Financial Modeling Approach for a Public Golf Course

 I've built financial models for private and public golf courses (for clients and general templates for anyone to use). The main difference between these two is the revenue drivers. Public courses are more of a capacity-based model for walk-ins that pay a one-time course fee. Private courses are a different kind of capacity model.

Relevant Templates:

The way I decided to build a financial model for a public course was to focus on the number of max potential walk-ins that can happen, and then let the user choose a capacity percentage of that level that can be achieved.

In this type of model, the user can go in and manually adjust the main drivers of what determines the maximum potential course fees. This is based on the average time it takes to complete a hole per group to the amount of time the course is open for, and the price charged per person per round, and the average number of people that participate per group.

They reason why I think it is better to build a public golf course model like this is because you automatically have a sanity check in your assumptions, compared to if you just entered some assumptions about the total rounds sold over time. Doing that may be more difficult to justify and investors would want to know how you are arriving at the numbers and if the numbers are feasible based on the course.

Most public golf courses also have food and beverage so I added assumptions for this based on the percentage of players that end up buying food or beverages and the average ticket value of that as well as the gross margin.

The capex is a little different in a golf course as well as what can be depreciated vs. what can't. In general, land is not depreciable so for the initial investment I broke things down based on a capex spend per hole and a percentage of that which is depreciable (fixed equipment in the ground is depreciable for example).

Article found in General Industry.