Thanks for sending Ace. Happy Independence Day!
Sent from myMail for iOS
Wednesday, July 4, 2018, 11:20 AM -0700 from dwayne-kay <dwayne-kay@xxxxxxx>:
SOGAGG Colleagues,
This article appeared today in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Take heart, SOGAGG
may always have courses to play on…
The best for a great Independence Day,
/Ace
========================================================
Golf course closures say less about sport, more about a difficult business
Citing the cost of water, the owners of Carmel Mountain Ranch Country Club said
they will close the course on July 8
Tod Leonard – July 4th, 2018
It is a headline easily written, but a story far more complicated to tell.
Golf course closes; game is doomed.
As the Southern California Golf Association’s director of governmental affairs,
Craig Kessler is in a position to see and hear that more often than he’d like.
“That drum beat about golf collapsing is just so much nonsense,” Kessler said.
“It’s not supported by any evidence.”
Kessler was on the phone, talking about San Diego’s latest loss — the imminent
closing of Carmel Mountain Ranch Country Club.
When the 32-year-old course is shuttered after play July 8, it will become the
seventh facility — fifth, public — that has been lost in San Diego in recent
years.
There is no way to make that a positive for golfers, who lose another playing
option, and the residents who will have to contend with their semi-green,
extended backyards becoming a weed-infested wasteland, with no clue what the
future brings to the space.
But the closings say less about the state of golf’s overall health — stable,
though not robust — than they do about the business market forces that have
changed dramatically in the last decade.
Golf around the country, and notably in Southern California, is experiencing
what the Suits like to call a “correction.”
They say it had to happen for long-term sustainability.
Everyone now admits developers went a little nuts in building courses in the
1990s and early 2000s. The appetite peaked in ’01, when 284 courses opened in
the United States.
Tiger Woods had something to do with that, and so did home builders who seized
the chance to sell entire communities on the merits of a golf “lifestyle.”
Home buyers and golfers gobbled that up. According to a Pellucid industry
report, in 2000, 518 million rounds were played — the most for any country in
the world. Ever.
There’s no way that could last — not with the arrival of the Great Recession,
skyrocketing water rates, rising labor costs and changing lifestyles over 18
years.
“We’d become accustomed to absorbing bad business models,” Kessler said. “There
were lots of waterfalls and $100 green fees. It took a while for the golf
industry to find its equilibrium.”
Kessler noted courses in population centers being closed for other commercial
purposes is nothing new. He cited Fox Hills Country Club in Culver City. It
opened in the 1920s and once hosted the Los Angeles Open, but was sold in the
1960s and became a shopping mall.
“Right now, if you own a farm or a golf course,” Kessler said, “there is
enormous development potential, and the value is higher than all but the most
successful golf operations.
“It’s easy to look at recent declines in golf, and easy to look at water rates.
Both are factors. But reality is that you own the property and you want to sell
it to make more money off of it.”
Pellucid reported — with an exclamation point — that 71 million fewer rounds
were played in 2017 than in 2000. That seems disastrous, until you know golfers
played 441 million rounds in 1995, compared to 447 million last year.
That is hardly a monumental collapse. It’s just that there are probably still
too many golf courses for the inventory of regular golfers.
Old-fashioned market principles are taking care of that. Just 25 courses opened
in America last year, while 175 closed. Through ’17, we’ve seen 12 straight
years of more courses going to seed than being constructed.
In San Diego County, I count 40 golf facilities with at least one
championship-length course that are available to the public. I include most of
the military courses, because they allow public play now. There are another
dozen executive and par-3 layouts.
John McNair looks at those numbers and sees more room for attrition. As the
vice president of JC Golf, which operates nine courses in San Diego, including
Carmel Mountain, McNair and his people battle every day, with every other
facility, for golfers’ bucks.
As much as golfers want to think of it as their recreation opportunity, like
going to the beach, golf is an ornery business. The profit margins are narrow
and some of the most critical factors are out of owners’ control. Hello,
drought and water costs.
“We need less golf courses, and that’s the bottom line,” McNair told me a
couple of months ago. “It continues to be the root of the problem. We probably
need five or six more in San Diego County to go, and maybe another 20 in all of
Southern California.”
Does he think that will happen?
“It will be a slower trickle,” McNair said, “but I feel pretty confident it’s
going to happen.”
It would be unfair to speculate here about which courses in the area might
close, but if you golf regularly around the county, it’s not hard to take note
of those that seem troubled. Start with this profile: brown fairways, receding
lakes, spotty sand in the bunkers, fewer staff, cut-rate prices on the golf
reservation websites.
Sadly, as we head into (more) months without rain, there are quite a few out
there looking like that right now.
It’s disheartening to see some of our favorite courses fade into disrepair, or
worse, close. They’re like our beloved bygone restaurants. We remember the
food, but more often the company we kept.
Golf isn’t going away, but it doesn’t mean the losses hurt any less.
