_Apr/backinthegame.jpg "Back in the Game")
By Trent Bouts
After falling into foreclosure, Andrew Ward and the new owners of Currahee Club are cued up for success
Realtors preparing open houses sometimes brew coffee and bake cookies to evoke a warm and welcoming sense of home so lookers might become buyers. A similar philosophy was at play in 2012 when staff from Currahee Club began delivering fresh-baked cookies to businesses in downtown Toccoa, Georgia. They weren’t trying to sell real estate—at least not at that point—but they were touting memberships to the 1,200-acre lake and mountain facility in the northeast corner of the state.
Today, the club’s managing director, Andrew Ward, looks back on the weekly cookie drops as a rare misstep in efforts to drag the club back from the brink of oblivion. Ward arrived in January of that year, a few months after Jacksonville, Florida-based Arendale Holdings bought the property, its Jim Fazio golf course and 48,000-square-foot clubhouse out of foreclosure. “We thought the cookies might lead people to take an interest and buy memberships,” Ward says. “Instead, all it did was get them to eat more cookies!”
Call that tactic overly optimistic, naïve even, but in retrospect the cookies did provide a taste—literally and figuratively—of what the club’s new ownership was about, and a sense of home was smack dab at the heart of it. “We’re a community, a lifestyle,” Ward says, with emphasis. And, as he acknowledges now, those things take time to build.
That was the bigger miscalculation. “We had the expectation that we’d turn this thing around overnight,” Ward admits. “We thought it would take six to eight months.”
Instead, reversing Currahee Club’s fortunes has taken longer and required an additional $10 million post-purchase investment. There remains a long road ahead, but there can be no doubting that the u-turn is complete. “We must be doing something right,” beams Ward, reciting a list of recent accolades that includes awards, improved course rankings and key partnerships.
Originally designed for 800 homesites ranging from $400,000 to more than $1 million, Currahee Club opened in 2003. Barely two hours north of downtown Atlanta along I-85, the setting was as convenient as it was beautiful on the shores of Lake Hartwell and in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But the Atlanta market was flush with inventory, as were centers a similar distance to the north, including Greenville, South Carolina, and Asheville, North Carolina. Competition was part of the challenge, but on top of that came the crash.
“We had 24 members when we got here,” Ward says. The club, including the clubhouse, had been closed for the best part of two years. Meanwhile, the recession had thrown the ownership of about 30 previously sold lots into grave uncertainty.
There was not a lot to smile about, but the new owners—with more than 40 years in commercial real estate and golf investment and development—were bullish. With no debt to service, unlike the previous owners, they had a range of movement and flexibility akin to Cirque du Soleil. They quickly identified Ward as their chief choreographer.
Ward spent the previous 13 years at Cuscowilla on Lake Oconee, another premier Georgia property about 100 miles south, where he enjoyed an evening cigar or two during visits by Golfweek magazine’s architecture editor Bradley Klein. That’s not to suggest that Ward is your quintessential Southerner. English-born, -raised and -schooled in hotels and resorts, his journey from London included stops in Bermuda, Kuwait and the Turks and Caicos Islands. He came with more moves up his deep sleeve than chocolate chip cookies.
“Can you imagine?” he says, the dismay apparent. “We had an $18 million golf course, a $12 million clubhouse, with 24 dues-paying members and less than 1,000 rounds played a year! We knew we needed to hit the reset the button. We realized our market could not be limited by a $50,000 joining fee and $800,000 lake lots.”
The club couldn’t market lifestyle and community if the place was a human desert, no matter how pristine—which the clubhouse pretty much was because of so little use. Ward knew he needed to get some flesh and blood moving about.
In response, the club began offering 12-month memberships for $1,500 with monthly dues of $300. The deal attracted about 100 new members who then received a $1,000 credit if they wanted to stay beyond the year.
“That really gave us a shot in the arm,” Ward says. Then, he launched a High Five program with membership at $5,000, five months of $55-a-month dues and five free rounds of golf for five friends. That program attracted an additional 30 members.
“Then, we did a buddy pass program,” Ward adds. “We know a lot of people are members of a club they don’t want to leave, but we also know you can get a bit bored playing the same course all the time. So we said you get three buddies together, and we’ll sell you one membership and everyone can play on that membership. You all pay 25 percent of the joining fee ($5,000) and a quarter of your monthly dues, which we set at $400.”
There were two conditions. First, those members had to live more than 50 miles away. Second, between each member the group had to bring 20 paying guests over the 12-month period. Satisfy that latter condition and the group could renew its membership sans joining fee.
Ward also introduced “generational memberships” that, for a modest $100 more in monthly dues, allowed a husband and wife couple, say in their 40s, to include their parents on their membership. The same offer was available to a couple, perhaps in their 60s, who wanted to bring in their 30-year-old children.
“We now have more than 200 people paying dues at this club,” Ward says. “From 24 to over 200 in 20 months, that’s not bad. That starts to make things happen from a food-and-beverage and room-nights perspective.”
Just as important was the simple fact of physical activity. As Ward explains, there was “no point trying to sell real estate when the parking lot was empty, there was no one on the golf course, and no one eating lunch in the clubhouse.” Lots are now priced from $85,000 to $450,000.
Getting fully “ready” included adding a 5-acre, $2.5 million sports amenity club and campus last spring. Beyond all the standard features, the facility offers bocce ball, beach volleyball, a Tiki bar and saltwater-poolside dining with a menu augmented by a community garden. The new center was integral to the club’s efforts to establish a “lifestyle” centered on more than golf. What’s more, the club has its own minibus and driver that runs members on canoeing trips, bowling outings and gambling forays to a casino in Cherokee, North Carolina.
“There used to be nothing here for mom and the kids,” Ward says. “No tennis, nothing. The club was simply all about golf. There are 500 lockers—for golf. But now everybody’s happy.”
By contrast, Currahee Club’s investment to address another issue that was thought to be a significant drawback cost just $500. “Our golf course is spectacular, but we had heard that it was too hard,” Ward says. The answer was to install new forward tees, creating an internal par-60 course with 14 par-3s, two par-4s and two par-5s.
“We got Jim Fazio, the architect, in and he signed off on it, and the USGA came in and they slope-rated it,” Ward notes. “You can play it in two hours. We have certain times when it’s available for play so you don’t have people catching up to groups on the full golf course.”
Ward made one more investment on the golf front, inviting Klein to bring some of Golfweek’s raters to take an updated look at the course. More than two dozen panelists arrived, and last fall the magazine promoted Currahee Club a full, and unprecedented, 20 places on its best residential course rankings to No. 42. More recently, the club received the 2014 Bliss Award for “Best Golf Community of the Year” from Real Estate Scorecard, which monitors communities in the Southeast. The club was also a narrow runner-up, much to Ward’s good-natured chagrin, in the Georgia Golf Course Owners Association’s course of the year award.
In addition to accolades, Currahee Club has established relationships with the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and MLB’s Atlanta Braves, which led to both teams holding executive business meetings at Currahee. The club is also working with ClubCorp, and its 150-plus clubs, to explore avenues for reciprocal privileges.
For all that, Ward appears most excited about the club’s growing relationship with Southern Living magazine and by extension the 20 million people who read it every month. Last fall, Currahee Club saw 5,600 visitors come through a 4,000-square-foot Southern Living Showcase Home built on the signature 17th “Quarry” hole.
“When people came, they didn’t just come to look at the home, they came into the clubhouse and ate lunch,” Ward says. “We also allowed them to play golf. And 85 percent of them told us, ‘If you build another one, we’ll come back.’ So we are and it will open late this May.”
Then in February, that relationship was further cemented when Currahee Club was named a founding member of the new Southern Living Inspired Communities. Only seven real estate communities were chosen, and Currahee was the sole golf development included. The announcement followed more than a year of discussion between the magazine and Ward, who envisioned a vehicle similar to Southern Living’s Hotel Collection, which identifies and promotes select hotels judged to exemplify the best in Southern hospitality. Ward says “occupancy soared” at member properties in the Hotel Collection, and he anticipates similar interest in the Inspired Communities.
Certainly, the showcase home was a hit. Over six weeks, it generated enormous traffic not just for the club but for Toccoa itself, a town whose population totals just 8,404. In response, officials festooned Main St. with banners and flags on light poles, and businesses offered celebration discounts to shoppers.
“The town and the city leadership really stepped up,” Ward says. “The locals have really embraced us. We always knew they’d fall in love with us once they knew what we were about, but it took a little more than cookies to convince them.”
Trent Bouts is a Greenville, South Carolina-based freelance writer and editor of Palmetto Golfer magazine.