You need a residential development to get ahead in golf course design – and a PGA professional designed course

Golf courses around the world are more and more turning on to the idea that to be truly successful they need a residential development alongside the greens and fairways. The other feature many seem to be unable to dispense with is a PGA professional-designed golf course and the two seem to go hand in hand.

It is hard to say who is leading the pack as far as golf professionals, but Jack Niklaus is one of the most active. Nicklaus rarely competes in competitions nowadays but appears to be very busy on golf course design, including a course at The Cliffs golf community in Carolina. In fact Niklaus design has over 300 golf courses currently open for play and almost 100 golf courses under design. A full list is available here. One of the more spectacular courses is the Great Waters course on The Reynolds Plantation golf development, which was voted among the “Ten Best New Courses,” by GOLF magazine. This is a video of their development courtesy of Fairway properties, a residential golf property sales portal.

Graham Marsh and Vijay Singh are two other PGA pros now involved in course designs on residential development, collaborating on the Al Houra Luxury Golf Resort in Tangiers, Morocco.

Tiger Woods has now “designed,” several courses, one notable course being the Tiger Woods Dubai, a massive development with over 100 villas on the course. More often than not, the courses are combined with residential golf communities, not all of them as large as the tiger Woods Dubai, but many pundits are seeing this as the only way to make modern golf courses profitable.

According to Monte Stewart of Ontario’s Business Edge,

“The days of Canadian golf courses being built without housing projects around them are coming to an end.”

Mr. Stewart quotes Ken Fulton, the general manager of Baxter’s creek Golf Course near Peterborough as saying,

“You do need a real estate component if you’re spending multi-millions of dollars. At the millions that we’ve spent here, you can reap the benefits through green fees and make money at it.”