A slumping economy has caused a big drop in the cost of new memberships at Everett Golf and Country Club, and that’s bad news for members currently wanting or needing to sell.
Of course, for those golfers thinking of joining the private club, it’s great news.
At stately Everett G&CC, where supply and demand cause fluctuations in membership prices, newcomers can join (upon invitation) for around $14,000, the lowest price in more than two decades. By comparison, the cost of a new membership last spring was between $21,000 and $25,000, general manager Maria Domann said.
And the bargain price has led to a spike in new membership sales, with 14 already in 2009, compared to just two in the same period last year. “Believe me,” Domann said, “it’s been attractive.”
“We’ve sure had a lot of luck finding people that will step up and buy them,” agreed Mike Dutton, an Everett G&CC board member who is also the club’s treasurer and chairman of the finance committee.
With each sale, Everett G&CC retains $10,500, which goes into the club’s capital fund (the balance goes to the selling member). “And that’s been very significant for us,” Dutton said.
“Operationally,” he went on, “we’ve got our challenges. But we’re getting capital money from those certificate sales and that’s what’s kept us in pretty good shape. Financially, frankly, we’re pretty solid.”
The news is slightly different at nearby Mill Creek Country Club, Snohomish County’s other private golf club. Mill Creek CC, which became a member-owned club in 2007, initially charged $25,000 for its memberships, but dropped the price to $12,500 a year ago. Unlike Everett G&CC, Mill Creek CC’s board of directors establishes the price of new memberships.
Mill Creek CC sold 15 memberships after the price drop, according to Ric Crowther, a board member and the membership chairman. But total membership has still fallen from a high of 310 to 265, and the club has instituted a one-year preview membership — essentially a trial membership — in an effort to boost sales.
“We feel fairly happy about the number of new members we’ve brought in,” Crowther said, “but (the problem is) the members exiting. We saw it first with the people (working) in mortgages and real estate, and then we saw it with the car people. Those types of industries have been hurt and people are taking big cuts in their incomes.
“There’s always turnover with any type of club, but certainly it’s had an affect with people exiting (at Mill Creek CC),” he said.
Private golf clubs like Everett G&CC and Mill Creek CC depend on monthly dues payments to meet their operating expenses. Mill Creek CC charges $405 a month for an individual membership and $435 for a family, so a drop in 45 members is a loss of roughly $18,000 a month, or about $215,000 a year.
“We need to have people that use the club that are paying their dues,” Crowther acknowledged. “That’s what makes the thing tick.”
Still, he said, Mill Creek CC’s members are “cautiously optimistic” about the future.
“We just need the economy to make a turnaround,” Crowther said. “And we’re not sitting on our hands. We’re being aggressive to build new memberships.
“When we purchased the club on the last day of June 2007 (from the previous ownership group), we had no inkling (of the impending economic downturn). Then lo and behold, the bad news kind of started. But if the economy had kept rolling along like it’d been, we’d (be) kicking butt now.”
Everett G&CC, meanwhile, has 375 golf members who pay $335 in monthly dues for an individual and $425 for a family. Because the club’s membership total stays relatively unchanged, the monthly income from dues remains fairly constant.
Still, club members are not oblivious to the troubled economy, Dutton said. “We’re really trying to be fiscally conservative. … But over the last few years we’ve done a lot of improvements and we’ve done that mostly out of the cash we’ve had.
“So I don’t think anybody’s too worried about the club itself,” he said. “We’re hanging in there just fine.”
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