Where to locate your golf facility

Being in a good and accessible location that matches your target customers is a key to running a successful indoor golf business. Research on the indoor golf industry points to a few keys to determining the best location for your indoor golf center. It is also critical to make sure you are not paying too much for your location in order to keep your expenses in line. Based on our research, some of the keys to site location include the following:


Home Ownership:

The higher the proportion of home ownership there is in your target area, the more rounds of golf you are expected to be able to support. This means a higher percentage home ownership in the zip where you are locating, indicates a higher propensity for playing golf. In addition, the average home price tends to also help predict the volume of rounds played. The higher the average home price in a zip, the more rounds you can expect. Look for information on the web about your target zip code and see home prices, percent renters, income and more.

Number of golfers in a 10 mile radius:

Not surprisingly, the number of golfers in a 10 mile radius from an indoor golf center were strongly correlated with the number of rounds reported by that golf center. The more golfers in the radius, the better for your golf center. A great place to find this sort of information is from marketing list companies. They gather information on golfers from things like magazine subscriptions and website registrations. Some may provide you these numbers as part of the process to price a list and you can get the number without paying for the list.

Weather:

This probably doesn't help pick an area within a city, but can give you a sense of how viable a given city is for an indoor golf center. The higher the number of rain / snow days there are per year, the higher the number of rounds played. Indoor golf centers in the United States experienced as many as 156 days per year with rain or snow, while others had as little as 90 days. Centers on the high end of this range get more play.

Average Annual Daily Traffic:

I am including this as a probable driver of rounds played, as traffic data was somewhat difficult to get with enough precision to be confident in analysis. That said, with a high number of first time visitors during the first year of an indoor golf center business, it stands to reason that a higher volume of traffic outside a location would be better than a location with lower traffic. The traffic statistic in question is often called Average Annual Daily Traffic and most reports abbreviate it as AADT. You may be able to search for it on the web for your target area in question.

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