Selling a golf course: what buyers and their lenders will ask

Before you sell: who will judge what the course is worth

A sale draws questions from three directions. The buyer wants to know what the course will earn under new ownership and what it will cost to keep it competitive. If the buyer borrows, the lender wants to know whether the course can carry the loan and what the property would be worth if it could not. Then come the advisers, who check every answer against documents.

Buyers pay for what they can verify. As one adviser told Golf Inc. in February 2026, buyers want to pay for what a course is, not for its potential. Each question below is a way of finding out what the course is.

What a buyer will ask about the numbers

Start with the accounts. A 2026 seller's guide from the brokerage Fairway Advisors says buyers and their advisers typically review three to five years of accounts, tax returns and bank records, and may check reported revenue against tee-sheet and point-of-sale records and look at rounds by category.

Buyers then rebuild your earnings on their own terms. Personal expenses and one-off items come out. If you run the course yourself without a salary, expect a market management fee to be deducted, and a reserve for replacing equipment and infrastructure to be set aside. If the course shares its books with a restaurant, a real estate company or another business you own, separate them before a buyer does it for you.

At a club, the membership records weigh as much as the accounts. The seller-preparation list in LIPG's 2025 Golf Investment Report puts the club bylaws and membership documents alongside the financial statements, so expect questions about each category of member, how many joined and resigned each year, and what they pay.

What a buyer will ask about the course, the buildings and the equipment

A buyer will walk the course with a superintendent or a consultant and then ask for the records behind what they saw. Irrigation usually comes first, because it is one of the largest capital costs at a golf facility. The USGA's Water Conservation Playbook, published in March 2025, puts a new system at $3 million to more than $5 million and its traditional useful life at about 25 years.

Greens, bunkers and tees wear out on their own cycles, and many courses carry work they have not funded. In the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America's 2025 survey of 18-hole courses, 40% of superintendents disagreed that funding for capital projects at their facility was sufficient, while 34% agreed.

Deferred work does not disappear in a sale; it moves into the price. Golf Inc. reported in November 2025 that an outdated clubhouse or a poor irrigation system can lower a course's sale price even in a strong market. A schedule of what has been spent, what is planned and what it will cost lets a buyer price that work from your evidence rather than from a worst case.

Equipment follows the same logic. In the same GCSAA survey, 49% of superintendents said their course leases equipment, and a lease the buyer takes over brings its payments with it. Have a schedule of what is owned, what is leased and on what terms.

What a buyer will ask about water, land and title

Water is often the first question. Brokers interviewed by Golf Inc. in February 2026 named access to irrigation water, and the cost of securing it, as buyers' main concern. Expect to show where your water comes from, the rights or contracts behind it, and the limits that apply.

Those limits are tightening in some places. In Southern Nevada, golf course water budgets were cut from 6.3 to 4 acre-feet per irrigated acre a year from 2024, according to the Las Vegas Valley Water District, with surcharges of up to nine times the highest non-potable rate for heavy overuse.

Title comes next. Expect title work and an ALTA survey, which the same February 2026 Golf Inc. article described as a required document. Buyers will look for easements, deed restrictions and covenants that require the land to stay a golf course, because these limit what the land can become. As one adviser told Golf Inc. in November 2025, land is only as valuable as its zoning allows.

Environmental questions follow. The US Small Business Administration lists golf courses and country clubs among environmentally sensitive industries, so a lender making an SBA-guaranteed loan must begin with a Phase I environmental site assessment, whatever the size of the loan. The SBA names ASTM E1527-21 as the current standard; the Environmental Protection Agency has recognized it under its "all appropriate inquiries" rule since February 2023. On a golf course the questions turn to how fertilizer and pesticides are stored and used, which Fairway Advisors lists among the environmental items buyers examine.

Memberships, contracts and licenses that pass with a sale

At a private club, refundable membership deposits can decide the deal. Many clubs sold memberships in the 1980s and 1990s with deposits refundable after 30 years, and a club lawyer interviewed by Golf Property Analysts in 2021 noted that those deposits are now coming due. The firm has also written that some buyers will not consider a club with large refund liabilities, and that others use them to negotiate the price down by more than their present value.

Prepare the bylaws, the membership agreements and a schedule of every deposit, showing when and how each one is repaid. Fairway Advisors notes that many sellers fund member deposits into an escrow account at closing, so the buyer does not inherit an unexpected liability.

Contracts come next: management agreements, cart and equipment leases, and any agreement with a homeowners' association. Buyers will want to know which can be assigned and what it costs to end the rest. A liquor license needs particular care; the Florida law firm Shutts & Bowen advises arranging its transfer to the buyer as part of the sale.

What the buyer's lender will ask

A lender asks two questions: can the course pay the loan from its own earnings, and what is the property worth as security if it cannot. Lenders in the Society of Golf Appraisers' 2026 survey reported loan-to-value ratios of 50% to 85%, 66.7% on average, and debt service coverage requirements of 1.25 to 2.5 times.

If the buyer uses a 7(a) loan guaranteed by the US Small Business Administration, the rules in force since 1 October 2026 add specific requirements. The buyer must put in equity of at least 10% of the project cost, and the lender needs debt service coverage of at least 1.25 times. The lender may value the business itself only if its price, excluding real estate, is $350,000 or less and buyer and seller are not closely related, and it may not use a valuation prepared for you or for the buyer. If the price exceeds the valuation, the buyer must cover the difference with equity.

The lender will also test your figures. The SBA requires it to analyze the business's three most recent years and to check the seller's financial information against IRS tax transcripts. Accounts that do not match your tax returns will raise questions.

If you are prepared to finance part of the price yourself, ask early how the buyer's lender will treat your note. Under the SBA's rules a seller note counts toward the buyer's equity only if it is subordinated to the lender and on full standby, with no payments of principal or interest for the term of the SBA loan, and it can supply no more than half of the required equity. If you plan to stay involved after a full sale financed this way, note that the SBA allows the seller to stay on only as a consultant, for up to 24 months.

How to prepare before you sell, refinance, renovate or hand over

Preparation is the part of the timetable you control. Put the evidence in one place: at least three years of clean accounts that match your tax returns, with the course separated from everything else; the operating data behind them; and the property, water and contract documents.

Then test it the way a buyer would. That is the work of Slope Intelligence's Capital Readiness Assessment. It gives the course an AssetScore across 10 categories and 43 data points, sets out the material risks with the evidence behind each, and includes an indicative value range where agreed and supported by the evidence. The range is separate from AssetScore and is not a formal valuation or appraisal. We identify the buyer, lender and partner profiles that fit the asset, so your time is spent on the right conversations. Introductions are agreed separately, and we do not take transaction fees from buyers or sellers.

If you decide not to sell, the work still counts. A lender refinancing the course, a partner funding a renovation and a family member taking it over will ask many of the same questions.

Questions owners ask about selling

Sources

Each link was opened and read on 19 October 2026.

1. The golf course broker's playbook: What every owner should know about today's market Golf Inc., 11 February 2026.
2. How to Sell a Golf Course: Complete Transaction Guide for Owners Fairway Advisors, 28 July 2026.
3. Golf Investment Report 2025 Leisure Investment Properties Group, 2025.
4. Water Conservation Playbook: Irrigation System Maintenance USGA Green Section, March 2025.
5. 2025 Capital Budget and Labor Survey Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, September 2025.
6. Golf course and club valuations are trending higher than ever Golf Inc., 12 November 2025.
7. Drought and conservation measures Las Vegas Valley Water District, undated page.
8. SOP 50 10 8.1: Lender and Development Company Loan Programs US Small Business Administration, effective 1 October 2026.
9. Standards and Practices for All Appropriate Inquiries, final rule, 87 FR 76578 Environmental Protection Agency, 15 December 2022, effective 13 February 2023.
10. Solutions to Private Club Legal Challenges Golf Property Analysts, 7 June 2021.
11. Membership Refund Liability: The Impact on Value Golf Property Analysts, 11 October 2017.
12. Buying and Selling Golf Courses in Florida Shutts & Bowen LLP, 21 October 2021.
13. 2026 SGA Golf Investment & Lender Survey Society of Golf Appraisers, 2026.
14. Slope AssetScore methodology, scoring specification v2.1 Slope Intelligence, effective 8 May 2026, corrected 11 October 2026.