Housing Hitting the Links

According to the National Golf Foundation, more than 200 of 14,000 U.S. golf courses closed in 2017, and only 15 opened. As this trend continues, more land for potential residential development is coming online. 

The typical 18-hole golf course has 150 acres, generally situated in affluent urban and suburban communities. Lesley Deutch, principal at John Burns Real Estate Consulting, tells Realtor.com, "It's an opportunity for builders to build closer in [to city centers and other more congested areas] and offer new-build homes in areas that are dominated by older homes." Florida is home to the most golf courses in the nation, 1,150, and to the most transformations of courses into housing developments. Local developer 13th Floor Homes built two communities of 429 single-family homes priced in the high $200,000s on a "dead" course, with the first selling out less than two years after launch.

Goodbye, golf courses. Hello, housing? Nationally, builders running out of land in desirable locations to put up new homes are finding it in an unlikely place: "dead" golf courses. Golf has been falling out of favor for years, plunging from 30.6 million regular golfers in 2003 to 23.8 million in 2017, according to the National Golf Foundation, a trade group. Aging baby boomers are dropping the sport en masse, and many millennials never acquired the fairway obsession in the first place. Generation Z? Forget it.

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