Gated community, golf course planned in Wells

WELLS – A company long associated with retail golf shops and smaller country clubs hopes to begin construction later this summer on Maine’s first gated golf community.

Harris Golf in Bath wants to combine 131 luxury homes with price tags of $600,000 to $1 million with a new 18-hole public golf course in this York County town.

Its president, Jeff Harris, said the Old Marsh Country Club will take five years to complete and be valued at more than $80 million.

Maine has more than 140 golf courses, but less than a dozen or so include housing. The state has a handful of gated luxury developments, but the one that Harris plans to develop on a 418-acre inland site would be the first that is centered on a golf course.

Harris said there’s a pent-up demand for the sense of security of living beyond a locked gate.

“People who can afford it prefer a gated community,” he said. “They just don’t have the problems. Their kids can play in the cul-de-sac and they don’t worry.”

Harris’s company bought the wooded acreage for $3.4 million from a New Hampshire developer who started to build an 18-hole golf course and housing on the land in the 1990s. After a long court battle with the town, he won building permits for 131 homes, but then sold the property to Harris Golf at half its appraised value.

At a time when the number of golfers has remained flat, Harris Golf has an incentive to diversify through real estate. The cost of permits and construction for an 18-hole course has become so expensive that it’s hard to make a profit solely through rounds of golf, Harris said. But the housing market is so hot that real estate can pay the total cost of developing a course.

Harris Golf has tested the business model at the Sunday River Golf Club in Newry, which includes 57 house sites where lots sell for up to nearly $300,000.

“We’ve got a proven track record of doing it and doing it well,” he said.

The Harris name is widely known on the Maine golf scene. Richard Harris served as the golf pro at several southern Maine courses and helped found Falmouth Country Club in the late 1980s. He opened the state’s first off-course retail golf store. He will be inducted into the Maine Golf Hall of Fame in September.

Harris and his sons, Jeff and Jason, bought the Boothbay Country Club 11 years ago, expanding it from nine holes to 18 holes. A year later they bought Bath Country Club and began upgrading it. This year, they took over management of Freeport Country Club, a nine-hole course owned by L.L. Bean.

Last week the company obtained permits for 21 house lots at Boothbay, which will be offered for $175,000 to $250,000. Harris Golf Shop in South Portland has added a store in Freeport. The retail business also is expanding online.

Golf course home sites are the most valuable form of residential real estate behind oceanfront property, according to Jeff Harris. He said he’s negotiating to sell the lots in Wells to an out-of-state builder, who would handle the home construction in phases. That would give Harris Golf capital to start the golf course.