Today I was on site at Cherry Hill walking through the last of the renovation work which is being completed this fall when one of the members said, “So what’s the big project next year?”
I turned and look at him and said “I don’t know.”
It got me thinking about whether next year would be the off year that I always said must eventually come. This same week I was talking to my friend Bruce and he mentioned that new work was drying up and that they will be looking for more renovation work going forward. This got me thinking about the fact that many of the big players in Golf Architecture have already begun to chase the renovation work pretty hard over the last few years in order to support their large overheads. I was recently beaten out for a pretty good renovation job by a large US firm. 5 years ago they would not have pursued that work - it was too small for them.
I noticed that a call I had recently received about a US club featured a number of big players in the mix rather than the usual smaller firms that I was more used to being up against. As I thought about it more I realized that the landscape had changed in the last 12 months and this was beginning to feel a little like 1992-93, the last real downturn in the golf design business.
The similarities are interesting. Both eras featured a great deal of economic fear with talk of a coming recession. Clubs in both periods finding themselves short of members and with no waiting lists. Public courses on the high end find that they have open times and are being forced to cut fees to fill the time sheet. There bread and butter, the weekday businessman, had all of a sudden gone missing. Both periods followed a major build outt hat left the market saturated with too many high end courses. This time its high end public, last time it was almost entirely high end private.
There are few differences between the two periods. While access to money was hard back then too – the interest rates are still ideal for long term borrowing. This time there is more renovation and restoration but there is also four times the number of architects chasing the work. Today I found out one of my contractors was just informed by a client that they would have to delay a major project till the economic cycle improves. Last week another architect told me of a major renovation halted due to shortfalls in membership.
Times may be getting tough in the golf design business.
Now before you begin the great GCA Telethon to Benefit Starving Architects, I should tell you that most years I begin with the same answer. In the renovation business work inevitably comes as the season changes to spring. But what today's question got me thinking - what if it doesn't?
I’m curious to hear other people's opinions on this.
appologies to Joel Stewart - but the politics on that thread drove me away