Loving Lahontan?
So do hundreds of other people ...
Many of you visiting my website are asking for info on the cost of a Lahontan Golf Club Membership so I thought I'd create a page with current rates as well as an update on how the Club at Lahontan got to where it is today.
The gated community of Lahontan is maintained by an HOA, which is separate from the Lahontan Golf & Country Club. If you own in Lahontan, your HOA dues of $1,175/quarter (2022 rates) pay for the gate house and security, the roads, snow removal and other common area maintenance.
If you want to go swimming, play golf, or have dinner at the Clubhouse, that requires a separate membership: either Golf or Social. Golf is the more inclusive of the two. With a golf membership, social is also included.
The social membership for 2022 costs $40,000 in initiation fees (quadruple what it was pre-Covid) plus $9,350/year. With a social membership, you can use of the pools, tennis courts, fitness center, and the Clubhouse with its beautiful restaurant & bar.
The Golf Club memberships are sold on the open market, and have appreciated significantly over the years..In 2015, you could buy in for $25k; today that same initiation fee can cost around $200k +/- (The lowest price membership in November 2022 was at $160,000). Like any commodity, the value of a Lahontan Golf Club membership fluctuates in response to supply and demand.
Opening the Gates
During the last Recession, Lahontan real estate sales slumped to a low median sales price of $1,725,000 with only 11 homes selling in 2011. To stay afloat in a shrinking pond, The Club decided to offer "invitational" golf club memberships to those who did not own property in Lahontan.
Fast forward, and you have a community with some 300 existing homes, and a Club with some 400 members. (Social membership is included in the Golf Club membership, and the invitational memberships were not recallable.)
Couple that with Covid overhauls that have so many people working from home, and suddenly you have second homes in Lahontan spending double the time here. That led to a bit of a conundrum: How do you continue to provide the same top shelf experience to Club members without expanding your facilities or limiting new memberships?
You don't.
By the beginning of 2021, strictly social membership had climbed by 50 percent. This, despite the fact that the initiation fee for a social membership doubled in 2020 to $20,000. The result was a wait list for new social membership hopefuls. (*Buying a home from sellers who already have a social membership catapults you to the front of the line)
Moving forward, the Club needs to make some hard decisions about whether to expand capacity or limit access. Tough call. And I'm sure there are advocates for both directions. Those who are already in the Club might prefer to keep it exclusive, and change nothing. Others, perhaps newcomers to the community, might advocate for a more egalitarian approach to the use of facilities likes the pool, tennis courts and fitness center.
Lahontan, historically, has around 50 strictly "social" members. If you live in Lahontan, and hope to share a glass of wine with your neighbors at the Clubhouse or play a game of tennis, the social membership, at a minimum, is a must. But given the separation between the HOA and the "Club," social membership is not automatically conferred to those buying a home in Lahontan.
At the beginning of 2021, social memberships had climbed to 75. That's not a huge number, but it doesn't include those who are entitled to use the "social" facilities thanks to their membership in the Golf Club. The Club experimented with a moratorium on social memberships, but that policy was soon scrapped in favor of allowing only "home" owners to join the social club; not owners of vacant lots.