CORE buys Las Vegas golf course

Making their first investment in the golf course sector, California-based CORE Realty Holdings has acquired The Revere Club for $28m.

CORE Realty Holdings has acquired a suburban Las Vegas golf course from links management company Troon Golf for $28 million (€21 million).

The acquisition of The Revere Club in Henderson, Nevada is the Newport Beach, California-based CORE’s first investment in the golf sector, though the firm is embarking on a strategy to invest in golf clubs across the country.

“The Revere is the first in a plan to acquire a number of well-positioned, golf-related properties throughout the United States each year,” CORE vice chairman Doug Morehead said in a statement. “Golf properties allow us an important alternative to our current portfolio of multi-family, commercial, retail and industrial investments.”

The club features two 18-hole courses, the 7,443-yard Lexington and the 7,034-yard Concord, spread over 400 acres south of Las Vegas. The acquisition includes the club’s 23,000-square-foot clubhouse.

“This will likely be one of the largest single asset transactions in the golf industry in 2007,” said Todd Ratliff, vice president of the golf division of investment bank Hodges Ward Elliott, which worked on the deal. “We have seen an increase in both buying and selling of golf course real estate in the past two years, a trend we see accelerating.”

The golf sector has been drawing increased interest from private equity firms in recent years as the sector has rebounded from a rash of oversupply in the late 1990s. In 2006, according to industry observers, there was virtually no new supply in US golf courses. Firms such as Walton Street, Apollo Real Estate and KSL Capital have all made acquisitions in either the golf or golf-resort space over the past year.