Old Sandwich, Kittansett, & 34 More

Hey folks,

It's an all-Massachusetts week at the top of the board, and Old Sandwich is the one to watch. It's taken a step down this year, from $2,533 a player in March to $1,812, then $1,350 and $1,250 in June, and now it's back Thursday night at just $383 with the bidding nowhere near done. It's one of fourteen lots closing together that night, with almost all of them in eastern Massachusetts. Three lots on the board are single auctions good for any of a club's courses. One covers Streamsong's Red, Blue or Black; another the Geneva National Palmer, Player and Trevino; the third either World Golf Village course, the King & Bear or the Slammer & Squire.

The Tape

Current Bid and Course Average show the whole-lot total with the per-golfer figure beneath.

Featured — nationally & state-ranked courses

The rest of the board

Course Spotlight

Old Sandwich Golf Club (OLSN)

Old Sandwich sits in Plymouth, a short drive from the Cape, on 450 acres of pine hills and sand, and Coore and Crenshaw moved almost none of it. The only earth movement of any consequence was taking out a sand hill so the par-five first could run where they wanted it. Everything after that sits where the ground already offered a site: greens on natural ledges and plateaus or benched into hillsides, fronts shaved close, with enough internal contour to keep you honest. Jeff Bradley's bunkers are cut straight into the scrub. Coore and Crenshaw said they hoped it would come to be seen as a compliment to its surroundings — fitting, for a course they barely touched.

It's a threesome, and the live bid is a fraction of the $1,572 those twenty-two prior sales average. The number's come down all year, and Thursday tells you whether that's a real trend or just where the calendar landed.

Market Insight

Seven of the fourteen lots closing Thursday night are sitting at exactly $600, and three more at $700. Nearly all are threesomes, so the bidding has not separated the clubs from one another at all: Kittansett and Oakley are both at $233 a player, and only one of them is a top-100 course. When a whole slate closes at the same hour the money spreads evenly across it, so the number worth watching is each club's gap to its own history, not the bid on the screen.

• Biggest value: The Kittansett Club is running -80% vs its $1,162/player average.
• Running hottest: Green Valley Country Club at +134% vs its $64/player average.
• Total money on the table this week: $20,396 in current bids.

Results

How last week’s board landed. Previous Average is what the course had been fetching going into this auction, so the sale being measured is not in its own baseline, and Difference is the gap between the two. Every money column shows the whole-lot total with the per-golfer figure beneath.