The Week That Was, may 15, 2016

     The PGA Tour is bringing its “branded” version of golf to Colorado. The tour plans to establish a Tournament Players Club in Berthoud, roughly 40 miles north of Denver, as part of a 1,200-unit community called Heron Lakes. A group operating as Heron Lakes Investments LLC has reportedly broken ground on TPC Colorado’s $15 million golf course, which could have its “soft” opening in the summer of 2017. One potential fly in the ointment: The Business Den says that the developers are still “working on bank financing.” TPC Colorado’s 7,900-yard layout -- it’ll reportedly be the first new course to open in Colorado since 2009 -- has been designed by Art Schaupeter, who previously designed a course for the people behind Heron Lakes in Windsor, Colorado (Highland Meadows Golf Course). At an appropriate time in the future, the tour is expected to bless TPC Colorado with an event on the Web.com Tour.

     A New York City-based investment banking firm wants you to believe that Baby Boomers will soon lift the U.S. golf industry out of its persistent doldrums. Based on a survey of 410 Americans (Warning: Small Sample Size) who plan to retire within six years (Warning: Even Smaller Sample Size), Jefferies Group has concluded that future Baby Boomers are going to take up golf in significant numbers and deliver at least 50 million “incremental rounds,” whatever they’re supposed to be, to our nation’s golf properties. This is good news, to be sure, but it begs an important question: How seriously should we take Jefferies’ data? As Bloomberg helpfully notes, the survey’s respondents are richer than the average Baby Boomer, a fact that makes the findings unreliable. What’s more, as Jefferies itself admits, it “skewed the survey” toward men -- 69 percent of the respondents -- so it could “get more robust answers around golf.” So there you have it: Jefferies’ survey is merely a publicity stunt. Anyone thinking about making an investment based on such flawed data should be reminded that synonyms for skew include words such as misrepresent, falsify, and fake.

     As part of a broad-based campaign to inject some life into what’s been described as “a plodding economy,” South Korea is hoping to persuade its citizens to play more golf. According to Reuters, South Korea’s 50.6 million people already spend about $13 billion annually on golf -- almost $260 per capita -- but the government believes that they’d spend more if the sport wasn’t so darned expensive and inaccessible. So, to address those problems, the government is trying to reshape the golf industry by encouraging public courses to lower their greens fees and offering incentives to help private clubs go public. By taking these steps, the government has opened the door to a brave new world for golf in South Korea. It’s too soon, however, to determine if the nation’s course owners and operators will buy what the government is selling.

     South Korea’s efforts to boost golf participation may soon take on a special urgency, because Reuters reports that interest in golf in the nation is “plateauing.” Citing data provided by the Korea Leisure Industry Institute, the news service says that the nation’s 473 golf courses recorded only a 5.3 percent increase in visits last year, the lowest number in three years. Although such an increase would be a cause for celebration in the United States, it’s a disappointment for South Korea’s golf industry, which is said to have posted annual double-digit increases in play though most of the 2000s.

     This week, the European Tour added a pair of Portuguese golf communities to its real-estate network, a chain that now includes 21 high-end spreads in Austria, England, France, Germany, Malaysia, Spain, Thailand, and other nations. The newcomers to the collection are Bom Sucesso, roughly an hour’s drive north of Lisbon, and Tróia Golf Resort, a slightly longer drive south of the city. Both communities have 18-hole courses. Bom Sucesso and Tróia form a troika of European Tour Destinations with Quinta do Lago, a community on the Algarve that features three 18-hole tracks. Bom Sucesso features a Donald Steel-designed course that opened in 2008, while Tróia’s 35-year-old, Robert Trent Jones-designed layout has been described by Top 100 Golf Courses as “magnificent, engaging, and also highly under-rated.” All told, the European Tour has added four communities to its holdings so far this year, matching the number it added in 2015. The previous additions of 2016 are ">Lighthouse Golf & Spa Resort in Bulgaria and Albatross Golf Resort in the Czech Republic.