America's First Million-Dollar Golf Club Welcomes You (If You Can Pony Up the Cash)
Initiation fees at the world's most exclusive golf clubs have been heading for the stratosphere, but a new resort in Florida is hitting dizzy new heights.
There’s an old quip attributed to Groucho Marx that goes something like:
“I never want to be a member of any club that would have someone like me as a member.”
Membership of elite clubs (and golf is just one version) have a weird sort of counter-intuitive interpretation of the concept of “club”.
Often, the “club” is sort of collegiate, a tribal badge, an emblem of us-against-the-rest togetherness.
At elite level, though, there’s something else going on.
It’s much less us-against-the-rest togetherness.
Much more me-with-the-elite individualness.
It’s ego stacked on ego, added to superiority and multiplied by pride, and every corridor and every carpet has to smell like money.
Now, let’s point out, right from the start, that when it comes to talking specifics about elite golf course and country club memberships, reliably exact amounts are hard to come by.
And that’s 100% by design.
Before we get to talk about something as sordid as price, we have to make sure that you’re the right type, approved and seconded by someone already inside the club. (Which is, of course, shorthand for: We have to make sure you have wheelbarrows of cash and are willing to spend it here.)
One of the ways exclusive golf clubs make themselves exclusive is by closely guarding the level of investment their members make.
As one country club member told Boston magazine in 2018:
“Have you ever seen a country club with an ad in the newspaper? They don’t do it. They want to be exclusive and hidden and not publicized.”
So elite golf and country club membership around the world becomes a sort of mirror image of that old Groucho Marx line.
Instead, it becomes something like:
“I only want to be part of a club that would have someone like that guy I envy for a member.”
So let’s caveat all of this by saying two things with some certainty:
Only those inside the clubs know the facts
Two people inside the clubs may not share the same facts
Nevertheless, the Internet is nothing if not a haven for gossip, so information does emerge, and as you sift through the reams of search results for a Google search like “world’s most expensive golf memberships”, you’ll soon notice a few things.
The first thing you’ll notice is the volume of results.
A lot of people around the world are searching for things like this, and as sure as night follows day, when a lot of people are searching it means a lot of content websites and digital media companies are publishing things to satisfy those searches.
The second thing you’ll notice as you click through the results is that a couple of patterns emerge.
Pattern 1: Same places
Many golf courses and country clubs are present in many of the articles.
Liberty National in New Jersey, where initiation fees were reportedly USD$450,000 in the past.
Trump National in Los Angeles (reputed $350,000 initiation fee).
Brookline Country ClubThe Country Club at Brookline in Massachusetts, where initiation fees are estimated to be somewhere in the region of $250,000.Congressional in Maryland ($120,000 initiation, with a decade-long wait-list)
Augusta, the home of the Masters, in the state of Georgia, where membership (by invitation only, of course) has been slated at anywhere between $50,000 and $500,000.
Wentworth in the UK, which was reported to have been charging GBP£125,000 to new members as long ago as 2015.
Pattern 2: Same people
The courses (and lots more like them) are distinctly American in flavor.
This should not really be a surprise.
These are search results powered by an American tech company, catering for a mostly American readership.
And golf is big business in America.
The market size of golf courses and clubs in the USA is estimated at somewhere over $27 billion (Statista Research, March 2023).
But this US focus overlooks the fact that many of the most expensive golf memberships in the world are now in Asia.
Shanqin Bay in China has been labeled the world’s most expensive golf club with an initiation fee of more than USD$1 million.
There are some suggestions that the ultra-elite Hong Kong Golf Club may challenge that status. It has been mooted to cost an initiation fee of HKD$15.5 million, which converts to more than USD$2 million — if you could get in; it’s currently closed to new members.
Nambu Country Club in Korea had membership fees in the past well in excess of USD$1 million, converted from the local won, and it’s likely that Singapore Golf Club’s initiation fee is well in excess of USD$600,000.
But that dominance by Asia, even if it’s not reflected in Google search results, may be challenged by a new upstart club in Florida, which is mooted to become American’s first ever million-dollar membership.
America’s New Challenger and a Promise That All Billionaires Want to Hear
Let’s be truthful: we’re living in Monopoly money times.
Price inflation and interest rates remain stubbornly high.
Companies listed on the stock exchange have sailed past the trillion-dollar valuation mark — Apple became the first company to that figure in 2018; as of this writing six companies have market caps in excess of $1 trillion and Apple is on the way to $3 trillion.
Sergio Garcia enjoyed by far the most profitable year of his career, despite falling off the edge of the publicity cliff.
In these times, when “add a zero” is a favourite strategy no matter what your line of work, it has never been more clear that value’s relationship to price is changing, maybe forever.
And so it was always going to be only a matter of months or years before some country club in the US took its joining fees past the seven-figure barrier.
New is easier than old
Local boardroom and locker-room politics being what it is, it’s always easier to get new people to agree to something than get old people to change something.
So while the likes of Brookline, say, or Liberty National might be able to make a genuine argument to up its rates to $1 million for new joiners, it should be no surprise that it would take a brand new country club to be the first one to push through the seven-figure mark.
And that’s exactly what Shell Bay Club in Hallandale Beach has done, launching into the market with that nice round number as an initiation fee.
Per its own website, Shell Bay is “South Florida's most exclusive enclave”, a “world-class oasis of leisure and luxury … curated for those seeking [wanky copywriting alert] the pursuit of excellence and the excellence of pursuits.”
Its private membership…
“attracts an alchemy of individuals who share a singular passion for the exceptional in every way”.
Watering at the mouth yet?
No?
Maybe this’ll do it:
“Above all, Shell Bay is here to inspire unforgettable moments and nurture a life well lived.”
The last time I heard that phrase — “a life well lived” — was in Series 3 of the HBO show Billions, when Mike “Wags” Wagner and Bobby “Axe” Axelrod were checking out Wags’ future burial spot and riffing on the dissipation of sympathy depending on one’s decade of death.
—Dying in your thirties is “tragic.” As is forties. Sympathy dissipates from there.
—Fifties is “such a shame.”
—Sixties is “too soon.”
—Seventies…?
—”A good run.”
—And eighties is “a life well lived.”
—Nineties?
—“That’s a fuckin’ hell of a ride.”
And maybe that choice of words by Shell Bay, where membership helps you “nurture a life well lived”, is no coincidence at all.
Because chance plays such a part in life’s successes and failures, and because the judgment of others is seemingly vital too to all our various ups and downs, maybe that descriptor — “a life well lived” — is the one outcome that falls outside the billionaire’s orbit of control.
And maybe anything that increases the likelihood of getting that descriptor bestowed upon you is worth every cent.
Because what’s seven figures to a man who has everything else but the certainty that he’s lived life well?
What A Million Dollars in a Small Town in Florida Will Get You
All images via shellbayclub.com.
