Michigan residents Audrey and Sean Swider started dreaming about moving to a golf-club community in a warmer climate about seven years ago. Sean’s passion for golf, shared by their two young sons, fueled the couple’s desire for a golf-centric lifestyle year-round.

In 2023, the Swiders got serious about moving. They toured a half-dozen cities, from Raleigh, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla. But like many recent U.S. house hunters with fairway aspirations, the Swiders encountered a hazard: golf-club waiting lists, which swelled during the pandemic and have yet to fully ease.

Buying a house in a golf community doesn’t always guarantee an automatic club membership, and the Swiders discovered that some had long wait lists. They didn’t even look at homes for sale in those neighborhoods.

“We did limit our house search because there were a couple clubs that we found out had a two-year wait list,” says Sean, 46, a sales executive. “We didn’t want to buy a house and move and not be able to use the golf course right away,” says Audrey, a 47-year-old real-estate agent.

The couple landed on the Hasentree Club in Wake Forest, N.C. In May 2023, the Swiders closed on a $1.24 million house that is 6,000 square feet and has five bedrooms. It’s on the fifth hole of the club’s 18-hole course. They started playing golf two days after they moved in.

For prospective golf-community homeowners, wait lists have turned the buying process into a game of strategy, patience and sometimes compromise, forcing some people to rethink when and where they buy homes. This is a turnaround from before the pandemic, when such communities had been plagued with years of sluggish sales and stagnant prices.

When it comes to home sales, “golf-club wait lists are a very real problem,” says Devin Kay, a Miami-based Douglas Elliman real-estate agent. “It’s one of the biggest challenges I’ve been dealing with.”

Some of his clients start their search in Miami, but finding that they can’t get into any of the golf clubs, buy instead in Boca Raton, Palm Beach Gardens or Jupiter, where some club memberships automatically come with a home purchase, he says.

“If Naples, Fla., was their dream retirement snowbird escape, they will explore Vero Beach or Jacksonville, in Florida, or Greenville, in South Carolina, as there is new construction in those areas and instant availability for a club membership,” says Jason Becker of Golf Life Navigators, a platform that helps people find golf communities.

There are approximately 3,800 private clubs in the U.S. About 47% of them, or roughly 1,800 clubs, have wait lists, ranging from a few months to 10 or more years, according to Club Benchmarking, a private club business-intelligence company. That figure has roughly doubled from before Covid, when 25% had wait lists.

The process of obtaining a golf membership varies from club to club. In some communities, membership is mandatory or bundled with a home purchase inside the gates. Other communities allow homeowners the option to join, though a wait list might apply. Some private golf clubs offer no preferred access, even for owners of homes directly on the course.

Last summer, Becker worked with a client who wanted to relocate to southwest Florida, home to about 150 private clubs. Only two clubs had memberships available—and they were almost sold out. “The client was like, ‘When did that happen?’” Becker says. “‘I said, ‘It happened in 2021, after Covid showed its face.’” The client is still house-hunting.

Before 2021, the average golf house buyer was typically looking at clubs where 8% to 10% of people dropped their memberships each year, Becker says. Postpandemic, that rate has dropped to 2% to 4%. Meanwhile, the number of golfers in the U.S. has increased by 16% since 2019, according to the National Golf Foundation.

Fred Fung is the CEO and general manager of Bonita Bay Club, a golf club in Bonita Springs, in southwest Florida. It has five 18-hole courses spread out over two campuses and about 3,400 residences within its gates. Properties currently on the market range from around $335,000 to $6 million.

Historically, Bonita Bay Club had about 62 golf members join each year. In the first fiscal year of the pandemic, that number more than tripled to 191, Fung says. Now it has about 180 people across its three golf waiting tiers.

Bonita Bay Club in Bonita Springs, Fla.

Shortly before the pandemic, aerospace executive and entrepreneur Peter Mirabello, 63, and former insurance industry executive Kim Elliott, 60, started looking at relocating from Connecticut to the southeastern U.S., considering southeast Georgia and north Florida. To ease their transition, they wanted to join a golf club for its built-in community.

They ultimately chose the Jacksonville area. Avoiding club wait lists wasn’t the sole reason for landing there, but Peter says it was part of their decision. “We got a little bit lucky because there were still some club membership opportunities,” Peter says. “Now the lines are longer.”

In July 2021, the couple purchased a $4 million, 6,400-square-foot spec house with five bedrooms on a 0.7-acre cul-de-sac lot in the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club community, which has two 18-hole courses. They spent an additional $1.2 million to customize their home. Construction finished in July 2023, when they moved in.

After buying their house, they joined the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, which soon after started a wait list that remains. They are still members there. In 2022, they joined Dye’s Valley at TPC Sawgrass, also now waitlisted, but eventually resigned to join Glen Kernan Club in 2024. Glen Kernan had membership openings due to ownership changes resulting in extensive renovations of the clubhouse and golf course. It’s now invitation-only for golf.

Becker anticipates that wait lists could soon get shorter, primarily because more golf-home inventory has opened up over the last six months as compared with the past couple of years, he says. More homes for sale might mean more memberships available as sellers often drop out.

At Mirabello and Elliott’s residence, the pool house has a golf simulator.

Brian Friederichs, CEO of Capstone Hospitality, which specializes in private-club membership sales, adds that once club wait lists reach three to five years, it becomes harder to attract new potential members, so wait lists start to shrink naturally.

“We’re making the turn to where becoming a member at a club could be more feasible than it was in the last five years,” says Johnny Delprete, a Douglas Elliman real-estate agent in Florida’s Palm Beach and Martin counties. “But it’s still competitive.”

Meanwhile, clubs are seeking creative solutions to minimize wait times. At Bonita Bay Club, Fung implemented what he calls progressive golf tiers, which grants immediate limited golf access to new members and incremental access as they move up the tiers toward a full golf membership. The complete process is currently estimated to take around three years, though that time frame could significantly change based on member turnover. David Pillsbury, CEO of Invited—a network encompassing 154 golf clubs nationwide, including the Swiders’ Hasentree club—developed XLife. This upgrade allows members and those on wait lists to play at Invited’s non-waitlisted clubs and 200 more clubs.

Buyers are also paying big bucks to skip wait lists all together. In Miami, Shell Bay is a new development with an 18-hole course and a condo tower that broke ground in January. Buying one of the roughly 100 residences, which range from about $2 million to $13 million, allows for immediate club access.

A rendering of Shell Bay in Miami.

“I’ve sold Shell Bay residences to people who didn’t even need a condo, but they ended up purchasing a property simply to gain club membership,” Kay says. Condo buyers still have to shell out for a club initiation fee, but they get about a 40% discount. The bargain cost? $800,000.