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Lahontan Homes for Sale
The Club & The HOA
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 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 2024 costs $40,000 in initiation fees (quadruple what it was pre-Covid) plus $12,400/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 going rates for golf in 2024 was around $175,000). Like any commodity, the value of a Lahontan Golf Club membership fluctuates in response to supply and demand.
Sellers "with a Golf Membership"
Can Incentivize the Sale of their home
Like furnishings, or other personal property, your Lahontan golf membership can be "included" in the sale of your home when you decide to sell. There's a cost to this to the seller, and it varies, depending on the going rate for Club memberships. If you "include" you Golf membership in the sale of your home, you will owe the Club 25% of whatever the market rate is for memberships through the Club.
Similarly, you can offer the membership to the buyer of your home outside of escrow. In that case, the transfer fee paid to the Club is the greater of 25% of the sale price or $10,000. At the end of the day, it's a math question; if it nets you a better sales price for your home, it might be worth considering the above options. Talk first with your CPA about the tax implications, as this will be different for every seller.
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.)
Interest in the Club at Lahontan skyrocketed during Covid, placing a strain on facilities that led to a brief moratorium on new social memberships. By the beginning of 2021, strictly social membership had climbed by 50 percent, and with many working from home, members were using the amenities more. This, despite the fact that the initiation fee for a social membership doubled in 2020 to $20,000. The result was that the Club implemented a wait list for new social membership hopefuls.
*Buying a home from sellers who already had a social membership catapulted those on the wait list to the front of the line, but it still had a chilling effect on new buyers because 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 was not automatically conferred to those buying a home in Lahontan.
By the beginning of 2021, social memberships had climbed to 75. That's not a huge number, but it didn't include those who were entitled to use the "social" facilities thanks to their membership in the Golf Club. The Club's experiment with a moratorium on social memberships was soon scrapped in favor of allowing only "home" owners to join the social club; not owners of vacant lots.
In 2024, Club members approved a $30k special assessment to fund improvements to the Fitness Center & Camp Lahontan. The revenue will also pay for the creation of a casual dining area offering pub-style fare as a nice compliment to the formal dining room of The Lodge.