Greens

Golf-driven real estate is finally getting out of the rough.

- Chris Rovzar

Wayne Swadron wasn’t looking to be near a golf course when he bought a plot of land at South Carolina’s Palmetto Bluffin 2018. Sure it had an 18-hole, par-72 course designed by the great Jack Nicklaus. But the 55-year-old architect in Toronto was more impressed by the area’s natural beauty and the breadth of other amenities. “We were principally looking for an escape from cold winters,” he says.

He wasn’t in a hurry to erect a home on the property either—that is, until March 2020. Once the reality of Covid19 set in, however, he hurried to start and now considers it the family’s principal winter residence.

As recently as 2016, developers of golf communities were doing so poorly that they were donating courses to national parks to take a tax break. Hundreds of them closed during the last decade after the building boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. But like so much of life since the pandemic, everything around the game has changed: A new spate of beginners has taken it up—the National Golf Foundation estimates that a record 3 million people in 2020 tried golf for the first time. Existing fans have been playing more rounds, too, while sheltering in place and working remotely.

That rebound has extended to real estate as interest in vacation homes of all kinds has skyrocketed. “Demand for private golf club community amenities and real estate is at all-time highs,” says Jason Becker, co-founder and chief executive officer of Golf Life Navigators, which matches homebuyers with golf course communities.