State of golf in UK

[Mark_Rowlinson]

Article in today's Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/leisure/11204638/Push-to-drive-golf-out-of-its-bunker-on-course-but-buyers-wait-in-the-wings.html

[Jon Wiggett]

Interesting article Mark, I can say that Middleton Park was ruined when Leeds Council turned it from a lovely 9 hole course to an 18 by adding probably the most hideous addition ever seen. Both courses used to be run successfully making the city plenty of profits but poor decision making and changing market have seen an end to them. I know for a fact the as far back as 2009 Leeds council were following a policy of trying to close down Middleton Park.

Jon

[Tony_Muldoon]

Who is standing up for Golf?  With an ageing population Golf should be one of the answers to the nation’s major problems, health or lack of?  It’s a fine thing for middle aged folk to do, that’s just one reason why it’s sad to see it in decline.

The article features at least one Chestnut.
Those in the UK can hear a statistics program that proves that there is not more land in Surrey as Golf Course than housing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b044jh75

And how did we miss this article featuring towo learned GCA participants?  (Well it was put up on 24th December, I guess that’s how.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24378868 

[John Kavanaugh]

How can maintenance practices 10 times better, fees twice as cheap with access to all golfers be failing twice as fast.  Bout time the curtain was pulled back on this so called utopia.

[Adrian_Stiff]

Who is standing up for Golf?  With an ageing population Golf should be one of the answers to the nation’s major problems, health or lack of?  It’s a fine thing for middle aged folk to do, that’s just one reason why it’s sad to see it in decline.

The article features at least one Chestnut.
Those in the UK can hear a statistics program that proves that there is not more land in Surrey as Golf Course than housing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b044jh75

And how did we miss this article featuring towo learned GCA participants?  (Well it was put up on 24th December, I guess that’s how.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24378868 

IMO money should be directed at the OVER 40s and the benifits of playing golf...1000 calories burned over a 4 hour round is more than many workouts. Stastically regular golfers live five years longer. We need to get the health aspect out to the world to promote the game and its benifits. Gyms have convinced many of the younger people. The government should get behind all sport and make it cheaper by reducing the tax, more healthy people equals a lesser bill to our NHS.

[Rich Goodale]

My local golf course is built on ~120 acres overlooking the Firth of Forth 5 miles as the crow flies from Edinburgh.  It is the Tiburon of Scotland, without the daily fog and the pretention.  Our golf course gets by each year with >$1 million/year in gross income (net income is negigible, after properly accounting for depreciation/maintenance of fixed assets), but it is slowly dying as its loyal players age and then die, increasingly to be replaced by annual members, who will come and go as they please.  Scotland as is the rest of the UK (yes even Scotland!) is sufferring from the availability of housing for younger people, rich and poor, mostly due to "draconian/keep the farmers happy/don't give the peasants any other way of living/don't rock the boat" land use policies.  My local golf course would be worth at least £10 million as housing/public recreation land.  Why do we continue to play crap golf over this valuable parcel?

Last week, Josie and I played 9 holes at one of the most impoverished golf courses within a 30 minute radius.  It was a Thursday noon and the sun was out in this extended Indian Summer we have been having and the course was highly playable, with greens that were superb and a routing over heathland that any of the real GCAs on this site would die to be able to develop.  It will die sooner than my local course, because it's funding is so poor (we were offerred £8 daily for as many holes as we wanted to play, 7 days of the week), and the players who used to play there are getting older and more frail, every day.  The land is beautiful enough and close enough (and well seved by transport) to the money pots of Edinburgh to attract housing investment, which nearby areas have done already.

We are the dinosaurs watching the increasingly luminescent ball of light in the sky that is an asteroid that will eventually destroy our playing fields and our fields dreams.  Enjoy your golf while it still exists.

Rich

PS--oh yeah, have a nice day!

[Thomas Dai]

Wasn't one of the reasons for the development of golf courses on farmland in the UK from around the time of the R&A's famous/imfamous report into the state of the game that farming had, or was becoming, economically unattractive relative to previous decades? Govts, of various colours, have buggered a few things up over the years, farming and land use is just one. Jeez we even import milk these days!

If, and 'if' is a big word sometimes, farming had been more economically attractive in the period since the report was published then lots of the newer courses would not have been built and then the figures in various reports and articles referenced would be considerably different. But as I say, 'if' can be a big word....

atb

[Adrian_Stiff]

Certainly in Bristol there was no situation of over-supply until the last few years.

I think every course was doing okay in its own way and then we had the credit crunch and some tougher years wherby companies conserved money and did not have their annual golf day, employees feared for their jobs and Armageddon was a distinct possibility. House prices dropped no one could borrow so things stagnated and being in business was tough as everyone cut their prices to attract trade.

This happened with golf courses. The badly run ones slashed their prices and offered budget golf in spaces they thought were empty..half price tuesdays...and when half price tuesdays was announced golfers that golfed on a monday or wednesday golfed on tuesday. So lets join up on teetimes.co.uk and discount 40% of the standard price we still get £60 a fourball (though you dont because teeoff take £12 so you get £48. Worse you have shown your weak hand to the other players, the customer is not stupid if he has seen your low price he knows you will drop your trousers again!

The member of the golf club comes in two parts, one that loves the club and will support the competitions, teams, the bar, he is proud to wear a club jumper and talk fondly of his club.....the other it is a ticket to play golf.....

Create a situation where it is cheaper to golf by taking advantages of the deals on offer and that ticket man will do what is best for his pocket.
A membership fee should be between 20 and 30 times the standard green fee....anything more and you are in trouble.

Our former member that is now nomadic very slightly resents paying each time, especially when he has paid £25 and it rained and the forecast for next week is not good, so avoids playing, then the next time he plays he is a bit rusty and plays less....and less and less because he is no longer enjoying it. Eventually he plays less and less until some years he does not even play once...technically though he is still a golfer.

Clubs on GolfNow, teeofftimes do no golf favours, same with groupons and wowchers. I wish they would learn to hold up their heads rather than race to the bottom.

[Rich Goodale]

Thomas

Whatever the R&A (and PGA in the USA) said a few years about golf being the savio(u)r of farming interests/green belts, etc., follow the money.  They were about as eleemosynary as the Borgias.....

These days when farmers get ~£75,000/year per windmill just for the rental of crap farmland, I don't think they are huritng (if they even were....).

Rich

[Jon Wiggett]

Adrian,

spot on with the price argument. At the end of the day you have to decide what your product is worth and charge it. If that means a few will not play then so be it. Golf courses survive LONG TERM mainly on a loyal customer base who will pay a realistic price for a product they like. If you then start dropping your price to attract the bargain brigade you get a short term hit of some one time players who will swap to another club offering less and alienate your loyal customers which makes no sense. As you put it is habit that keeps people coming back. Break that and you will have trouble getting it back.

Up here many clubs are discovering that reciprocal deals were a bad idea leading to more play and less income.

Jon

[Sean_A]

Jon

If you are like me, once I pay the cheaper rate, that is defacto the green fee.  A club can double the fee come May, but that doesn't mean I am keen to pay extra for supposedly better conditions.  In the UK, any time of year a course can be in good or poor nick, so I don't worry much about seasons.

Ciao

[Thomas Dai]

As you say Rich, follow the money. If Old McDonald, who had a farm, could have made more money from staying in farming rather than by turning to golf (or somthing else) he'd probably wouldn't have turned. So it'll be interesting to see how many golf courses are turned back into farms. The population having gone up by 13m since the R&A report and the seeming happiness of society to import foodstuffs may also be influential though.

Good points made about membership/loyalty/price cutting too. Members are the cake, others are the cream/cherry/icing sugar on the top.

atb

[Sean_A]

atb

I would be very surprised to see courses turn back into farms unless they are wind or solar farms.  Even now, I think the rage for turbines is on the decline.

Ciao

[Thomas Dai]

atb
I would be very surprised to see courses turn back into farms unless they are wind or solar farms.  Even now, I think the rage for turbines is on the decline.
Ciao

I go along with you Sean. I've seen a few small fields covered in solar panals though, although maybe they were polytunnels?

atb

[Adrian_Stiff]

Taunton Vale is reverting to farmland I think as we speak. Farmland is circa £10,000 in some places so x 150 of them if you can convert the clubhouse into a few houses, perhaps the greens maint area too then it does make commercial sense. I would have thought most golf courses could be worth £2,000,000 if they can be split up that way.

[Mark_Rowlinson]

In the Manchester/Cheshire area it is a number of long-established clubs (over 100 years old) which are apparently most in danger of folding, two of them along the banks of the River Mersey in the Manchester suburbs. One small pay-and-play facility (Mobberley, 9-holes, very badly designed) closed recently in order for a wealthy local football star to build a very big house in the grounds.

The courses that went into liquidation in the years shortly following the R and A's announcement were Portal, Carden Park and Shrigley Hall, all initially aimed at the high end business market. They were bought cheaply and are still in operation. There is a Lee Westwood golf academy now at Portal, Shrigley is a hotel which probably survives on its wedding business while Carden Park brought in the Nicklaus firm to build their 'championship course.' Portal has two and a half courses, Carden two and Shrigley has a single, somewhat perverse course with some good holes and some crazy ones. It is often VERY wet, horribly exposed to the elements. In good weather, however, the views are stunning.

[Jon Wiggett]

Taunton Vale is reverting to farmland I think as we speak. Farmland is circa £10,000 in some places so x 150 of them if you can convert the clubhouse into a few houses, perhaps the greens maint area too then it does make commercial sense. I would have thought most golf courses could be worth £2,000,000 if they can be split up that way.

Adrian,

but imagine what 150 acres with planning permission in the right location would be worth. In Leeds late 60s, Moor Allerton sold their entire course for housing building themselves 27 holes and plush clubhouse a few miles away. Next door Sandmoor sold off 4 holes for a good price too. In the late 80's Alwoodley sold off one of their practice grounds which funded the new clubhouse among other things. In the late 90s at West Bowling (Bradford) members voted to sell the course for an industrial development pocketing a multi £K sum each. This has been going on for decades and is not because of the current financial situation.


Sean,

I have a very similar in outlook to you

Jon

[Adrian_Stiff]

Yes if you can get houses on your golf course then you have hit the Jackpot of Jackpots.

The Players Club used to have some land inside a proposed boundary, would be nice if they moved the line back.

Ryan Coles' Knowle is a good candidate.

[Thomas Dai]

Kings Norton GC in south Birmingham sold up for housing a few decades ago. Used the money to move location a bit further out of the city and they now have 27-holes arranged in 3 loops of 9 returning to the same point plus a 12-hole short-course and a converted large old manor/farm house as a clubhouse.
atb

[Paul Gray]

How can maintenance practices 10 times better, fees twice as cheap with access to all golfers be failing twice as fast.  Bout time the curtain was pulled back on this so called utopia.

Ah, go on then, I'll take the bait.

Most of the courses over here, despite the impression you may get when you see review after review of excellent GCA courses, are run with the good old USA being seen as the Gold Standard. The kind of false perfection you seek, John, is the kind of crap the average British punter has been programmed to think of as desirable, hence we have hundreds of farm tracks in an over supplied market which are on the verge of bankruptcy.

[BHoover]

Ah, go on then, I'll take the bait.

Most of the courses over here, despite the impression you may get when you see review after review of excellent GCA courses, are run with the good old USA being seen as the Gold Standard. The kind of false perfection you seek, John, is the kind of crap the average British punter has been programmed to think of as desirable, hence we have hundreds of farm tracks in an over supplied market which are on the verge of bankruptcy.

Many of us in the good old USA see the game in the UK and Australia as the golf standard.

[David Ober]

Ah, go on then, I'll take the bait.

Most of the courses over here, despite the impression you may get when you see review after review of excellent GCA courses, are run with the good old USA being seen as the Gold Standard. The kind of false perfection you seek, John, is the kind of crap the average British punter has been programmed to think of as desirable, hence we have hundreds of farm tracks in an over supplied market which are on the verge of bankruptcy.

Many of us in the good old USA see the game in the UK and Australia as the golf standard.

Having just returned from Scotland and Ireland, I heartily agree.

[Paul Gray]

Brian,

I'm increasingly thinking Australia is actually the standard but know that in reality that it is only the top courses which appreciate the virtues of 'the running game.'

I actually think America gets a bad press in this country in that everything wet and target like simply gets called 'American Style.' It's actually a global style and you guys don't deserve all the blame.  

[Mark Pavy]

The grass is always browner on the other side of the fence.

[Paul Gray]

The grass is always browner on the other side of the fence.

Like it.