This north Strand golf course has closed and a contracted sale fell through. What’s next
Brick Landing Plantation Golf Club closed on Jan. 1, a day after a contract to sell the course expired.
Course owner Larry Doyle said he is now having discussions with two more prospective buyers and hopes to have the property under contract again within a couple weeks, though it’s unclear if the course will ever reopen.
Doyle said one of the potential buyers is interested in reopening the course but the other is not, and it will remain closed as long as he owns it.
“I am definitely not reopening it myself. My days are done,” said Doyle, who has owned it since 2011. “I’m at the stage now where enough is enough. A buyer is going to have to step up and get it done.”
Brick Landing is a scenic Mike Brazeal design along the Intracoastal Waterway that opened in 1987 and also includes a grand 11,000-square-foot clubhouse near the waterway’s banks.
Doyle is asking $1.25 million for the 125-acre course and clubhouse, and he also owns 71 undeveloped lots around the golf course that he additionally has for sale for $750,000.
“I think everybody is starting to realize that it’s worth a lot more as the sum of its parts,” Doyle said from Puerto Rico, where he generally spends his winters. “The community should really buy the golf course and the developers could develop the waterway. So they need somebody to step in there and put it all together and I think it could be worked out for a lot of people, so we’ll see. I think that’s the ideal situation.”
Doyle said the buyer who allowed his contract to expire on Dec. 31 reconsidered. “I think he just felt he was retired and it would be too much effort and hassle,” Doyle said.
The View restaurant in the clubhouse remains open six days a week: lunch Monday through Friday, dinner Thursday and Friday, and brunch Sunday.
The golf course has benefited from renovations in the past few years, including new Sunday ultradwarf Bermudagrass greens in the summer of 2018.
“The course is in the best shape it’s ever been,” said Terry Yow, president of the Brick Landing master property owners association. “That’s the shame of it right now is we’re all looking at a course that has been not in as good of shape at other times, and right now as of December 31st it was in great shape.”
The course has struggled financially in part because it has lacked strong community support, with a high of about 18 percent of community residents owning memberships during Doyle’s ownership, he said.
Brick Landing has not received substantial play from Myrtle Beach-area golf packages in recent years.
Yow said the POA is looking to work with the next property owner in the hopes of resurrecting the course. A committee of approximately 20 residents has formed to work with a prospective new owner.
They want to meet with the next person or group contracted to buy the course during the due diligence period “so we can kind of tell them what we want to do to help try to keep the club open,” said Yow, who operated multiple country clubs in North Carolina three decades ago.
“Whoever buys the club, if they are willing to keep it open, we want to work with them to either increase membership or do whatever needs to be done,” Yow added. “We’ll just keep our fingers crossed.”
According to Brunswick County Planning and Zoning senior planner Marc Pages, Brick Landing – the golf course and surrounding property – is zoned R-7500 within a Planned Development, which would allow a medium density residential development with minimum lot sizes of 7,500 square feet.
“Brick Landing is a Planned Development which allows some flexibility from the conventional standards of the R-7500 district,” Pages said in an email. “With planning board approval you could even have multifamily and some limited commercial uses. Any efforts to develop the golf course property would require planning board approval.”
Yow believes some homeowners may have restrictions on building on parts of the golf course in their deeds or sales contracts, particularly along holes 1 and 18 along the waterway that would impact their “line of sight” to the water. Yow hasn’t yet seen the documentation, however.
Doyle said he wasn’t aware of redevelopment restrictions on the property.
In 2010, prior to Doyle’s purchase, then-Brick Landing POA president Ken Horton was confident the course’s next owner would have to operate the property as a golf course based on documentation and other factors, including the POA’s ownership of roads through the property.
Horton said then that the property’s PUD zoning allowed for 40 multi-family housing units around the clubhouse. “Anyone who wants to do that can build and make their money and still have a golf course, so there’s a little wiggle room for anybody,” Horton said.
An attempted reopening of the course might be complicated by parcels that are owned by other parties.
According to Doyle and Yow, a few holes and most of the driving range are independently owned.
Holes 11-14 across N.C. 179 from the remainder of the course are owned by the Hewett family, and Doyle said that property reverts back to the family if its use ceases to be a golf course.
Stratford Land of Texas owns about two-thirds of the driving range – along with four other non-contiguous tracts around the course – and has been talking with Doyle about purchasing it.
Doyle said the driving range was previously a leach field for the community’s waste.
“There’s a lot of moving parts,” Doyle said.
Brick Landing is the latest in a spate of Grand Strand course closings over the past two-plus months, as golf courses have become attractive property in the midst of a burgeoning housing market.
Indian Wells Golf Club in Garden City closed on Dec. 21 and Possum Trot Golf Club in North Myrtle Beach closed on Oct. 31, and both are likely to be redeveloped.
The Pearl Golf Links in Calabash, N.C., closed nine of its 36 holes on Jan. 1.
Doyle would prefer to find a buyer who wants to reopen the course, especially if he doesn’t sell his lots around it.
“Everybody’s hoping some white knight will come in,” Doyle said. “Because I own the land, I would rather see somebody come in and continue it as a golf course. If somebody is there running a good golf course my lots would sell themselves over time.”
This story was originally published January 7, 2020 at 2:44 PM.
