The Business of Sustainable Golf

Decisions about the product you create, how you create it, and how you communicate its unique qualities to consumers, all cut to the heart of short and long-term profitability.

Protecting and enhancing the environment is always cheaper, in terms of both construction and on-going maintenance, than heavily engineering and modifying it. And while some of the latest sustainable building technologies might cost more initially to purchase and install, the lifecycle savings and payback periods make real financial sense. Whether the facility is a quick build-and-sell-on or a proprietary development with long-term operational interests, sustainability affects the bottom line.

The most significant 'sustainability versus profit' choices tend to arise during project conceptualisation and masterplanning in integrated golf, leisure and residential developments. In such projects the predominant model has been to develop as much real estate into housing as possible, squeezing the land available for golf and other landscape and ecosystem features. While such projects might bring higher short-term returns on investment, a weaker golfing product, expensive maintenance of engineered fixes, and degraded residential views will all inhibit these projects' enduring success.

In addition, such projects usually lack meaningful and distinctive unique selling points and fail to engage the local population. Such a project misses the opportunity to create a great golf course as the heart of a thriving golf business that continues to multiply value for itself and the community for decades to come.

Compare the lost opportunities of standard-design golf courses to the Old Works Golf Club (shown above) which restored a polluted industrial site, turned its historical equipment and natural features into unique attributes, and created a range of direct and indirect skilled and unskilled employment, and recreation for the community. This really is golf as a catalyst for ecological and community regeneration.