When most people travel to Cabot Links in Nova Scotia for the first time, they occupy their minds almost entirely with the golf they are playing on the resort’s well-crafted courses overlooking the expansive Gulf of St. Lawrence.
But Matt Welter started thinking of other things on his maiden trip to the property that golf impresarios Ben Cowan-Dewar and Mike Keiser had created on the Cape Breton coast.
“It just struck me looking around a place that was a three-hour drive from the airport in Halifax and wondering where the hundreds of people working there lived,” said Welter of his 2017 visit.
While that may seem to be an odd thing to be pondering at such a time and place, it in many ways made perfect sense for him.
For one thing, Welter was in the real estate business back home in Valparaiso, Indiana. “So, no matter where I went, I was invariably thinking about where people lived and worked,” he explained.
For another, Welter knew from the few years he had spent caddying after graduating from Indiana University in 2010, including a season at the Kingsbarns course outside the historic Scottish burg of St Andrews, how difficult it could be for a looper to find accommodations that were neither too expensive nor too far away from their place of employ.
Welter’s first customer was Bandon Dunes, where he built a pair of motel-like structures on resort property for founder Keiser that provide nearly 50 rooms with 62 beds for workers at an average monthly cost of $500.
Thus were sown the seeds for a business venture that Welter continued contemplating after he returned home. And that led the now 38-year-old Hoosier to establish a company called Dormy House. Its mission: to help solve the labor-market issues facing remote golf resorts by offering employee housing that not only improves their quality of life but also makes it easier for resorts to attract and retain workers.
Welter’s first customer was Bandon Dunes, where he built a pair of motel-like structures on resort property for founder Keiser that provide nearly 50 rooms with 62 beds for workers at an average monthly cost of $500.
That endeavor has proven so successful that Welter and Keiser are talking about building other such accommodations at Bandon. Welter is also in discussions with Keiser’s son Chris about doing something similar for the equally isolated Sand Valley resort in Wisconsin. And Welter will likely have no trouble finding other customers in golf, especially as the number of destinations being established in far-flung locales keeps increasing.
“These lodgings fill a desperate need for us,” said Keiser the elder when asked about the spaces that have gone up at Bandon. “The first two sold out immediately, and we are going to do more.”
Of course, Welter is only too happy to satisfy those demands, adding that his goal is to make Dormy House the on-site housing standard for golf employees in the U.S.
Matt Welter’s aim is comfortable, affordable housing for golf resort employees.
In many ways, it is understandable that he has found a way to involve himself in the game, for Welter has been around golf since he was a boy. His grandfather was good enough to have competed on the University of Chicago golf team, which practiced at the Olympia Fields Country Club, and played in the Western Open.
“My dad was always a good golfer, with a handicap in the high single digits,” Welter said. “And my mom was able to get down to an 11. I played a little as a junior but was more into the action sports back then. But I started enjoying it more by the time I was 16.”
“As much as anything else at that age, golf was a way to get out of the house and not be bothered by my parents about where I was and what I was doing,” he added with a chuckle.
He came to like the game enough to play club golf at Indiana, from which he earned a degree in economics and business. And after a rather unfulfilling stint as a sales representative for a beer distributor after school, he decided to caddie for a spell, first at Lost Dunes, located in Bridgman, Michigan, not far to the northeast of his hometown, and then Old Collier Golf Club in Naples, Florida.
“Old Collier had a lot of Irish caddies and talking to them got me interested in going overseas,” Welter said.
That led him to loop at Kingsbarns in 2013. And it was during that time that he learned what it was like for caddies and other resort employees not to have affordable housing near their places of employment.
Back in the States, Welter used money he had earned from looping to establish a real estate development company in Valparaiso that involved everything from project conception and construction to sales, ownership and management. Its name was Wayne Enterprises. Then in 2017, he accepted an invitation to join the Dunes Club in New Buffalo, Michigan, a private retreat some 35 miles from his home with a nine-hole course that Mike Keiser had started in 1995, four years before the first track at Bandon Dunes came on line.
“My dad was an early member at the Dunes Club,” Welter said. “And it was through him that I met Mike and then his son Chris.”
“They each cost $100,000 to build. And coupled with some subsidizing on our part, we were able to get the monthly rent down to $500, which was key.” – Mike Keiser
Not long after Welter joined the Dunes Club, his father told him it was time to plan what he called “the Keiser trip.” And that is what led them to make that fateful journey to Cabot Links.
Now a 5-handicap, Welter was an even better stick in the early days of his time at the Dunes Club, having worked his index down to a plus-2 and won the club championship in 2018 and 2019. And it was around the time of that second triumph that he first spoke to Chris Keiser about the employee housing concept he had started thinking about at Cabot.
“Chris loved the idea, and we were all set to talk about it with his father, with a meeting set up in January 2020,” Welter said. “But we had to cancel due to a really bad blizzard. And then COVID hit. So, we put it on the back burner.”
One day the following year, Welter saw Mike Keiser sitting by himself in the clubhouse there.
“I asked if I could join him, and he said yes,” Welter recalled. “And the first question out of his mouth was what Valparaiso was doing for public housing. I asked why he was interested, and Mike said he was having staffing and housing issues at Bandon. So, I told him about the plan I had developed for employee housing at just that sort of place.”
Six weeks later, Welter added, he was flying out to Bandon with the man who had created that destination. With that, Dormy House was born. And a little more than a year later, Welter and Keiser were breaking ground on those first two buildings.
“They each cost $100,000 to build,” said Keiser. “And coupled with some subsidizing on our part, we were able to get the monthly rent down to $500, which was key. There is nothing special about them from an architectural standpoint. But they are good as far as being a comfortable place to live, with one small bedroom and a bath. The real attraction is the rent and the proximity to the property.”
And they make things so much better for employer and employee alike.