Hot Springs (Ark.) Country Club is offering a more casual setting where members can wear jeans and play music from their golf carts as part of an effort to appeal to millennials, while Pleasant Valley Country Club in Little Rock, Ark., now has more members than ever after completing more than $5 million of renovations.
Clubs in Arkansas are turning to targeted marketing, adding junior golf programs and fitness centers, abandoning one-size-fits-all memberships and reinvesting in their facilities to appeal to millennials. Some, like the Hot Springs (Ark.) Country Club, are offering a more casual setting where members can wear jeans instead of khakis and play music from their golf carts, the Little Rock, Ark.-based Arkansas Business reported.
Several Arkansas clubs said they are being challenged to be all things to all people and to make do with reduced revenue, a consequence of having fewer members, Business reported.
“It’s a struggle. Everything’s more in the mantra of trying to do more with less,” said Jason Branch, a golf professional at Fianna Hills Country Club in Fort Smith, Ark. “It’s a challenging market, to say the least.”
Branch, who is also president of the Arkansas chapter of the Professional Golfers’ Association, hopes programs like a junior tour that attracted 300-plus children will build a pipeline of future golfers. But this much is abundantly clear: Having a golf course is no longer enough. The game is difficult, time-consuming and expensive, all strikes against it with the millennial crowd, Business reported.
But the expense of joining a club isn’t necessarily driving younger folks away—a bigger factor is whether a club is a good lifestyle fit for millennials. As for the time issue, many clubs are encouraging their golfing members to play nine holes instead of 18 or to treat the game more casually by playing for however long they can, Business reported.
The Arkansas State Golf Association doesn’t track rounds played in Arkansas or other state-specific statistics, but Executive Director Jay Fox said the association’s membership has fallen by 1 to 3 percent a year for the past several years, matching a national trend, Business reported.
While many clubs have shuttered, others have been reinvesting in themselves. One of those is Pleasant Valley Country Club in Little Rock, which has more members than ever. It just completed more than $5 million worth of major renovations, General Manager Michael Auerbach said.
The club’s origins date back to 1947 as the Riverdale Country Club, which was in the Riverdale area of Little Rock and had 550 members. In 1963, Winthrop Rockefeller, then the head of what was to become the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, asked the club to move to a new neighborhood being developed in west Little Rock. It was offered debt relief, a new clubhouse, tennis courts and a 27-hole golf course. The club reopened in the new neighborhood in 1968 as Pleasant Valley Country Club, Business reported.
Recently, the club improved its clubhouse, golf course and tennis courts. It upgraded its swimming pool and added a splash park, too. Pleasant Valley also completed those projects without charging members an assessment beyond their regular monthly obligation, Business reported.
Like all private clubs across the country, Auerbach said, Pleasant Valley suffered during the Great Recession. Luxuries like club memberships are often the first things people strike from their budgets when they have to cut back, he said.
The national economic downturn caused the club’s membership to plunge from about 725-750 to 550, he said. Now, at 920, Pleasant Valley’s membership is the highest it has ever been. Peak membership does not, however, translate to peak rounds of golf, Business reported.
For the past three years, the average number of 18-hole equivalents has been 26,000-27,000 rounds, Auerbach said. The peak was 29,000-31,000, Business reported.
The club’s “aggressive push” to bring in new members, especially the younger crowd, had succeeded, Auerbach said. The average age of its membership has dropped to 53, from 58 three years ago, and a vast majority of the new members are in their 30s and 40s, Business reported.
One of the steps Pleasant Valley took was to waive a portion of the initiation fee for new members who sign and honor a multiyear contract. New membership categories were added, as was a junior golf program sponsored by the PGA and called Operation 36. That program has “grown dramatically,” Auerbach said.
Still, a current member must sponsor any new member, and the club’s Board of Governors votes on the new membership. New members pay between $1,500 and $15,000 in initiation fees and regular monthly dues of $105-$437, Business reported.
Auerbach said Pleasant Valley is in a “very strong financial position” with healthy cash reserves and annual revenue of nearly $7 million. In 2016, the club’s total revenue was $6.96 million, and its expenses totaled $6.36 million. In the past three years, according to Pleasant Valley’s 990s filed with the IRS, its total revenue, total expenses and revenue generated by membership dues have been flat, Business reported.
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