I wanted to devote this update of the blog to the irrational exuberance of the US real estate market. For some time I have felt that the US economy is a pensioner of the home-equity market, which is to say that the last consumers left in the American mall are those refinancing their houses to pay for washers and dryers. At the same time, I realize it is August, that few people are at their desks, and that in these dog days, no one wants to think about depressed or depressing markets. If people are thinking about anything, it is about such pastimes as Harry Potter or how to improve their golf. As well they should—August only comes once a year.
Not wanting to buck any such trends, I thus am content to turn my own fancies to golf, as not long ago I spent an agreeable few days watching the British Open, known locally as The Open. I had never before watched a major golf championship, and thus did not want to turn down an invitation from a friend, Richard Wax, who set up his company’s hospitality suite in a house not far from the 18th green at St. Andrews, the Scottish town which was the host to this year’s Open Championship.
In sporting mythology, golf is thought to have started in or near St. Andrews, in perhaps the fifteenth century, and the Old Course there is thought to be the oldest in the world. Mary, Queen of Scots, is among those royals who are reported to have tried their hand with a mid-mashie, and she might well have played here, given the importance that the St. Andrews cathedral and castle played in Stuart history. Whether Mary had to pay $125 for a round and put her name in a lottery for a tee time has never been verified. But the game’s constitutional authority, the so-called Royal & Ancient, presides over the sport’s rulebook from an austere clubhouse next to the course. Such is its air of Scottish mysticism that one could also easily imagine finding in its vaults the rules to govern Harry Potter’s beloved quidditch.
Alas, watching a golf tournament is not as easy as it sounds. Great swarms of people follow the leaders, like Tiger Woods, and unless you gain entrance to one of the course grandstands, all you see at the Open is the golf cap of the person standing in front of you. Out on the course, the drama of shot-to-shot television golf is lost, as only in a few locations can you glimpse the leader board or follow the scores. In this instance, I walked the course with my nine-year old son, and we ended up stationing ourselves near the ninth hole and waiting for the golfers to come to us.
We missed Jack Nicklaus’s farewell round, but, yes, on a few occasions we saw Tiger Woods. He nearly drove the green on the par-four ninth, hitting the ball about 330 yards, and we got a good look at him while he chipped near the hole and then rolled in a birdie putt. I had never before seen Woods in person. He plays with the brooding elegance of a Greek god (Poseidon’s backswing comes to mind). He graciously acknowledges the crowd’s approval with a reflexive tip of his cap, and he walks purposefully from spot to spot on the course, rarely distracted by small talk with other players or chitchat with the fans. He seems a touch taller than the other players, although some of that may be his aura and the surrounding gallery. But there is grimness in his game-day expression, as if on every shot he were looking over a precipice into a dark world where there is no perfection.
In the evenings, we reconvened in the company of Richard Wax, and reviewed the state of play. After the first day in this year’s Open, the drama had left the course, as Woods had the tournament well in his determined grip. In effect we were watching two Opens: in the first was Woods v. Woods, for the championship, and in the other, the field was playing to be his runner-up. In the evenings we also spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a great golf course, and why some golf course resorts succeed, and others, well, play into the sand. My friend Richard is an expert at understanding what kind of hotel works well with particular golf courses.
Certainly nothing in St. Andrews resembles the opulent, Gatsby-like golf resorts in California or Florida. The hotel we stayed in could well have been an army barracks, and the food in St. Andrews is a variation on pub lunches, if you are lucky. The course may be still something of a cow pasture, and the town seems to dwell in a permanent November. But it remains the home of golf precisely because nothing there gives the sense that it can be bought or sold.
Which brings me back to irrational exuberance, and real estate dreams. One night in St. Andrews, I was invited to dinner by a real estate group that has purchased a Victorian dormitory that also overlooks the adjoining first and eighteenth fairways. In recent years the building has been part of the student housing at St. Andrews University. The dinner was held to introduce a real-estate project to be known as St. Andrews Grand, the redevelopment of the dorm into a kind of time-sharing club, in which members would purchase the use of an apartment for ten weeks a year, at prices ranging up to about $3.3 million. For that you get both a butler and a helicopter standing by.
Those assembled looked at floor plans for the renovated flats, each of which had a living room labeled “the Grand Hall.” It left the impression that Mary and some of her nobles might pop in for a banquet after a round at the Old Course. The promoters of the project were at pains to say this was not time-sharing in the sense of using a worn condo for two weeks in Malaga, but a club into which the world’s wealthiest families would buy ten weeks of membership. (Except for students and queens, most people tire of St. Andrews after about four days.) I liked the promoter backing the project, Bernie Wasserman, who clearly has made a fortune in US real estate from his base in Providence, Rhode Island. He cheerfully confessed to being better at stickball than golf. But are there 116 families out there with a spare $ 2 million or so ready buy 10 weeks of membership to use an apartment overlooking the hallowed grounds of St. Andrews? Maybe so, but for that you get neither membership in the Royal & Ancient nor guaranteed tee times on the Old Course. Nor do you actually take title to the apartment that comes with the Grand Hall. As Tom Wolfe wrote of other property disappointments in Bonfire of the Vanities: “Whadaya want for a million dollars?”
