Vital Signs, april 24, 2015

     Generally speaking, opinions about the health of the golf business haven’t changed much between last year and this year, according to Marcus & Millichap’s latest “Golf Investor Sentiment Survey.” M&M’s Leisure Investment Properties Group, which polled golf-industry professionals and prospective buyers, has determined that its index of investor confidence for 2015 is 63.4, essentially the same as it was in 2014 (63.2). The survey’s bottom line: “Despite concerns regarding the golf industry as a whole, investors remain confident in their ability to gain market share and improve operations in 2015.” Specifically, almost 97 percent of the respondents believe that the number of rounds played at U.S. public courses in 2015 will either remain the same as last year (22 percent) or increase (75 percent), while roughly 90 percent believe that initiation fees, dues, and membership counts at private clubs will either remain the same or increase. Of course, many of these same respondents also predicted that Kentucky would win the college basketball championship.

     Developers looking to build coastal golf resorts in the Mediterranean should consider up-and-coming nations such as Turkey, Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, and Montenegro, says a report by KPMG’s Golf Advisory Practice. Those nations are the vacation spots of the future, while old favorites like Spain and Portugal, despite their enduring popularity, are ultra-competitive and largely tapped out. “In the mid-term, we expect emerging markets to experience the strongest growth in the number of golf-integrated resorts across the Mediterranean countries,” the group writes in “Golf Resorts in the European Mediterranean Region,” its distillation of recent development trends. The future appears to be bright for resort development, because KPMG says it’s “witnessing a resurgence in developer confidence,” mostly due to continuing increases in tourism and improving consumer confidence. In addition, it believes that “residential holiday home sales will start to pick up again,” although it doesn’t say when. These are all good signs for “signature” golf architecture, which KPMG believes is worth the extra investment because it lends instant credibility to even the most formulaic resorts in the most out-of-the way places.

     Sigmund Freud once famously asked, What do women want? When it comes to taking up golf in the United Kingdom, the answer may be simple: An invitation from the men in their lives. A new survey suggests that more British women would start playing golf if their male partners simply asked them to. According to Sports Marketing Surveys, more than half of the sons of male adult golfers in the U.K. also play golf, but only a small fraction (12 percent) of male golfers’ daughters do so. “There could be a number of reasons why women don’t play golf,” the editor of Women & Golf said in a press release, “but I suspect that most have never been given an opportunity to play or encouraged to do so.” Women in the U.K. shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for an invitation, however. SMS says that only about 25 percent of male golfers in the U.K. “are interested or very interested in playing casual golf with female golfers in the future.”

     Although some U.S. home builders continue to believe that golf courses can boost sales of residential real estate, others are having better luck with less expensive forms of open space, such as parks and community gardens. “Doing a golf course these days for a master-planned residential community is a disaster,” the CEO of a Texas-based development group told the Dallas Morning News. “It’s expensive to build them and expensive to maintain them. And [they’re] way down on the list of what people want to see in a community.” So what’s at the top of the wish list for today’s home buyers? Answer: Hiking trails.