Norman’s Port Hughes golf course looks set for closure

20 Feb 2013

According to reports in the Adelaide Now newspaper, Greg Norman’s 9-hole course at Port Hughes on the Yorke Peninsula is in danger of being shut-down. The project was placed into receivership last July, with debts totally more than $13 million. Receivers have tried to move the remaining residential allotments, and keep the golf course operating, but sales have been almost nonexistent and golf course patronage has halved, from an already dangerously low base.

According to the report, since being launched to great fanfare in 2007, just 100 of the 1,900 residential allotments at Port Hughes have been sold. The golfing numbers are equally poor, with only 90 members currently using the Copperclub golf course facility. The local council has now been handed the site and asked to try to make the golf operations feasible. They effectively have three years to improve the business, or risk the course closing entirely. The chances of Norman’s team ever getting to build their second nine holes seem remote at best.

The newspaper reports that, “the local council has taken ownership of The Dunes course in a last-ditch bid to save the course, which it says will be doomed without community support.

Copper Coast council has reached an in-principle agreement with project financier Rural Bank to take ownership of the nine-hole course in return for sponsorship of a new independent body charged with managing the course's operation.

It is understood Rural Bank, which is owed around $8.3 million since the collapse of the developers of the $500 million resort, rejected an offer to purchase the site before offering more funding.

The bank will provide sponsorship for a three-year period, after which it is expected the new association will be self-sufficient.”

A spokesman for the bank added that, "if the golf course cannot establish a viable business plan going forward, the future of the course will need to be reviewed. This may mean a different standard of course or potentially the closure of the course."

Adelaide Now were told that the course’s annual water bill of $150,000 had crippled the business, and that the council expects to reduce or remove this cost over time thanks to a new Community Wastewater Management Scheme. Clearly every little bit helps when placed in such a perilous trading position, but with only 90 members the council are going to need more than free water to rescue this situation.

Every failed golf course project damages our industry, and this one seemed an enormous risk from the start. A long way from an Adelaide golf market reluctant to travel, the project relied almost entirely on the pulling power of the Greg Norman brand. Whether Australian consumers are more sophisticated than those overseas, or whether it’s simply a sign of a depressed economic climate, there are now countless examples across Australia where a celebrity endorsement or ‘design’ has failed to overcome the handicap of a poor location or a poor business plan.

Interestingly, while the failure of Port Hughes should act as a warning to other developers, Norman recently met with delegates from Olympic Weightlifting champion Dean Lukin’s company to discuss another regional South Australian golf course development, this time at Port Lincoln, which is even further from Adelaide than Port Hughes. Lukin and his son Dean Lukin Jr unveiled plans last year for a $300 million residential development at Port Lincoln, complete with a golf course built in the shape of a great white shark. At the time the family said they were, "keen to get a big player on board to help design the course to make it a “must play” destination".

Not surprisingly it now appears that big player name will be Greg Norman, who visited the site in late January and told local reporters that, "the land exceeded our expectations."
Hopefully that means the ground is better for golf than they had imagined, and not that it looks more like a shark from the air than they were told. See concept sketch below.

The Lukin’s hope to begin work on their ‘Shark’ golf course during the second half of 2013.

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