Can't Putt? Buy the Hole
ClubCorp spent $265M acquiring Sequoia Golf. We spent just a fraction of that tracking down Greenberg Glusker's Steve Lurie, who repped the seller and management team.
Atlanta-based Sequoia operates 50 private and public golf facilities nationwide, including Spanish Hills in Camarillo, Rancho Vista Golf Club in Palmdale, and Old Ranch Country Club in Seal Beach. Steve helped CEO Joe Guerra form Sequoia and acquire the first seven courses that launched the company in 2002, as well as all the subsequent properties in a JV with Parthenon Capital. ClubCorp plans a course of "reinvention" projects for the greens, plus updates to dining and social gathering facilities. Steve admits his own golf game could be better—he modestly pegs his handicap at 24.
Steve—here with wife Andrea and their 18-year-old twins Rachel and Jason at a Dodgers game—tells us the deal involved players around the US: a Dallas-based buyer, Atlanta-based seller, Boston-based equity partner, an investment banking firm in Wisconsin, and legal counsel in LA, Chicago, and Denver. (Those could become new lyrics to "This Land is Your Land.") Over the past 12 months, he's been involved in $1B-plus of real estate transactions, including repping Majestic Realty in a 1.2M SF build-to-suit lease in Chino. Another major project is sending Rachel and Jason off to college this fall—she'll be starting at Princeton, while he'll be a freshman at UCLA.
