re: Troon taking over English Turn

quote:

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The unique issue there is it is pretty inconvenient to access the facilities and they have like a 60,000 square foot clubhouse to maintain

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This. I say all this as a current member.

The clubhouse is 43,000 sq ft and has massive overhead for utilities and maintenance. The food and beverage has not been anything enticing since Poon purchased the club. So the F&B revenue from the relatively small membership is minuscule. We see events like weddings out there every so often, but not every weekend or anything close to what would be needed to have it survive as an event space. Probably the most profitable thing they've had for the club in several years are rare filming rentals of the facility.

So you've got this massive building that was basically built as the community center for a very upscale gated community back when virtually every homeowner was required or just wanted to be a member of the club. The demographics of the neighborhood have changed drastically over the last 20 years to wear roughly half of the homeowners probably have no interest in the country club. There is no HOA requirement or incentive to be a member of the club. They take pretty sizable losses every month due to overhead and F&b.

Onto the golf.... The course is still the best layout in the city and is usually in good shape ....except for the greens and tee boxes. They did a surface level reinstallation of new greens in late 2021 that were nice when they opened with a new type of grass called mach one. Only problem is that they have completely killed the greens twice between 2021 and now due to lack of watering. So when there are constantly dead spots and growth issues with the greens now, I can't even really blame it on the turf provider. The tee boxes are often bombed out and in sandy condition just due to laziness and bad maintenance practices in my opinion.

The course does get a lot of nonmember play, which helps overall revenue. Im told the golf course by itself does turn a profit. However, they are kind of in a Catch-22 to where they have made outside play cheap enough that a lot of members have quit and just paid the daily guest fee of about $85. Monthly dues for a single member are $300. If they increase the daily nonmember fee to $120 or more, I suspect outside play would all but dry up. And until they consistently improve the condition of the greens, they cannot grow the golfing membership base.

I'm honestly not sure what troon will be able to do to to stop the losses on the clubhouse/food and beverage side. And I'm not sure they can significantly improve the greens without completely redoing them again at this point, which I'm sure no one is putting up the money for.

I am happy to report that over the last several weeks if not two months, the new superintendent that Troon brought in has gotten the golf course in tremendous shape. The greens have been in the best condition we've seen in possibly 20 years. Fairways are plush, and the rough is cut to appropriate height. Bunkers still often lack consistent amounts of sand, but the membership understands how much it would cost to rebuild all the bunkers.

BridgeHouse puts on a good event

Well I would hope the greens are in great shape...they were redone in 2019 ...Marist put 5 million of his own money into the course to make it top notch but had a second rate manager that kept running off Superintendents of which ones background was at Augusta National and Alotian Gulf Club....she new more than him...go figure!