Golf courses can take several years to build and sometimes more than a year to renovate. This requires construction crews to be on site or near site for long periods of time. Finding housing for the crew members can be a challenge for golf course managers in today’s housing market.
On top of that, managers can spend countless hours doing it themselves.
“We asked a sample of 30 customers, ‘Hey, before you reached out to us, how much time have you already spent looking,’ and we had answers between five and 30 hours, and they still had not been successful,” says Carlos Abisambra, president and CEO of Travelers Haven, which is a corporate housing provider company.
Travelers Haven works with MLB and NBA players and MMA fighters. In 2017, Travelers Haven started attending golf course construction conferences, where they met people in the industry. From there, being involved in golf course construction was “a no-brainer” for Abisambra.
“At the end of the day our bread and butter is helping those essential workers, the people that have this particular skill set that you can’t hire locally,” Abisambra says. “With golf courses, it kind of makes sense. You're not necessarily hiring a local person to build greens and roughs and design the landscape of a golf course, that's why you need to travel and you're bringing that expertise, and that’s what we specialize on.”
When starting, golf course managers start from scratch, researching, emailing, calling and negotiating prices among other things for housing. And this isn’t even counting furnishing.
Managers enter basic information onto its website and using its database and a company such as Travelers Haven can find what the customer is seeking.
“We have a vast database with partnerships all across the country,” Abisambra says. “We actually have an algorithm that looks at what industry is a client and what they are looking for. Do you have any special requirements like they're bringing their pets or it's a construction crew, so they're doing to two people per bedroom and single beds."
Not only does it save golf course managers time by outsourcing housing, but it saves them money as well. Furnishing an apartment can be expensive when doing it themselves. The managers will get bad or average rates, and depending on the number of rooms, it adds up.
Corporate housing companies have contracts with furniture providers that have preferred service, rates and delivery where “they'll start typically dozens of percentage points below what doing it yourself would cost you, so that's a money component,” Abisambra says.
Likewise, on the property side, outsourcing housing can save money on setup costs. Corporate housing companies with contracts or partnership agreements can allow security deposits and certain administrative fees to be waived, thus saving money in setup costs.
For golf course managers or superintendents, Abisambra recommends looking into housing a month in advance.
“When it's multiple apartments, let's say it's a crew of 20 and you want double occupancy, that’s 10 apartments; two weeks plus is probably good,” Abisambra says. “But for best results a month of a heads up for more apartments and more occupants and more people you're bringing into more complexity is typically best case.”
Even though corporate housing companies have a number of contracts and partnerships, the companies will still run into challenges. Reaching out ahead of time gives the team more time to deal with the challenges or issues.
Golf courses have been built in rural areas with little around them. Supplies in a rural area can be tough and they “have to get creative if we don’t have enough partnerships or agreements in that particular location,” Abisambra says. “Although it can be challenging, they’ve done it before.”
“It's nothing that we haven't done which house people in town so small, there's not even a census number yet,” Abisambra says. “When we say we can virtually house anybody in the cities, towns and villages across the US, we can do that.”
Over the next three years, Abisambra sees supply of real estate being an issue before vacancy rates reach any state of normal.
As of 2022, the homeowner vacancy rate sits at 0.8 percent, the lowest in the 66 years of the Housing Vacancy Survey. The rental vacancy rate is one of the lowest since 1985 at 5.8 percent.
Abisambra expects problems to shift from an availability standpoint to a purchasing power issue. Right now, properties are in the driver’s seat as they don’t have much vacancy.
Jacob Hansen is a Kent State University senior participating in Golf Course Industry’s summer internship program.