Florida Is in a Golf Building Boom. Here’s the Part Nobody Saw Coming

Somewhere around 35 miles north of Panama City, on a stretch of Panhandle the golf world has mostly ignored for a century, Tom Doak is building a golf course for Michael Keiser.

If those names mean nothing to you, here is the translation. Doak is the architect behind Streamsong Blue, one of the two or three best courses built in this state in fifty years. Keiser is the son of the man who built Bandon Dunes and turned an empty Oregon coastline into a pilgrimage site. His projects follow the same gospel: put a world-class walkable golf course on great land first, then let the hotel and the restaurants grow up around it. The new one is called Old Shores. Preview play is expected late this year. The full opening comes in 2027.

That is the headline version of Florida’s golf boom, and it is real. What is more interesting is what is happening about 500 miles south and about $30 million cheaper.

Tune in Saturday Mornings on AM 820 The Big 8 in Tampa for the Golfers Unite Let’s Go Low Radio show with Host Jeff Stanislow. For more details and to stream it from anywhere click here. Catch the previous episodes on the Golfers Unite YouTube Channel.

The numbers behind the boom

Start with the demand, because none of this happens without it.

The National Golf Foundation, headquartered in Jupiter, has been counting American golfers since 1936. Its 2026 industry report found that 2025 produced record rounds played in the United States for the fourth time in five years. Total participation reached 48.1 million people, a figure that includes 29.1 million who played on an actual golf course and another 19 million who engaged only off-course at driving ranges, simulators and entertainment venues.

On-course participation has now grown for eight consecutive years, a net gain of more than five million golfers over that span. More than eight million women and girls played on course last year, an all-time high and a 46 percent increase over 2019. Women now make up 28 percent of on-course golfers and people of color 26 percent, both records. Another 21 million Americans who did not play at all in 2025 told researchers they are very interested in playing.

If participation rises another four percent this year, the United States crosses 50 million golfers for the first time in history. Through April, 2026 was tracking ahead of last year’s record pace.

NGF’s read is that this is not a pandemic hangover but a recalibrated, higher baseline. Eight straight years is not a spike. It is a shift. And there is a mechanism underneath it that operators are still catching up to: roughly two-thirds of new green-grass beginners now arrive having already swung a club somewhere else. The simulator, the Topgolf bay, the tech-enabled range. The front door to the sport moved, and the sport got bigger because of it.

Florida is not a golf state. Florida is a golf country.

Now put that demand on top of the most golf-dense piece of ground in the Western Hemisphere.

Florida has roughly 1,260 golf courses, more than any other state by a mile, about 31 percent more than second-place California. Only three countries on Earth have more golf than the state of Florida: Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada. Not Australia. Not Germany. Not France, South Korea or China. There are 94 courses within a 20-mile radius of the NGF’s own office in Jupiter.

So when the building starts, it starts here. NGF counted 28 brand-new Florida courses between 2023 and 2025, with at least 23 more in development. Nationally, more than 140 courses were in planning or under construction at the start of 2026, the highest level in more than a decade. Course closures, meanwhile, have fallen to their lowest levels in about two decades.

That is the healthiest supply picture golf has had since before the crash.

The catch

Here is the part that does not make the brochure. Look at what is actually being built.

At Streamsong, David McLay Kidd’s new course is set to join layouts by Doak, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, and Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. In Hallandale Beach, Shell Bay opened a Greg Norman championship course, the first new one of its kind in South Florida in more than 25 years, with a 60-key Auberge resort and 108 residences arriving in 2027. Out near Venus, Hanse and Wagner built a private club on rolling citrus-grove land with miles-long views, the kind of terrain most people do not believe exists in this state. Old Shores will be Doak’s third original Florida design, after Streamsong Blue and Sandglass.

These are magnificent golf courses. Several will land on national top-100 lists within five years of opening. And NGF’s supply analysis says the quiet part plainly: the majority of the 140-plus projects in the national pipeline are tied to private destination clubs, high-end real estate communities and resort properties.

Almost none of it is for the guy playing nine after his shift.

That is the honest shape of the boom. New golf is premium golf. It is destination golf, member golf, real-estate golf. If your definition of the sport’s health is whether a great course opened in Florida this year, the answer is yes, several. If your definition is whether it got easier and cheaper for a regular Floridian to tee it up on a Saturday morning, that is a different question with a different answer.

To understand why the top end is booming, you have to follow the money. And the money has changed its mind about golf.

The smartest money in Florida is buying golf courses

Chris Karamitsos has spent his career on both sides of this business. He came into the game after the Army, worked as an assistant pro at Countryside Country Club in Naples, learned teaching under Ken Venturi and operations under Greg Gagliardi in Tampa, then crossed over into real estate. Today he is a partner at Leisure Investment Properties Group, brokering golf course sales nationwide, with a long list of Tampa-area deals behind him including Black Diamond Ranch, Lakewood Ranch and Feather Sound.

When he came on the Golfers Unite “Let’s Go Low” radio show, he was asked about the oldest joke in the industry: that the way to make a small fortune in golf is to start with a large one. Watch this episode here.

His answer was that the saying has “totally flipped.”

Here is the arc he described. The Tiger Woods phenomenon of the late 1990s and early 2000s left the country badly oversupplied with golf courses. The 2008 downturn corrected it the hard way, through closures. And now, after fifteen years of that correction working through the system, the market has reached equilibrium and in some regions is bordering on undersupplied.

That is a stunning sentence about a sport people were writing obituaries for a decade ago.

The investment consequences are already visible. High interest rates have squeezed returns on traditional commercial real estate like retail and multi-family apartments, and capital has migrated toward specialty leisure assets instead. Golf courses, marinas and RV parks are drawing money because they are producing returns in the 12 to 13 percent range. Sellers are cashing out after three or four strong years or getting ahead of loans coming due. Buyers are finding that a very nice golf course still trades for under $5 million.

At the top of the market, the demand signal is almost absurd. Private club waiting lists are at historic lengths and initiation fees are at all-time highs. Karamitsos noted that a new master-planned community course in the Tampa area can carry an initiation fee reaching $175,000.

One hundred seventy-five thousand dollars to join. In Tampa.

That number tells you the sport is healthy. It does not tell you the sport is accessible, and Karamitsos was careful not to conflate the two. His point was that there is a golf course out there for every level, in skill and in cost, and that plenty of courses will still get you 18 holes for $25 or $30. Golf, he argued, is recession-proof in a specific way: when the economy tightens, golfers do not quit. They just move down the price ladder.

Which is exactly why the next part of this story matters more than the initiation fees do.

Tune in Saturday Mornings on AM 820 The Big 8 in Tampa for the Golfers Unite Let’s Go Low Radio show with Host Jeff Stanislow. For more details and to stream it from anywhere click here. Catch the previous episodes on the Golfers Unite YouTube Channel.

The muni comeback

Something genuinely unusual is happening at Florida’s public courses, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.

Delray Beach Golf Club has been closed since November 2025 for a $30 million renovation. Not a bunker touch-up. A full restoration of a Donald Ross and Dick Wilson design, with the city explicitly working to preserve the historic character rather than modernize it into something generic. The work is phased, north nine first, and city officials said the project was roughly half complete in early June and on budget for a November reopening. A local instructor who has taught there for two decades told WPTV it is looking better than he anticipated.

Thirty million dollars. On a city golf course.

Saddlebrook in Pasco County is in the middle of a $92 million property-wide overhaul, and the golf is the centerpiece. Rees Jones is converting two tired 18-hole courses into 27 holes built as three interchangeable nines, with greens rebuilt to USGA specification, rebuilt and laser-leveled tees, upgraded bunker drainage and a new irrigation system. Three different 18-hole combinations out of one property, which is a smart answer to a resort’s oldest problem: repeat guests getting bored.

Bobby Jones Golf Club in Sarasota is the one everybody points at. A Donald Ross municipal course that had been slowly dying got a restoration from architect Richard Mandell and came back as a legitimate destination. It became the proof of concept. Mandell’s next Florida project sits on barely 100 acres wedged between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, trying to bring a classic look back to a piece of urban ground nobody would have bothered with fifteen years ago.

Babe Zaharias in Tampa carries more history per square foot than almost any muni in America. The course opened in 1926 as Forest Hills Golf and Country Club. In 1949 Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias, the best all-around athlete this country has produced, bought it and spent her time there playing and running clinics for local golfers. After she died of cancer in 1956 the course closed and the clubhouse eventually burned. The City of Tampa reopened it in 1974 under her name, and it has since absorbed millions of dollars in renovation work including a rebuild of the greens and bunkers. It plays a shade over 6,000 yards. It is still a city golf course anybody can book.

And in southwest Florida, where the private club scene is loaded and the public options are thin, a new nine-hole public facility called The Gate Golf Club, with a short loop and a putting course is going in near Naples. Nine holes and a putting green does not sound like much next to a Tom Doak routing. For the number of Floridians it actually serves per acre, it might be worth more.

Why this is the real story

Golf spent twenty years treating municipal courses as a liability on a balance sheet. Underfunded, over-mowed, one budget cycle from a for-sale sign. The industry’s entire supply correction, roughly 2,000 facilities gone since the peak, fell hardest on exactly this tier.

What changed is that the demand finally became undeniable. Eight straight years of participation growth. Record rounds. Tee sheets full at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday. Cities and operators looked at that and reached a conclusion they had resisted for two decades: the asset is worth defending, and it is worth spending real money on.

Delray is spending $30 million to restore a Ross course for public play. That is not charity and it is not nostalgia. It is a bet that a well-conditioned, historically interesting municipal course in South Florida will be full every day for the next forty years. Based on the numbers, it is a good bet.

The result is a two-track Florida golf boom, and both tracks matter. The top end is building the courses that will define the state’s reputation nationally, and there is nothing wrong with that. Streamsong put Central Florida on the golf map. Old Shores will do it for the Panhandle. Those projects pull visitors, dollars and attention into the state.

But the track that determines whether your kid plays this game is the other one. It runs through Delray and Sarasota and Tampa and a nine-hole loop outside Naples. It is less glamorous, it gets a fraction of the coverage, and it is the reason Florida golf might come out of this decade stronger than it went in.

Eight million women and girls on golf courses. Twenty-one million Americans sitting on the sideline saying they want in. Whether the sport actually catches them will not be decided at a club with a $175,000 initiation fee. It will be decided at a city course with a $45 walking rate and a starter who remembers your name.

Karamitsos put the whole thing in one frame when he described the modern golf course. It is not just a place to play anymore. It is a real business asset, resilient, profitable, and finally being treated like one.

The good news for the rest of us is that the same math works on a muni.

Florida is building golf courses again. Keep an eye on the cheap ones.