AusGolf - Golf Course Living overview

ON COURSE LIVING - Australian golf real estate

by ausgolf writer Selwyn Berg
Click here for State by State listings of developments across Australia

Residential golf communities are no longer a novelty. When we last reviewed Australia’s golf estates in the 2003 Guide, we observed that what started at Tura Beach in NSW in the 1970s had boomed on Queensland’s Gold Coast throughout the 90s but was as yet in its infancy with only a handful of new developments on the Victorian and Western Australian coastlines. Now we count nearly 100 golf courses with residential development, and many more are planned.

Whilst some golf estates are attracting young homebuyers and families, much of the dramatic growth has occurred as the “Baby Boomers” retire.

Demographer Bernard Salt (author of The Big Shift, a partner at KPMG and Australia’s guru on what the Baby Boomers are doing) has observed the “seachange shift” – the move to coastal areas beyond the capital cities. ‘Seachange is a modern and uniquely Australian term encapsulated by a popular television series of the same name first aired in 1998. The series was an immediate hit with the over-40s. It appealed to baby boomers who were then being swept along by surging property values. Doing a seachange can mean buying a holiday house or it can mean relocating to a beach community. The big shift in coastal property values didn't begin until early 2001. By 2004, most coastal property within a 2 hour drive of large capital cities was fully valued. In hindsight we all should have bought coastal property the moment Sigrid Thornton surfaced in Pearl Bay.’

The population living in non-metropolitan coastal areas increased from 2.2 to 4 million between 1976 and 2005. Already there is $10 billion of coastal development under way or planned, and the big developers are finding that vacant land in favourable locations is scarce. This has tended to keep prices high, despite a correction reported by property consultant Residex (BRW Mar 2006) after the coastal boom of the past decade.
Salt has also coined the term “treechange”, a much fuzzier community focus so that prospects for capital growth rely more heavily on lifestyle attributes:

‘The development should be located within a 2-3 hour drive of a capital city and preferably within easy drive; this requires a motorway for at least part of the way. The surrounding countryside must be pretty. Undulating hills lightly wooded with bountiful eucalypts go down especially well. A nearby town should possess essential services, and there should be a river or lake, vineyards and a GOLF COURSE regardless of whether the treechanger plays! In fact, less than one third of the purchasers of golf real estate over the past few years have been golfers.’

‘The most common retirement age for Australians is 58, so that with the baby boomers now aged 45-60, barely one third are over the line, with another ten years worth yet to retire. The baby boomers represent the biggest group in the Australian population (they are the fastest spending mass market according to AC Nielson) and there will be an additional one million people moving to coastal areas. This is retirement and lifestyle driven and our challenge is to prepare for that next big surge.’

In retirement, the baby boomers are often realising capital gains on a city home, downsizing, and yet wishing to maintain their standard of living in a lifestyle location. 

Heading the list of preferred lifestyles is both seachange and treechange. No surprise then that living on a golf course, often with added benefits (even for non-golfers) of security, club house amenities, and manicured open green spaces provides a highly desirable solution.

Jeff Blunden, who headed Ernst & Young’s real estate advisory services before joining Golf Australia as Club and Industry Advisory Manager in 2006, notes that some buyers who realise that they cannot afford a water view opt for living next to the open green spaces on the fairways. Golf real estate now accounts for an average four percent of all new housing; some 25,000 blocks built or master planned since 1999, and with another 50 courses currently proposed 30,000 more homes will be created.

The trend has not gone unnoticed by the authorities. Council planners have united to form the National Sea Change Task Force, formally constituted in November 2004 to develop policies that will protect the coastal environment, establish sustainable limits to growth and address funding issues. On the outskirts of big cities infrastructure and services such as roads, water and sewage, are put in place to encourage residential shifts, but on the coast, it’s the other way around. Water is a particular issue at the moment, following a long period of drought, but also sewage, sewage treatment, community facilities, sporting facilities, health facilities, education and the whole range of services that are required in a community. Aged care is an important one as the baby boomers retire.

A Sunshine Coast $250m residential golf development has met with a State Government call in after being approved by local Council, the Environmental Protection Authority and the majority of residents of the local community, as it was to be sited in a rural zone. In Victoria, the government launched a Coastal Spaces strategy in April 2006 to curb development along the state’s 2000km coastline. The State Government has even gone so far as to state that it “will crack down on housing projects masquerading as golf estates, mainly on the coast”. A new ‘farming’ zone is threatening an $800m golf estate at Inverloch, but the Bass Coast Shire has been overturned by the Planning Minister, granting the Linfox Group ‘rural activity’ zoning for their $300m golf tourism development.

above - the stunning Brookwater development in Sth East Queensland

Click here for State by State listings of developments across Australia