Want to build a golf course? Here’s how — and what it will cost

So many things in life seem easy to the uninitiated. Juggling. Unicycling. Giving a toast. Playing golf. And, yes, to some golfers even, building a golf course.

A nice piece of land with pretty views, a bulldozer, 18 flags — what’s so complicated? World Top 100 here we come! Thankfully, your accountant, spouse, employer and so on will quash such Keiser-esque visions, because creating any course, never mind a great one, is hugely complex and fraught with danger — not unlike juggling chain saws on a unicycle while giving a toast.

A world-class course can easily run into the tens of millions of dollars. Here’s a quick primer on the process.

SITE SELECTION

Finding an enticing piece of land for golf with sufficient acreage (120 minimum for 18 holes) is tough enough — but that’s just the starting point and likely involves real estate brokers and lawyers, who don’t work pro bono. The question then becomes: Is it feasible? The answer comes down to the golden rule of real estate: location, location, location. Meaning, firstly, is there a market for your would-be course? Is there sufficient demand locally, regionally, nationally or internationally? Research and possibly specialist consultants can determine if you’re answering a need beyond your ego or building a snowball for hell.

Then there’s location as it bears on the physical qualities of the land as well as growing conditions. Rolling hills are nice, but suitability involves more than topography. Soils, water availability, drainage, geology and vegetation must be considered. Oh, and then there’s potential environmental and legal restrictions, the local infrastructure and service provider situation, never mind safety issues and other possible hurdles and conflicts.

DUE DILIGENCE

Think you’ve found a winning site? Great. You’ll likely either acquire an option to purchase the land or make an agreement to do so with a specified due diligence period. That means going through title insurance, figuring out if there are any deeds or liens and such on the land. Also, site surveys to make sure there aren’t ancient burial grounds or endangered salamanders to consider. Due diligence is an expensive proposition, involving several experts and often hundreds of thousands of dollars just to figure out if you want to make this long-term commitment.

“Development costs can be insane,” says renowned architect David McLay Kidd of Bandon Dunes (Top 100 World No. 85), Nanea (Top 100 U.S. No. 83) and Gamble Sands (Top 100 U.S. No. 100) fame. “Pre-construction/development costs are very location dependent and in no way associated with the quality of the site. You could have a great site that costs the earth to get a permit, or a terrible site that’s supercheap, or vice versa. But the construction costs are somewhat linear. The better the site, the lower the cost.”

PERMITTING

Presumably, you’ve checked with the zoning board already, so it knows your plan, but you’ll still need an official sign-off on it. There will be a number of permitting hurdles to clear — related to streams, wetlands, wildlife and trees, just to name a few — at both the state and federal level. Without sign-off from multiple agencies, you will be DOA. Welcome to your new reality. For our developer, Trey Marucci, hard at work on Bounty Club, a nascent private club in Nashville, it took almost two years to go through the permitting process, which can be patience-testing and expensive too, given the costs of a civil engineer on the payroll as well as specialists to support the engineer.

“Making sure you’re doing everything by the book is one of the biggest challenges in the process,” says Marucci, who is overseeing the project for 8AM Golf. “There are a lot of books out there, and you must read them all. One regulatory authority wants X, the other regulatory authority wants Y, and sometimes those two things might be in conflict.”

PICKING AN ARCHITECT

Unless you’re a DIY lunatic, you’ll require a course architect. How many you solicit plans from is up to you. The top names might well be busy, and they’ll for sure be pricey — anywhere from the high six figures to the low(ish) seven figures. Anyone you do contact will likely ask for a pin so they can first check the site on Google Earth.

“Back in the days of Donald Ross, they’d stick him on a train, and it would be the first he’d seen of it,” says Brian Curley, veteran designer of layouts from Palm Springs (The Plantation Course) to China (Mission Hills). “Nowadays, between the topo and Google Earth and drone images, I’ve already kind of got it figured out before I set foot on a property.”

Assuming no red flags like, say, not enough acreage or it’s in a FEMA floodplain, some architects will go put boots on the ground.

“If I know the developer is real, then they’re not paying for me to go look — I am,” says McLay Kidd. “It’s hard to get someone to pay and then tell them no. That feels really bad, so I generally don’t charge to go see a site.”

… AND PICKING A PLAN

Architects will eventually give you a (probably rudimentary) development idea, a (ditto) budget and a proposal that includes their design fee. Eventually, you’ll choose the one you prefer and sign a contract. At this point, the designer starts putting more flesh on the bone in all the different components of course construction — earth-clearing, demolition, earth-moving, materials needed, irrigation and so on. From this, the budget gets refined. Going from preliminary design to detailed design will likely take a few months.

“Courses can cost wildly different amounts,” says McLay Kidd. “In only the last three years we’ve built courses for under $10 million and well over $20 million. The main difference is the suitability of the site when you start.

“Including all fees and the grow-in costs,” he adds, “$1 million per hole is a reasonable ballpark figure.”

What drives up the cost? Features, mainly. “Bunkering, water features and landscaping,” says Curley. “Those are the three line items where an owner might say, ‘Oh, no, I just need a basic thing.’ Otherwise, irrigation is irrigation, cart paths are cart paths, grass is grass.”

PICKING A BUILDER

While there are some design-build firms that handle both jobs, more often you’ll bid out the job to a few of the specialist golf course construction firms like Heritage Links, LaBar Golf Renovations or Landscapes Golf Management.

You’ll pick one based on schedule, the architect’s relationships and experience with them and price, although they’re unlikely to vary much. Things generally cost what they cost.

BUILDING THE THING

Hands on? Hands off? Some degree of collaboration between the developer and the architect is always there. No plan perfectly mirrors the end product, and issues and changes are inevitable. Communication structures vary; some owners employ project managers for day-to-day contact, others are involved hour by hour themselves.

Sometimes it’s a committee. And some — well, maybe one or two — are essentially hands-off.

CONSTRUCTION

The architect oversees the construction crew and will spend time on-site — how much varies, and associates will be there otherwise, but they’re all there to read the plans and interpret them because, as McLay Kidd notes, “there’s a lot of interpretation. Some architects follow the plans quite closely, some barely follow them at all. So, the contractor is working hand in glove with the architect to realize the course and hopefully follow the budget and bring it together inside the original estimates.”

WATER, POWER

“Where you start the process is at your irrigation lake,” Curley says. “Number one is: Where are we going to have water available so we can start irrigation as soon as possible? And you’ve got to get power to your irrigation lake. The building process doesn’t go in a binary, yes/no fashion — it’s overlapping and interconnected. The construction schedule might have to do with just how you get the equipment around. A lot of factors determine the construction sequence. But one thing is inviolable: Drainage always comes before irrigation. Because drainage is gravity flow. You have to keep a constant flow going. Irrigation can be laid on top of drainage because irrigation is pressurized.”

SEQUENCING

That sequence starts with “rough grading” — moving dirt around with big equipment — then shifts to feature shaping. Which gets done twice: pre-irrigation and post-irrigation, because after irrigation the features need to be put back together and cleaned up.

“Once irrigation’s in, it’s a full-court press,” Curley says. Depending on planting windows to grow grass — Montana’s, say, is a lot tighter than Malaysia’s — and the time frame, the tension can ramp up considerably.

PRAY FOR GOOD WEATHER

Weather delays inevitably mean an increase in cost; people’s time is money, and so are resources like bulldozers sitting idle. A good architect and builder will do what they can to mitigate such expenses, but there are limits to fighting Mother Nature’s budget busters.

THE GROW-IN

Going from something in the shape of a golf course to an actual golf course means growing grass. That’s not on the contractor or the architect (who may stay involved, keeping an eye on mowing lines and other bits of fine-tuning). That’s the superintendent’s job, responsible to the developer. It might take six months to a year for the grow-in to be completed. And if you think growing grass is as simple as watching grass grow, well, you haven’t been paying very close attention.