Cabot Saint Lucia’s Ambitions Come Into Focus As Amenities Spring Up

The Caribbean has no shortage of high caliber golf product offering. However, for connoisseurs of top 100 courses in the world countdowns—a constituency particularly drawn to the Cabot brand—the region’s bounty has historically trailed other bastions of super premium level play.

Cabot believes their Point Hardy Golf Club which just opened last month in St. Lucia will be a catalyst to shifting that perception. Believe it or not but while the Canadian developer and operator of luxe resorts and tony residential golf properties, whose handiwork occupies a heady 4% share in Golf Magazine’s latest global rankings always dreamed big, it wasn’t too long ago when they were just another underdog fueled by visionary aspirations.

When construction on Cabot Links got underway during the great recession, the expectations for that first golf course which would open in 2012 were pretty much zilch. The off the beaten path location in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia—a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Halifax, didn’t exactly scream golf holiday central.

“First of all, people said nobody’s ever going to go there. It was pointed that it was not going to work,” Cabot St. Lucia COO Andrew Alkenbrack, who spent a decade as the general manager of Cabot Cape Breton, explained.

Fast forward to the present and the maritime golf marvel is on every player’s bucket list and the resort’s sister course, the Cliffs, clocks in as Canada’s top track in Golf’s top 100. The burgeoning Cabot brand itself has been on a snowball roll with golf properties popping up in Scotland, Central West Florida, and British Columbia.

“With Point Hardy they say oh it’s just like Cypress and Pebble—built in 1928 and 1919—it’s almost impossible to manage expectations. I will say the overall feedback when people come off this golf course is just mind blowing. We enjoyed that underdog role for a long time and now we don’t have it,” Alkenbrack said.

Entering The Caribbean Golf Conversation

When you picture the Caribbean’s greatest golf hits, lush tracks abutting water the color of Gatorade blue come to mind. The region brims with locales where tee shots are soundtracked by the melodic trill of Bananaquits, waves pummel promontories and gauging the direction of the sea breeze is key to scoring well. Places like The Abaco Club in the Bahamas, The Green Monkey in Barbados, and Casa De Campo (Teeth of the Dog) in the Dominican Republic and Old Quarry in Curacao fit the bill.

Unfurling over a 375-acre peninsula on the northern tip of St. Lucia, Point Hardy Golf Club boasts a shocking abundance of seaside holes snuggled against the island’s rugged volcanic rock coast. The adventurous lay of the land necessitates quite a few chasm and cliff hopping hero shots, a thrilling feature that should expedite Point Hardy Golf Club’s arrival onto the first page of the Caribbean golf leaderboard. Calling this organ pipe cactus strewn dreamscape (the native succulents provide prickly juxtaposition on an island teeming with tropical rain forest flora) merely ‘scenic’ or ‘pretty’ would be as big an understatement as calling Scottie Scheffler’s iron play ‘decent.’ In November, a month before its grand opening, the aforementioned industry title Golf pegged the track as 76^th in the world, just one spot below Teeth of the Dog.

“Cabot St. Lucia is a stunningly, spectacular site. It’s just incredibly spectacular visually, it’s dramatic and it has a very distinctive type of, not only landforms but vegetation and we’ve tried to incorporate all of that into the golf course and showcase it in such a way that when you’re there you know where you are,” Bill Coore, of the Coore/Crenshaw design duo who built the course, said.

While asking Coore to pick a leaderboard topper amongst a portfolio built over thirty years in the business would be like asking a parent to pick a favorite child, he did almost come close to caving when the question was broached.

“Ben and I both try to be very reserved in our public comments about sites because everyone wants you to say this is the best. I have publicly said and would say to you, it very likely is the most visually dramatic site we’ve ever worked with: the vistas, the shoreline, the landforms along the coast that we were given are just beautiful beyond description. The photography doesn’t really do it justice,” he added.

Real Estate Piece

The initial offering of lots and residences on the property, have been scooped up with $160 million in real estate sold to date. That tally will hit $230 million when the latest phase consisting of 12 four-bedroom villas starting at $5.65 million finds buyers. With peak interest rates now in the rear view, purchaser interest has perked up, though the recent spike in the demand is multi-factor.

“We opened up December 1^st and now people can actually play all 18-holes. We’ve launched a pretty turnkey solution at a price point we think is attractive and the market is telling us that it is and all of a sudden there is a little bit more scarcity,” Alkenbrack said.

Contributing to the demand picture are the amenities beginning to take shape with a three-storey clubhouse— featuring a pair of restaurants, a bowling alley, golf simulators and a movie theater is set to begin construction in June. With fairway villas beginning to go vertical, prospective buyers are no longer just looking at renderings that look good on paper but still require somewhat of a leap of faith.

Balls can already be bashed at the tennis center decked out with hard, clay and pickle ball courts with plans to add padel to the mix. Wellness facilities including weight training and yoga studios and a spa are set to go up by year end 2026. Also, a Beach Club where golfers can set sail in Hobie Cats, give kite surfing a whirl or simply lounge poolside in a cabana will also have a residential component—hillside flats and beachfront lots, currently being finalized, will be the next real estate phase launched.

As the property fills in and more players experience the course, Cabot is confident in its chances to go from title contender to consensus Caribbean leaderboard topper.

“We really like our trajectory, I would say that the interest and even the volume present day is off the charts. It may be a curiosity today, but to a person, when they’ve left the golf course, they’ve been effusive in their praise and hellbent on telling everyone they know that they played it,” Alkenbrack said.