Kiwi golf club selling land to pay down debt.

By: Darius Oliver

Across the Tasman Sea, the same difficulties facing Australian golf clubs are ever-present in the New Zealand market with golf club relocations, sales and mergers become more and more prevalent. The latest North Island club forced to act in the face of financial distress is the Hawke’s Bay Golf Club, half an hour from the esteemed Cape Kidnappers course.

As reported this week in the New Zealand Herald, the club has agreed to sell 11.6ha of its 56.4ha property to a local developer, in order to repay a decades old debt and to both combat declining membership and fund course enhancement works.

From the NZ Herald Article:

Work has begun to turn Hawke's Bay Golf Club into a viable entity and to counter declining membership that all clubs are grappling with in the country.

Club president Mike Maguire said last night the club had sold 11.6ha of the 56.4ha course property in a bid to repay about $500,000 debt, believed to be a mortgage dating back to late last century.

"The challenge for any golf club is financial sustainability and, as a club, we've been carrying a substantial mortgage for quite some time," he said.

A member at the club since 2001, Maguire's research revealed the debt dated back almost three decades from the time he started there.

”We managed to stabilise our debt but for a small club, or even a larger one, to service a debt like that takes a lot of your funds and you're not reinvesting in the game to enable your course to develop properly."

He said the club was managing "to hold our head above water". In the past four years, bar one year, it posted a modest surplus.

The club has a sale of purchase agreement, which has passed "its traditional stage" and should be done and dusted come January.

Gourmet Blueberries Ltd, a neighbouring business, has bought the 11.6ha property.

"We've got some funding applications in so the overall success of our development will be on things like irrigation," he said, adding they would come via grants.

Everything adhering to the script, the course redesign and redevelopment will be completed by June next year.

"We wouldn't be doing this if we weren't going to be mortgage free," he said.

The club is teeing up the whole exercise to coincide with its 50th anniversary next year.

Grant Puddicombe, based in Auckland but whose course designing and building services offshore to Canada, the United States and Japan, is the architect behind the revamped course.

The Canadian, who designed the Wainui golf course in Auckland, has completed his work.

"The trees should have started coming down [yesterday]," Maguire said of the more than $300,000 project.

The men's par-73 course measures 6103m (club) and 6436m (championship), and the women's par-74 one is 5417m. They will become shorter after the restructuring.

"It'll still be 18 holes but we'll be building four new ones but the course will be modified quite a bit."

The men's club course will mutate to a par-71 course and it'll end up with one more par-3 hole, which means a par-5 one will disappear.

"Two holes will require people to play over water. We have currently got water hazards so those holes with water will go and two other areas will be used in what will become attractive water hazards."

With the rest of the holes remaining the same in dimension, Maguire said the redesign would incorporate the features of the landscape with minimum disruption to the topography but accentuating features "within a very tight budget".

The club's close to 300 members had requested the redesign should offer challenges but not lose its character.

"That's what we've tried to do. The new par 3s will introduce a new challenge in Hawke's Bay," Maguire said.

In keeping with kicking the mortgage into touch, the members were assured their subscriptions would remain the same after the facelift.

"This project will not increase our members' fees."

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