What Happens to Your Home Value If the Golf Course Behind You Closes?

You paid for the view.

Maybe not on the closing statement, and maybe nobody said it out loud, but you paid for it. A home backing a fairway costs more than the same home one street in. That is true in La Quinta, it is true in Palm Desert, and it has been true here for fifty years.

 

So the question that keeps coming up is a fair one. What happens if the course closes?

 

It is not hypothetical. On Tuesday the Palm Springs Planning Commission takes up a request to redesignate about 35 acres of the old Tommy Jacobs Bel Air Greens course from open space to residential. That course has been sitting dead since 2014. Twelve years. This is the first application ever to move through the golf course conversion ordinance Palm Springs adopted in 2019.

 

Palm Springs is not my market, and I am not writing this because of Bel Air Greens. I am writing it because we live in the place with more golf courses than anywhere on earth, and almost nobody here has done the math on what a closure actually does to the houses around it.

There is one study that gets cited on this. Yates and Cowart, published in the Journal of Sustainable Real Estate in 2019. They compared homes inside golf course communities to homes outside them, before and after a course closed.

Two findings.

 

Homes in golf course communities sold at about a 9 percent premium.  After the course closed, prices in those communities fell about 17 percent.

 

That 17 percent is the number that gets repeated. Here is what does not get repeated with it. The study was done in Shelby County, Alabama.

 

Different climate, different buyer, different reason for owning. I am not going to hand you an Alabama number and tell you it is your number.

There is also research pointing the other direction. A separate study looked at homes near a course that closed in Denver and found no evidence that adjacent homes sold for less afterward.

 

So the truthful answer is that a closure can cost you real money, and sometimes it costs you nothing. Which tells you the outcome is not decided by the closure itself.

What decides it is what goes in the ground afterward.

 

A closed course that becomes a brown field behind a chain link fence is a different property than a closed course that becomes preserved open space with a walking path. And both of those are different from seventy houses.

 

That is a zoning question, not a golf question. It gets answered by a planning commission, usually at a meeting almost none of the neighbors attend.

 

Look at what Palm Springs is actually doing. The Bel Air Greens land would be redesignated for 2.1 to 4 homes per acre, which on 35 acres theoretically supports about 70 houses. City staff is recommending the change take effect only once a full development plan is approved, so the city can check it against the open space requirements first. The applicant's earlier concept had set aside 5.5 acres of open space where the ordinance required 17.5.

 

That ordinance is the whole story. It is the difference between a city that gets to negotiate and a city that only gets to react.

We have more than 120 golf courses. About 106 of them sit inside the Coachella Valley Water District's boundaries. There is nowhere else in the country with that concentration.

 

And the economics underneath them are moving. A single course uses roughly 800 to 1,000 acre feet of water a year. CVWD has spent two decades shifting courses off groundwater and onto recycled water and Colorado River water from the Coachella Canal, with dozens more lined up to switch. Between 2015 and 2018, 26 courses pulled out more than 165 acres of turf.

 

None of that means courses here are about to close. Most of ours are healthy. It does mean the cost of keeping grass alive in the desert is going up rather than down, and that pressure lands hardest on the courses that were already marginal.

 

We have lost some. Rancho Mirage Country Club, Santa Rosa Country Club and Mesquite Country Club have all gone away in the last decade. Nationally the closure rate has been running near 200 courses a year.

Three things worth knowing, in the order they matter.

 

Find out how your course is zoned. Not how it is used. How it is zoned. A course zoned open space and a course zoned residential are two very different risks, and the answer is public.

 

Find out whether your city has a conversion ordinance. Palm Springs adopted one in 2019. When I went looking for an equivalent in La Quinta and Palm Desert, I did not find one. La Quinta's open space protections are built around hillside conservation, which is a different thing. I would rather tell you I could not find it than tell you it does not exist, so call your city's planning department and ask them directly.

 

Read your CC and Rs. Some golf course communities have recorded agreements about the course staying a course. Most do not. Owners are surprised in both directions.

Ask what you are paying for the view, and ask it out loud.

 

If the premium is real, then part of your purchase price is riding on something you do not control. That is not a reason to walk away. It is a reason to know the number before you pay it, and to ask the zoning question before you are in escrow instead of after.

 

I would rather you buy the fairway home with your eyes open than find this out at resale.

The 9 percent and 17 percent figures are from Yates and Cowart, "The Impact of Shuttered Golf Courses on Property Values," Journal of Sustainable Real Estate, volume 11, issue 1, 2019, pages 2 to 15, based on Shelby County, Alabama. The contrary Denver finding is from a separate study using a difference in difference design. Course counts and water figures come from the Coachella Valley Water District. The Bel Air Greens details come from the Palm Springs Planning Commission staff report as reported by The Palm Springs Post on September 17, 2026.

 

If your course is the one you are worried about, send me its name. I will look up how it is zoned and tell you what I find, and if the answer is boring I will tell you that too.

 

Updated 9/24/26 - The Palm Springs Planning Commission postponed the Bel Air Greens housing proposal after learning the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians acquired about half of the site

 

Laura Lake | Your Desert Real Estate Partner | DRE #01455311