Green Valley Ranch Golf Club sold

Founder and owner Pat Hamill sells course to focus on new project

By Jim Bebbington

Green Valley Ranch Golf Club, the home of the Inspirato Colorado Open championships and the First Tee of Green Valley Ranch chapter, has been sold to a New York-based real estate investment firm.

Pat Hamill, founder and CEO of Oakwood Homes, said Monday the sale closed last week. The new owners, The LCP Group, are expected to continue operations as a public course and maintain this summer’s scheduled events, including the Inspirato Colorado Women’s, Men’s and Senior Opens.

“Eventually everything has to be sold,” Hamill said. “The whole vision of the Green Valley Ranch Club was to give the public golfer a private golf experience and we’ve achieved that. It’s our team; our team really did a great job.”

Hamill said he is selling in order to be able to focus on a new golf course project. He said he could not discuss details of the new project because they have not yet been finalized.

The 18-hole course with an adjacent par-3 tract opened in the early 2000s anchoring a part of the residential development of the Green Valley Ranch community near Denver International Airport.

The sale price for Green Valley Ranch has not been released and sales data had not been filed at the time this article was posted. The land where the course sits is not part of the sale; it is owned by the Town Center Metropolitan District, according to county records, which was one of the original entities established in the 1980s to enable development of the area.

According to the Denver County property assessor’s records the parcels where the course sits have assessed land values totaling about $7.2 million.

What was sold was the right to operate a golf course on the land, according to John Vander Zwaag of the LCP Group. The terms of that lease run until the year 2100.

“It was a fair price,” Hamill said. “We had multiple bidders on the (course) and we got a fair price. Green Valley Ranch Golf Club has become a staple and well-known nationally as the host of the Colorado Opens.”

Hamill said the course’s staff have worked hard to make the game accessible. “(I sold to) owners who would be good stewards of the game and the asset of providing public golf opportunities,” he said. “With the First Tee and world class training facility and the par 3 we’ve done a great job of introducing the game of golf to the souls less fortunate, to continue to create that opportunity.”

In June Hamill is also leaving his role as Chairman and CEO of Oakwood Homes, one of the developers of the Green Valley Ranch community. Hamill sold Oakwood Homes in 2017 to a subsidiary of the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. He is scheduled to be inducted this fall into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame.

The purchase is the first golf course for the LCP Group, Vander Zwaag said. The investment group owns hotels and buildings that house day-care centers, grocery stores and other commercial uses throughout the country. It is moving into the golf space, he said, because of the quality of the opportunity with Green Valley Ranch. They hope to add more golf course operations to their portfolio going forward, he said.

“It represents what we’re looking for in golf courses,” Vander Zwaag said. “It’s a very high quality course, it’s been well maintained, and it has tremendous facilities for practicing and the First Tee.”

Vander Zwaag said they intend to keep the current staff and have agreed to keep the course’s general manager, Matt Bryant, on to lead the operation. “We expect to keep (employees) long-term,” he said. “We’re very excited Matt has agreed to stay with us; we think very highly of him.”

The course also hosts many tournaments throughout the summer; all planned events are expected to proceed without interruption, Vander Zwaag said.

Colorado AvidGolfer Magazine is the state’s leading resource for golf and the lifestyle that surrounds it, publishing eight issues annually and proudly delivering daily content via coloradoavidgolfer.com.
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Jim Bebbington is the Director of Content at Colorado AvidGolfer. Contact him at [email protected]