Golf Course Asset Values Continue to Gain Strength

By Scott Kauffman

March 28, 2025

Changing geo-political conditions and talks of tariffs notwithstanding, golf course owners should gain continued strength in 2025. At least that’s what recently published reports from Leisure Investment Properties Group and the National Golf Foundation appear to be signaling.

According to a dose of good-news data from real estate broker LIPG, 2025 is shaping up to be another ‘seller’s market’ for course owners after four strong years of pandemic-powered golf and private club participation, revenue gains and investor interest. In LIPG’s 2025 “Golf Investment Report” released Feb. 28, executive managing director Steven Ekovich reported:

“We have not seen operations this good or average prides this high since 2006, the year before the great recession. Golf has gained back its lost territory taken by the wicked down-turn that lasted from 2007 through 2023, an unprecedented 18-year cycle.”

Fueled by these economic headwinds, LIPG said the total number of course transactions recorded in 2024 with available sales data was 92, which was a 9.5 percent increase from the previous. Meanwhile, the average sale price and median sale price last year were $6,870,417 and $3,025,000, respectively, accounting for respective increases in both categories to 38% and 22.7%.

The last time average prices were at these levels was 2007, and the real estate group went on to say “with continued optimism and momentum postcovid, both the average and median values have consistently trended upward (year over year) and are now more than double 2019.”

The most obvious catalyst to the increase in values, according to LIPG, is “improved operational performance but another critical factor we’ve witnessed on the brokerage side of the business is the shift in investor sentiment.”

“Golf has proved resilient in recent years and is now viewed through a much different lens than just a short time ago,” added LIPG associate advisor Kody Tibbetts, whose group sold or placed under contract more than $200 million in golf assets in 2024. “With popularity growing and attractive cap rates in comparison to core commercial assets, more capital is flowing into the golf airspace than we’ve seen since the “Tiger Boom” of the early-to-mid- 2000s.”

On top of the optimistic LIPG report was the NGF’s annual “U.S. Golf Facility Supply Trend” study, stating, “Golf’s Course Correction is Over.” Indeed, for the first time since 2022, the industry actually had net gains in the number of new facilities (6) and courses (17) that opened in America.

Meanwhile, the number of annual course closures decreased for the fifth consecutive year, according to the NGF, with the “number of shuttered courses dipping to its lowest levels since 2004,” when 63 U.S. courses went out of business.

That same year, the industry welcomed 150.5 new courses boosting the country’s number of total facilities above 16,000 for the first time (16,057) in history. Two years later, the industry hit another milestone when the NGF reported 146 closings and 119.5 openings, the first time the industry experienced negative net growth in new courses since the late 1940s.

Of course, the U.S. golf market had become oversaturated by the addition of more than 4,000 golf courses over a 20-year span from 1986 through 2005, fueled by a real estate development boom driven by developers/home builders and golf course home buyers.  When the U.S. housing bubble burst in the mid-to-late 2000s, the golf market followed suit – exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession.

That led to more than 2,000 courses being culled from the U.S. supply total during the nearly two-decades-long ‘course correction.’ According to the latest NGF report, the number of U.S. courses and facilities at year-end 2024 were 15,962 and 13,952, respectively.

As the NGF described it, the “current momentum suggests the trend in supply stability has legs’ and this “balanced state is an indication the industry has matured beyond its boom-and-bust cycle into a more sustainable phase of measured growth.”

What remains to be seen, however, is how the changing political winds and that dreaded ‘T’ word, tariffs, will affect what is poised to be another favorable year for course owners and operators.

 (Editors Note: A version of this story was published by the National Golf Course Owners Association of America)

The Club at Bella Collina near Orlando remains one of the top-selling private golf club communities in America.