Kevin Rogers didn’t think of himself as a country club guy. He’s 40, sells real estate near San Antonio, and has four kids. He didn’t even play golf when he moved near Fair Oaks Ranch six years ago. Six months later he joined anyway. Now the club runs his family’s week. The kids ride the waterslides. His wife does Pilates. He meets his friends at the casual bar, and nobody asks him to wear a jacket.
Jessica Flint’s Off Duty cover story says Rogers is the new face of the private club. Clubs across the country have stopped acting like the stuffy places their fathers knew. They sell themselves to the whole family now. Jim Butler runs Club Benchmarking, a Boston firm that crunches numbers for private clubs. “The club must be for the family,” he says. Butler says the husband who vanishes to the course every Saturday is a rare bird now.
The old model broke in the 2008-09 financial crisis. Clubs lost more than 25% of their income per member from the peak. The wait lists were gone almost overnight. For more than a decade after that, more clubs closed than opened. Butler calls it an industry that found out its value had “an expiration date it didn’t know about.” Clubs split two ways. One group cut dues, waived joining fees and froze building plans. The other spent millions on pools, gyms and programs for kids. The spenders won. Roughly half of America’s private clubs have wait lists again.
What the family club costs
Butler’s data splits golf clubs into two camps. The ones that put real money into fitness, racket sports, pools and kids’ programs charge a median joining fee of $60,000. The ones that spend almost nothing beyond golf charge $30,000. Median means the middle club, with half above it and half below. Grey Oaks in Naples, Fla., is the extreme case. Over ten years it put roughly $85 million into the place. That bought a resort-style pool, a wellness center of about 30,000 square feet, racket courts and a market that sells roasted chickens. The joining fee was $160,000 in 2020. It’s $400,000 now. Members don’t seem to mind. Satisfaction scores went from the mid-70% range to around 95% over those six years. Members used to ask why the club needed a grab-and-go market, the general manager says. Now they ask why it doesn’t sell milk.
The Landings in Savannah, Ga., spent $26 million. Three formal dining rooms became 10 places to eat, from a sushi bar to a cantina. Food and drink sales were $4.8 million in 2010. They’re close to $25 million now. A $4 million building with 22 pickleball courts is next. The Florida Yacht Club in Jacksonville is 150 years old. It finished a project of close to $20 million in mid-2024. Weekday use went from 10% to 40%.
Our read
This is cash flow (M5), and for a lot of our readers it’s a retirement question. Naples, Savannah and Jacksonville are retirement-belt towns. A club there is a lifestyle line item with a big entry ticket. The joining fee is usually money you don’t get back. Then come the dues every month, for as long as you belong, whether you swim or not. And notice which clubs people love. The ones that keep spending. Grey Oaks spent $85 million, and its fee more than doubled in six years. Someone pays for the next pool, and it’s usually the members. So before you join, get three numbers in writing. This year’s dues. How big projects get paid for. And what the last one cost each member.
The one thing to check in your own plan is the fixed-cost line. Dues, homeowner association fees, memberships and subscriptions are the bills that show up whether the market’s up or down. This week, add them up for a year and set the total next to your Social Security and pension income. If the fixed bills eat most of the steady money, the fun is riding on the portfolio. That’s worth a conversation at your next review, before the next renovation vote. We’d rather check the roof while the sun’s out.