Even in a sport fabled for exclusivity, Spanish Oaks Golf Club is an exclusive place.
The fairways, with their cultivated knolls and occasional spots of tanned grass, look model's-hair mussed. Creeks burble with piped-in river water. The putting greens appear miraculously comfortable among scrub plants that have survived millennia in the rocky, soil-starved, irregularly watered Hill Country.
And, best of all, there's almost never a crowd. Of course, it's hard to find a crowd of golfers anywhere these days.
In addition to pitting will against ability on giant manicured lawns, golf offers a helpful anecdote about the economy. Business is bad right now, so much so that, since 2000, at least 16 Central Texas courses, including Spanish Oaks, have sued the appraisal districts that tell them what their property is worth and how much they have to pay in taxes.
By and large, appraisal districts didn't raise golf course valuations significantly this year. But owners say increased competition and thinning clientele mean courses are worth less than they were last year.
"It's been a lull for everybody," said Daniel Porter, whose real estate company owns Spanish Oaks.
In the booming late 1990s, with Central Texas sensing a golf shortage and developers building on cities' edges, courses became a relatively easy way to draw home buyers to fresh suburbs. In many cases, the courses were part of the utility systems; lacking city sewers, developers would treat effluent and spray it over the fairways and greens.
Between 1998 and 2003, Travis and surrounding counties added 17 golf courses, increasing the number of holes more than 40 percent, according to the National Golf Foundation.
Then, about the time the economy turned "stock options" into a punch line, the sport started morphing from hobby to expense. People spent less time and money on their short game, and Central Texas had a golf glut.
Art Cory, chief appraiser for the Travis Central Appraisal District, said litigation -- particularly involving golf courses and country clubs -- has a regularity that transcends the business cycle. Cory said he belongs to Great Hills Country Club, and even it has sued him over its appraisals in recent years.
"Golf courses have always been fairly litigious," he said. "Barely a year goes by where we don't have a lawsuit with at least one of them."
A matter of timing
Course owners, though, say business is perceptively worse than it was before the downturn. The timing has been particularly unforgiving on newer, high-end courses like Porter's. He conceived Spanish Oaks in 1998 amid tech money and Tiger Woods hype, seeing a need for a club the elite would consider elite.
But golf courses take time. The ones that look nice in rocky, environmentally sensitive areas take a lot of time. Spanish Oaks' opening finally arrived in 2001, 45 days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Spanish Oaks memberships go for $80,000, and the club caps their number at a relatively low 350 (If people can't get on your course, you won't have to wait on them to nail that sextuple bogey).
So far, a third of Spanish Oaks' memberships have sold, Porter said. Asked how the club survives, he responded, "deep, deep pockets, and we've got some."
Like other owners and managers, he said golf courses seldom make much money, and none are considered short-term investments.
"If you don't have staying power, you're not going to make it," he said. "You're going to go through a slow economy. We hit ours at the beginning."
Travis County appraisers value the course at more than $5.3 million, slightly more than last year.
Austin's municipal courses, lifestyle pillars of the middle class and anonymous, also see the change.
The Austin parks department added a sixth golf course, the Bergstrom Cedars Golf Course, to its stable in 2000. Yet since 1999, total rounds of golf on city courses have dropped from 315,000 to an estimated 275,000 this year, said Kevin Gomillion, who runs the city's golf program.
Some city courses are offering specials to get people to tee off there. They already have some of the lowest greens fees in town.
"The situation we're in right now is extremely good for the golfer," Gomillion said.
Building and dealing
Gomillion invoked a line from a baseball movie -- "If you build it, they will come" -- in describing the go-go mind-set of golf course developers and the recently cruel bend in the supply-and-demand curve.
Jim Popp, an Austin lawyer who specializes in property tax lawsuits, made the same reference.
Popp represents several golf courses in lawsuits against their county appraisal districts, including Spanish Oaks, Barton Creek Resort & Club, the Hills of Lakeway Golf Course (part of the Hills Country Club), Falconhead Golf Club and Steiner Ranch Golf, also known as the University of Texas Golf Club. ("Golf is one of my passions, along with property taxes," he says.)
Other litigants in Travis County since 2000 include the Austin Country Club, River Place Country Club, Lost Creek Country Club and Onion Creek Golf Course.
In Williamson County, the list includes Cimarron Hills Golf & Country Club, Berry Creek Country Club, Twin Creeks Country Club and Balcones Country Club.
Popp said such lawsuits are frequently part of the negotiation process, and he does not expect most to go to trial. He described a surprisingly amicable relationship with Cory, a man Popp makes his living suing.
"The appraisal district has a tremendously difficult job," he said. "You're dealing with a difference of opinion as to value. It's not a fact. It's an opinion."
And the opinion that the golf business is ailing is not unanimous. Bob Wunsch, owner of Avery Ranch Golf Club in Northwest Austin, said his staff works hard wooing tournaments, marketing the course and promoting its conference center, and the club is prospering. He said he also works surrounding neighborhoods, making sure people don't forget the club's existence.
As a result, he said, Avery Ranch largely dodged the doldrums afflicting his competitors.
"We just go bang on doors and get business," Wunsch said.
Porter said he hasn't had to try anything dramatically different to attract members to Spanish Oaks. As much as anything, he waits for the economy to improve and golfers to turn their gaze back up the food chain. Already, Porter sees reason to hope: He recently sold his 100th lot, and expects the remaining 300 surrounding his golf course to go in the next five years or so.
"The quality's always going to sell," he said. "In my opinion, the worst is behind us."
Source: Austin American-Statesman (Texas)