(Marvin Joseph/ WASHINGTON POST ) - Chris Broadbent and his wife Allison Broadbent relax with their dogs Roxy and Chloe in their yard that sits on a huge golf course in the Belmont Country Club community in Ashburn.
When Allison Broadbent and her husband, Chris, were shopping for a home in 2002, they happened to go into a development with a golf course and they happened to go into a house overlooking the course.
“When we looked out back, we thought: ‘Wow, this is beautiful. This is so relaxing. This is what we would like,’ even though at the time we didn’t know that was what we wanted,” she said.
They ended up buying a house along a fairway, although at another community, Belmont Country Club in Ashburn. Since then, Chris has become a frequent golfer. Allison and their three children (one each in eighth grade, high school and college) have taken up the game to varying degrees. But golf is only part of what the family likes about living there.
“For me, a lot of it is that I love action, people around me, just seeing life,” Allison said. “A wooded lot is wonderful, but I’m not one who can sit and stare at birds. It’s just so enjoyable to be able to go out, sit out back and watch people go through. You see everyone outside playing, being happy, having a good time.”
Demand for golf-community living helped fuel the increase in golf courses from 12,846 in 1990 to a peak of 16,052 in 2005, according to the National Golf Foundation, a trade association. However, the net number has dropped each year since, and by the end of 2010, the count stood at 15,890.
“There was a huge growth boom, largely driven by real estate, where golf courses were constructed as an amenity to sell real estate with very little concern over whether the golf course on its own could survive as a business,” said Greg Nathan, senior vice president of NGF in Jupiter, Fla. “They were going to sell the lots and sell the homes and maintain the golf course at a very high level during the period of sell-in, and once all the homes and the lots are sold, they’re gone.”
During the recession, all types of golf communities proved to be vulnerable, from the most exclusive gated enclaves on down, said Henry DeLozier, a principal with Global Golf Advisors in the firm’s Phoenix office. The firm analyzes and advises golf-centered developments.
Locally, for example, with sales faltering and a promised clubhouse unbuilt, in 2009 the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain sold its stake in the ultra-high-end Creighton Farms development near Aldie, in Loudoun County, to Southworth Development, a Massachusetts-based developer. Creighton Farms’ centerpiece is an 18-hole Jack Nicklaus Signature Course — with a golf initiation fee of $45,000. Lot sizes go as high as six acres in the community and, before the change in ownership, starting prices exceeded $2 million. Although the real estate is still decidedly high-end, the new owners have added some smaller homes to their menu. The Nicklaus Village section introduced in March offers “cozy one-acre lots,” according to the marketing material, with homes starting at 3,200 square feet and prices starting at $1.05 million. Clubhouse construction is scheduled to be finished in September.
“Developers have a tendency to be incredibly effective sales and marketing folks. They fill up their club, they sell off their residential property, then hand off the community to people who may or may not be sales and marketing experts,” DeLozier said. “It’s only when the community becomes troubled that folks start asking people like me what went wrong, and we say you vanished from the market for 12 months, 36 months.”
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