Country clubs have exploded in price and popularity in the last decade.
In many metropolitan areas, club initiation fees top six-figures while would-be members join decade-long wait lists. What was once a realistic luxury for some middle-class golfers is becoming out of reach for anyone but the wealthy.
From 2019 to 2022, median country club initiation fees rose from $29,000 to $50,000, a 72% increase. In 2024, Rancho Santa Fe Country Club in California hiked its initiation from $75,000 to $100,000—which was double the $50,000 fee the club charged in 2021—and that’s before annual membership fees and monthly dues.
Inflation has been a factor in rising club costs, but a supply-demand imbalance has been a bigger driver of this growth.
Home Away From Home
The post-COVID environment saw a boom in the popularity of golf, with 3.3 million green-grass golfers added since 2020.
Greg Nathan, CEO of the National Golf Foundation, said the pandemic helped renew the need for community for many Americans.
The isolation and shutdowns of COVID led people to search for the so-called third place. “If home is one place and work is the second place, what’s the third place where you feel like you belong in a community of people? And I think that’s also had a meaningful effect on the demand of private golf in America is you look at all socio-behavioral trends,” Nathan tells Front Office Sports.
“You could say that private golf is a loose extension of that, in terms of wanting to be part of a community,” he adds.
Country clubs aren’t just limited to golf now—many offer tennis, fitness, and social memberships available as well. Golf memberships typically are the most expensive, but the demand for less expensive social memberships have contributed to more clubs reaching full capacity.
John Middlekauff, who hosts the podcast “3 and Out” on Colin Cowherd’s network, “The Volume,” says long waitlists are a product of the popularity of social memberships.
“There are a lot of people that have money that don’t play golf, right? So that doesn’t have that much interest to them,” Middlekauff tells Front Office Sports. “I think social memberships are really important and they’re way cheaper.” Younger families, who may not be able to afford the cost of a golf membership—or care much about golf—join because they want to use the pool and enjoy the other, more affordable amenities of the club, he says.
At the half private TPC Scottsdale in Arizona, Middlekauff says his $15,000 membership was roughly a third of that five years ago.
Running Out of Real Estate
Population growth in urban and suburban areas has maxed out many cities’ empty lots. Since golf courses take up large portions of land, it’s nearly impossible to build new clubs to meet the demand.
“You’re not likely going to have any more golf courses, public or private, built in any of the top 100 or top 200 [metropolitan statistical areas],” Nathan says, “because the cost of the land in those urban centers is too high, [as is] the cost to build.”
The supply in major cities isn’t going to ramp up significantly, while interest in golf will likely hold—a classic problem of mismatched supply and demand.
Out of Golf Digest’s top private country clubs in South Florida, only one new construction, Panther National—built in 2023—ranked in the top 10. The other nine were built before 2003, reflecting the challenge of building new courses.
Combined with increasing demand, the lack of space has forced developers to move further into the suburbs. Take Miami, for example: As the Miami metro area has grown by more than 800,000 people since 2010—comparable to Tampa and Orlando in the same period—the Apogee Club in Hobe Sound, Fla., charges an initiation fee of up to $650,000. The club, a new construction that’s partly funded by Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, is pushed 11 miles inland and is a 40-minute drive from Palm Beach International Airport.
“There’s a huge explosion of private golf and Hobe Sound right now,” Nathan says. “It’s pretty far from the nearest airport. It’s moving into land that was ranches and farms. That land was affordable for the developers to build the six or seven new private clubs up there, because they’re remote and because there’s so many people. The demand for private golf in South Florida is extreme.”
Real Estate Equity and Jumping the Line
High-value property and memberships are intertwined in many high-end neighborhoods, especially Phoenix. For example, Silverleaf asks members for a $400,000 initiation fee. The club sits amid the neighborhood of Silverleaf, and homeowners can add a transferable membership to the property value. This also means would-be buyers interested in joining the golf club have an added incentive to buy a Silverlead property—they can skip the wait list.
“I could ask for an extra million dollars for the home because you jumped the wait list,” says Middlekauff. “They’re coming from Chicago or L.A., so it’s worth it for them to pay way more to jump the line, because it’s one of those things that it’s like, you can’t really pay people off to jump the line just because you have money.”
