Want to build a golf course? Here’s how – and how much it will cost

Many things in life seem easy to the uninitiated. Scams. With a cycling. Giving a toast. Playing golf. And, yes, even for some golfers, building a golf course.

A beautiful land with a beautiful view, a bulldozer, 18 flags – what is so complicated? Top 100 in the world here we come! Thankfully, the accountant, spouse, employer, and so on will quash such Keiser-type visions, because creating a course, never mind a great course, is extremely complicated and fraught with risk—not unlike juggling chainsaws on a unicycle while giving a toast.

A world-class course can easily run into the tens of millions of dollars. Here’s a quick primer on the process.

CHOICE OF THE PLACE

Finding an attractive golf course with enough acreage (120 minimum for 18 holes) is difficult enough – but that’s just the starting point and will likely involve real estate agents and lawyers who don’t work pro bono. Then the question arises: Is it feasible? The answer comes down to the golden rule of real estate: location, location, location. It means, first, is there a market for your potential course? Is there sufficient demand locally, regionally, nationally or internationally? Research and perhaps specialist consultants can determine whether you are responding to a need beyond your ego or building a snowball for hell.

Then there is the location as it depends on the physical qualities of the soil as well as the growing conditions. Rolling hills are nice, but fitness involves more than topography. Soils, water availability, drainage, geology and vegetation must be considered. Oh, and then there are potential environmental and legal constraints, the local infrastructure and service provider situation, not to mention security issues and other potential obstacles and conflicts.

PROPER EXERCISE

Think you’ve found a winning site? Big. You will either get an option to buy the land or enter into an agreement to do so with a certain due diligence period. That means going through title insurance, finding out if there are any deeds or liens and such on the land. Also, site surveys to ensure there are no ancient graves or endangered salamanders to consider. Due diligence is an expensive proposition, involving several experts and often hundreds of thousands of dollars just to figure out if you want to make this long-term commitment.

“Development costs can be crazy,” says noted architect David McLay Kidd of Bandon Dunes (World Top 100 No. 85), Nanea (US Top 100 No. 83) and Gamble Sands (US Top 100 No. 100) fame. “Pre-construction/development costs are very location-dependent and in no way related to the quality of the site. You can have a great site that costs land to get a permit, or a terrible site that’s very cheap, or vice versa. But construction costs are somewhat linear. The better the site, the lower the cost.”

go-ahead

Presumably, you’ve already checked with the zoning board, so they know your plan, but you’ll still need an official sign-off on it. There will be a number of barriers to cleanup — related to streams, wetlands, wildlife and trees, just to name a few — at the state and federal level. Without being signed by multiple agencies, you will be DOA. Welcome to your new reality. For our developer, Trey Marucci, hard at work at the Bounty Club, a fledgling private club in Nashville, it took almost two years to get through the permitting process, which can be both patience-testing and expensive, given the costs of a structural engineer on the payroll as well as specialists to support the engineer.

“Making sure you’re doing everything by the book is one of the biggest challenges in the process,” says Marucci, who is overseeing the project for 8:00 Golf. “There are a lot of books out there, and you have to read them all. One regulatory authority wants X, another regulatory authority wants Y, and sometimes those two things can conflict.”

CHOOSING AN ARCHITECT

Unless you’re a DIY nut, you’ll need a course architect. How many plans you look for is up to you. Top names can be busy, and they’re sure to be pricey—anywhere from the high six figures to the low seven figures. Anyone you contact will likely ask for a pin so they can check the site on Google Earth first.

“In Donald Ross’s day, they’d put it on a train and it would be the first thing he’d see,” says Brian Curley, a veteran layout designer from Palm Springs (Plantation Course) to China (Mission Hills). “Nowadays, between topo imagery and Google Earth and the drone, I already have it figured out before I even set foot on a property.”

Assuming there are no red flags like, say, insufficient acreage or being in a FEMA floodplain, some architects will go put boots on the ground.

“If I know the developer is real, then they’re not paying for me to go look — I am,” says McLay Kidd. “It’s hard to get someone to pay and then tell them no. That feels really bad, so I generally don’t pay to go see a site.”

… AND CHOOSING A PLAN

Architects will eventually give you a (perhaps rudimentary) development idea, a budget (similarly) and a proposal that includes their design fee. Eventually, you will choose the one you prefer and sign a contract. At this point, the designer begins to put more flesh on the bone on all the various components of course construction—soil clearing, demolition, earth moving, materials needed, irrigation, and so on. From this, the budget is refined. The transition from preliminary design to detailed design is likely to take several months.

“Courses can cost wildly different amounts,” says McLay Kidd. “Just in the last three years we’ve built courses for under $10 million and well over $20 million. The main difference is the adaptability of the site when you get started.

“Including all fees and growth costs,” he adds, “$1 million per hole is a reasonable figure.

What increases the cost? Features, mostly. “Bunkering, water features and landscaping,” says Curley. “Those are the three line items where an owner can say, ‘Oh, no, I just need one basic thing.’ Otherwise, watering is watering, cart paths are cart paths, grass is grass.”

CHOOSING A BUILDER

While there are some design firms that handle both jobs, more often you will outsource the work to one of the specialty golf course construction firms such as Heritage Links, LaBar Golf Renovations, or Landscapes Golf Management.

You will choose one based on the plan, the architect’s relationship and experience with them, and the price, although they are unlikely to vary much. Things generally cost what they cost.

CONSTRUCTION OF THE THING

With hands? Hands off? Some degree of collaboration between developer and architect is always there. No plan perfectly reflects the final product, and issues and changes are inevitable. Communication structures change; some owners hire project managers for day-to-day contact, others get involved hour by hour themselves.

Sometimes it’s a commission. And some — well, maybe one or two — are essentially handheld.

BuIldINg

The architect oversees the construction team and will spend time on site — it varies, and the associates will be there otherwise, but they’re all there to read the plans and interpret them because, as McLay Kidd notes, “there’s a lot of interpretation. Some architects follow the plans closely, some barely follow them or it’s working anyway. And hopefully we’ll follow the budget and bring it together within the original estimates.”

WATER, POWER

“Where you start the process is in your irrigation pond,” says Curley. “Number one is: Where are we going to have water available so we can start watering as soon as possible? And you have to get the power to your irrigation lake. The construction process doesn’t go in a binary, yes/no way – it’s overlapping and interconnected. The construction schedule can only be about how you get the equipment. Many factors are always violent before the work comes: Dr. irrigation Because drainage is gravity You have to keep flowing a continuous flow.

SEQUENCE

This sequence begins with “rough grading”—moving dirt with large equipment—then moves on to shaping features. Which is done twice: pre-irrigation and post-irrigation, because after irrigation, the features must be joined again and cleaned.

“Once irrigation starts, it’s full-field suppression,” says Curley. Depending on the seeding window for grass growth—say, Montana’s is much narrower than Malaysia’s—and the time frame, the tension can run high.

PRAY FOR GOOD WEATHER

Weather delays inevitably mean an increase in cost; people’s time is money, and so are resources like bulldozers sitting idle. A good architect and builder will do what they can to mitigate such costs, but there are limits to fighting Mother Nature’s budget ravages.

GROWTH

Going from something in the shape of a golf course to a real golf course means growing grass. This is not up to the contractor or architect (who can stay involved, keeping an eye on the mowing lines and other bits of fine tuning). This is the job of the supervisor, responsible to the developer. It can take six months to a year for the growth to complete. And if you think growing grass is as simple as watching grass grow, well, you haven’t been paying much attention.