Golf’s Distressed-Asset Playbook: Buying the Down-Cycle

Matthew Erley & Evan Roosevelt | Old Tom Capital

The last era of widespread distress in golf unfolded against a long contraction in course supply. Between 2006 and 2020, the U.S. saw a net loss of more than 2,000 golf courses from a 2005 peak of about 16,000 facilities, according to the National Golf Foundation. Closures averaged about 130 a year in the late 2000s and early 2010s and reached a record 246 18-hole equivalents in 2019. Course values fell sharply during the most dislocated years. The average course sale price tracked by Marcus & Millichap’s golf group dropped from $7.33 million in 2006 to $2.7 million in 2012, a 63 percent decline.

Today, almost every part of that picture has reversed. Rounds have exceeded 500 million for six straight years, NGF reports that the number of U.S. facilities has held steady at about 14,000 for five years, and the average course sale price reached $6.87 million in 2024, the highest since 2006, according to Leisure Investment Properties Group. Investors waiting for that kind of distress to return are likely to wait a long time. Distress in golf has not disappeared, but it has moved. It now sits less in the operating performance of courses than in the capital structures built around them. The next down-cycle will reward investors who can underwrite that structure, not those who simply buy the cheapest course.

What the Last Cycle Actually Paid For

The discounts of the last cycle were less a verdict on golf than a reflection of constrained financing. As broker Steve Ekovich explained to The Real Deal in 2012, limited access to financing was putting downward pressure on valuations. By the third quarter of 2011, the median course sale price had fallen to $3.0 million from $4.6 million in 2006, creating an advantage for buyers who could close without relying on traditional bank financing.

They were also paid for underwriting what a course could earn rather than what it was earning. In 2008, appraiser Jeffrey Dugas documented two sales at trailing cap rates of 5.5 to 6.9 percent that buyers underwrote at 9.3 to 11.7 percent on pro forma income, according to the New England Real Estate Journal. The gap between those two numbers was the operating and capital fix the buyer intended to make. The price reflected the seller’s results. The return depended on the buyer’s plan.

The largest returns came from combining those assets. Arcis Golf acquired CNL Lifestyle Properties’ 48-course portfolio in 2014 for about $320 million, roughly $6.7 million per property, according to CNL’s SEC filings. ClubCorp bought a foreclosed Atlanta club in 2010 for about $7.4 million, which its annual report described as less than one-third of replacement cost. Both deals became the base of larger platforms; ClubCorp was acquired by Apollo in 2017 for about $1.1 billion in equity. The lesson of the last cycle is that the discount was the entry point and aggregation was the return.

Why the Next Cycle Will Be Different

Each of those conditions has changed. Supply has stabilized at about 14,000 facilities, and NGF reports more course openings in recent years than at any time since 2010. Operating health is strong: about 25 percent of public courses rated their finances poor or very poor in 2009 and 2016, against 5 percent or less in each of the past five years, according to NGF.

The financing gap that created the last discount has also narrowed for larger assets. Leisure Investment Properties Group reported 66 percent more golf course buyers in the market in 2024 than before 2019. Private credit now lends to scaled club owners; Ares led more than $1.7 billion of debt financing in 2026 to support KSL Capital Partners’ acquisition of Invited Clubs. Sale-leaseback capital has entered the category as well, with EPR Properties acquiring five Dallas-area golf courses and a water park in Virginia Beach in a $113 million transaction at a blended 8.6 percent yield in December 2025.

The result is that institutional-quality assets may see less severe dislocation in a future downturn, with more capital available to absorb forced or motivated sales.  The deep discounts are likely to appear only where that capital does not reach: smaller assets, complicated ownership structures and situations that require more than a check to resolve.

Distress Has Moved Into the Capital Structure

The failures of the past two years show where that is. Most occurred during a period of record demand, and few were caused by a lack of golfers.

Wohali, an unfinished golf resort in Coalville, Utah, filed for Chapter 11 in 2025 with about $86 million owed to its EB-5 lender and more than $30 million in water bonds. The lender acquired the project in 2026 through a $65 million credit bid, according to the Salt Lake Tribune and KPCW. Stockton Golf & Country Club in California exited Chapter 11 in 2024 after cutting its debt roughly in half under a 19-year plan with its bank. The Country Club at Otterkill in New York moved from Chapter 11 into Chapter 7 in 2025, with its lender foreclosing.

An earlier case shows how far the problem can sit from the golf itself. The Dominion Club in Virginia had enough cash flow to maintain the course when it filed for Chapter 11 in 2011. What forced the filing was its membership deposit book: $1.7 million due and a further $10 million to $11 million in future refund claims, according to Richmond BizSense. The course was not failing. The balance sheet was.

That changes where a distressed investor should enter. In the last cycle, the opportunity was usually to buy the asset. In this one, it is often to buy the claim: the bank note, the defaulted loan or the creditor position that controls what happens next. Concert Golf Partners built its early portfolio this way, buying the bank note on the Country Club of Woodmore in Maryland for cash in 2012, erasing a debt load that traced to a $6 million renovation loan, and converting the club from an equity to a non-equity private club, according to Golf Course Industry.

The Liabilities Come With the Keys

Buying the claim brings a new underwriting requirement. A distressed golf asset arrives with obligations that are often larger than the purchase price, and the most important are not on the scorecard.

Membership deposits are the clearest example. ClubCorp’s refundable initiation deposits, typically repayable after about 30 years, totaled $170.4 million in current and $205.1 million in discounted non-current liabilities at the end of 2016, according to its annual report. When deposits mature, they become live claims. A 2023 settlement with California’s attorney general required ClubCorp to return more than $43 million in deposits to over 30,000 members with 10 percent annual interest and pay $31.25 million in damages and penalties. In a smaller case, a federal court ordered the buyer of a Jupiter, Florida club purchased for $5 million in 2012 to repay about $5.77 million in member deposits and interest, more than the purchase price.

The same dynamic may be forming in a different place. The Club Management Association of America, drawing on data from more than 1,200 clubs, reported in April 2026 that median initiation fees rose nearly twice as fast as inflation between 2020 and 2025, and that in a growing number of clubs initiation fees account for more than 75 percent of capital income. That funding depends on new members joining. A club that finances its capital plan through turnover is exposed if demand softens. Broader golf demand bears watching as well: national rounds fell 3.6 percent in July 2026, with no region reporting an increase, according to NGF and Circana.

Deferred capital is the second liability. An irrigation system costs about $2,500 per head, or roughly $2.5 million for a typical course, and breakdowns become more frequent after 25 years, according to NGCOA and the USGA. Greens, bunkers, pump stations and cart paths each have their own replacement cycles. Miami’s Doral resort illustrates the risk at scale: bought out of Chapter 11 for $150 million in 2012, it underwent a multi-year renovation, and a 2021 appraisal commissioned by Deutsche Bank valued it at $297 million against $379 million spent on purchase and renovation, according to The New York Times. A discounted entry protects a buyer only if the capital plan is underwritten with the same discipline as the purchase.

The Land Floor Is Narrower Than It Looks

Investors often treat the land under a struggling course as their protection. In the right market it is. Glendale, Arizona bought the closed Glen Lakes course for $6.5 million in 2019 and sold it to a homebuilder for $28.64 million in 2024. Pulte paid $31 million for the 139-acre Oak Tree course in Oakland Park, Florida in 2019, after more than three years of approvals.

Those outcomes depend on conditions that many courses do not meet. In Swain v. Bixby Village Golf Course, an Arizona appeals court enforced a deed restriction requiring golf use, holding that “mere economic struggles cannot serve as a basis for abrogating a restrictive covenant.” In Escondido, California, about six years passed between a course’s purchase out of bankruptcy and the start of demolition, including a failed ballot measure and litigation. Water can cut the other way as well: in Broomfield, Colorado, the owner of Eagle Trace sold the course’s water rights, and the course closed in October 2026 ahead of a scheduled November water shutoff, according to CBS Colorado and The Denver Gazette.

The land floor is therefore real only where zoning permits another use, no covenant binds the property and the buyer can afford years of carrying costs and community opposition. NGF found that over 90 percent of courses closed in 2022 were daily-fee facilities, and three-quarters had peak green fees under $40. The courses most likely to fail are often the ones whose land is least valuable. In covenant-protected communities, the floor is the golf course itself.

Our View

The last golf down-cycle rewarded investors who bought cheap assets and combined them. The next one is likely to reward investors who can resolve the problems that make an asset cheap. Course-level distress is scarce, institutional capital is deep, and well-run facilities will attract buyers quickly in any downturn. The opportunity sits where that capital is reluctant to go.

Three areas stand out. The first is member-owned clubs carrying debt, deposit obligations or initiation-dependent capital plans, where recapitalization and conversion can stabilize a club that members value but can no longer finance. The second is smaller assets that banks avoid; Golf Property Analysts’ Larry Hirsh has noted that many banks may not consider golf loans and predicted that more deals under $5 million would require seller financing. The third is failed developments and leveraged single assets, where the creditor position offers more control than the deed.

In each case the work happens before the purchase. The signals worth watching are already published: NGF’s financial health surveys, in which courses rating themselves poor close at four times the rate of healthy ones; monthly rounds data; and the share of club capital funded by initiation fees. The underwriting that matters is equally specific: deposit books and their maturity schedules, deferred capital by component, water rights, covenants and entitlement timelines. The investors who did best in the last cycle were positioned before it turned. The same will be true of the next one, but the assets they buy will look less like distressed golf courses and more like distressed balance sheets attached to good ones.

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Source Note

National Golf Foundation, “Golf’s Course Correction Is Over,” February 28, 2025; “A Big Drop in Golf Course Closures,” February 25, 2021; “Record Rounds Again in 2025,” February 4, 2026; “How Financially Healthy Are Golf Courses?,” September 10, 2026; “July 2026 National Rounds Played,” August 28, 2026; mid-year closure update, July 7, 2022.

PolitiFact, citing NGF data on the 2005 supply peak and closure rates, December 5, 2014.

Golf Digest, citing Bloomberg and Marcus & Millichap National Golf & Resort Properties Group, April 19, 2014; The Real Deal, March 15, 2012.

Leisure Investment Properties Group, as reported by NGCOA Golf Business, May/June 2024, and First Call Golf, October 1, 2025.

New England Real Estate Journal, Jeffrey Dugas, October 29, 2008.

CNL Lifestyle Properties, Form 8-K filings, 2014; ClubCorp, Form 10-K for fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2016, and Apollo acquisition announcement, July 9, 2017.

Forbes and Yahoo Finance on Invited Clubs financing, 2026; EPR Properties, sale-leaseback announcement, December 4, 2025.

Salt Lake Tribune, April 16, 2026, and KPCW, May 1, 2026 (Wohali); ABC10, 2024 (Stockton Golf & Country Club); News 12 Hudson Valley, 2025 (Otterkill).

Richmond BizSense, January 12, 2011, and January 6, 2015 (Dominion Club).

Golf Course Industry, September 2014 (Country Club of Woodmore).

California Attorney General, settlement announcement, December 2023; Patch, December 2023; NBC News, 2017 (Jupiter, Florida deposit ruling).

Club Management Association of America, Board Brief, April 2026.

NGCOA Golf Business Weekly, April 2026 (irrigation) and November 2022 (Larry Hirsh on golf financing); USGA Green Section.

Golf Channel, February 2012 (Doral purchase); The New York Times, July 3, 2025 (2021 appraisal commissioned by Deutsche Bank).

Scottsdale Area Association of Realtors, April 22, 2024 (Glen Lakes); The Real Deal, October 2, 2019 (Oak Tree).

Arizona State Law Journal on Swain v. Bixby Village Golf Course, 247 Ariz. 405 (App. 2019); NBC San Diego and 10News (Escondido Country Club); CBS Colorado, July 23, 2025, and The Denver Gazette, October 11, 2026 (Eagle Trace).