If we can deal with the fact that the sun’s magnetic field reverses polarity every 11 years, we can probably make sense of the wild turnaround in golf real estate that COVID-19 sparked.
Endless reports about golf communities with falling home prices and no hope of attracting Gen X or Millennials turned on a dime as COVID set in, switching to news of a sudden appetite for fairway living. Jason Becker’s company, Golf Life Navigators, swung with that pendulum and entered, in his words, “an era we might not have foreseen a few years back – waitlists.”
The private-club side of the golf market has historically gone without much business support, likely due to its secluded and even quirky nature. Running private country clubs in businesslike fashion was the concept that inspired Robert Dedman Sr. to launch ClubCorp back in 1957 – an exception to the norm that made Dedman an industry icon.
“Each questionnaire covers 300 points of data, and 40,000 different people have completed it. We speak with great confidence to the communities and realtors, not just about how to market what they offer currently, but what sort of amenities and improvements they should have at the top of their cap-ex schedules.” – Jason Becker
Of late we’ve seen startups bringing various specialized solutions to the inefficiencies of private-club operations. OpenRounds, for example, is a web-based platform delivering a two-sided marketplace for private golf clubs and their members. The company’s advanced version of reciprocal play now serves 460 clubs and 25,000-plus members.
Golf Life Navigators launched in 2015, focusing on the search by snowbirds for a private-golf lifestyle that would suit them ideally, somewhere along a Palm Beach-to-Hilton Head swath of the Sunbelt.
“We were a lead generator for golf communities selling memberships and homes,” said Becker, a former PGA golf professional whose undergraduate thesis foretold the company he would one day co-found. Seven years later, GLN’s bootstrapping days are in the past and its service to golf developments – and the golfers aspiring to patronize them – are continuing to evolve. A turning point for the company came in 2017, when it completed work on a complex algorithm that works like a sophisticated online dating app.
“Prior to building it we were advising golfers in one-on-one phone calls,” Becker said. “Having the algorithm turned our business into something you could legitimately scale.”
GLN’s revenue is made up of subscription payments from country clubs inside community gates and from real estate companies selling the homes that surround those clubs. These are payments for the contact info of thoroughly vetted leads – people whom the algorithm has matched with a handful of communities it deems most suitable. On that short list are client clubs of GLN and non-clients – the consumer doesn’t know which are which and there’s no preferential treatment for the clubs that pay.
You might logically conclude that heavy demand for memberships as well as homes would cause those subscriptions to lapse, but working with GLN brings added value these days, based on the company’s emergence as a data machine.
It goes like this: To prevent the all too common situation of a snowbird couple buying into a community they end up not liking, you have to study what the market offers and translate those various qualities into an exhaustively specific questionnaire. The more golfers you put through that exercise, the more you grow and deepen your macro data about needs, wants and willingness to pay.
That stats-based guidance, very scarce in the golf club industry, is a key to Golf Life Navigators’ extremely high renewal rate of 85 percent on subscriptions.
GLN gathers the data, cross-tabulates it and presents it in reader-friendly reports that probe the collective mindset of today’s home buyer and membership seeker. In fact, there is a third revenue stream for the company that is all data, no leads. It comes from the highest-end club communities, those charging $100,000 initiations or higher. They’re averse to being listed in a computer-match environment but happy to pay $5,000 a year for reports only.
“Each questionnaire covers 300 points of data, and 40,000 different people have completed it,” Becker said. “We speak with great confidence to the communities and realtors, not just about how to market what they offer currently, but what sort of amenities and improvements they should have at the top of their cap-ex schedules.”
That stats-based guidance, very scarce in the golf club industry, is a key to Golf Life Navigators’ extremely high renewal rate of 85 percent on subscriptions. Becker credits Dr. Jim Butler, a longtime mentor, with the robust buyer-satisfaction levels GLN helps achieve.
“Jim helped me develop all the questions,” Becker said. “He saw deeper into the individual’s reasons for preferring one club situation over another. The word ‘like-minded’ is used a lot in the club industry, and it turns out you can get very strategic about defining that and measuring it.”
The share of questionnaire-takers who are interested in memberships only, not real estate, is a mere 15 percent, according to Becker. But in the other 85 percent he includes people who start as golf-only and gradually identify themselves as home buyers.
“People can be two to three years away from making these big decisions,” Becker said, “or they can be ready with cash in hand but nothing much available to invest in, as the market is currently. Either way, the communities are getting used to how well-matched the people we send them turn out to be. The last thing they want is unhappy members and homeowners.”
There are golf real estate developments all over the United States and indeed the world, not just in the region the company has been covering. GLN has, in fact, moved toward the “relo” side of the market by adding golf communities in four large northern-tier U.S. markets to its platform. “That’s all loaded,” Becker said, “we just haven’t turned it on yet.”
So, yes, the business is immensely scalable, and if you follow its fortunes you may one day see a golf real estate juggernaut operating globally, all testament to the power of a very good idea.