Just like playing golf there, buying a property at Cabot Links in Inverness is, shall we say, aspirational.
Five of the eight luxury villas to be built adjacent to the Cliffs course at Cabot have been sold before ground is even broken. More than 100 local tradespeople will begin construction “imminently.”
“Those (sold) range in price from $2.085-million to $2.675. We’ve sold the higher end, we’ve sold the mid-range, we just have a couple more to go and no shortage of interest,” Cabot GM Andrew Alkenbrack said on Thursday.
Cabot got in the real estate business in 2014, a few years after its first course opened, when five villas were built next to the first hole.
“That first phase sold in a day, then we launched nine more and that sold in a day,” said Alkenbrack.
At the Links now, there are 72 hotel rooms and 19 villas, either two or four-bedroom. Rates are seasonal, but you can spend as little as $230 to spend a night in a hotel room or as much as $2,325 a night for a four-bedroom villa. Seven of the villas at the Links are owned by Nova Scotians.
Villa owners tend to spend some time living there, and most of the time renting them out to get a return on their investment.
“You have the option, it’s not mandatory, but you have the option to go into a rental pool and then we manage all the logistics behind that, everything from the marketing to the housekeeping, maintenance and reservations, all the service side of things is managed by us,” Alkenbrack said. “In theory you could stay here all season if you wanted to, you could stay here year-round.”
Getting into real estate, Alkenbrack said, was a natural progression from building golf courses rated among the best in the world.
“It certainly wasn’t the catalyst behind the project,” he said. “The real thing was to build great golf and see what happened. I think the demand was so overwhelming that it essentially forced us to do that.”
Most of the buyers at the Residences at Cabot Cliffs are from Ontario, with one from the U.S. Alkenbrack expects the development to lead to future phases, and one of those, called the Hillside Homes, is already being designed.
“Those will be a little smaller product when compared to the Cliffs residences,” he said. “The Cliffs residences are 3,000 to 3,300 square feet, these will be somewhere in the 1,100 to 1,300 square feet, in that range. We’re still polishing floor plans.”
Work on Hillside Homes is expected to start early next year. Also slotted for the first quarter of 2021 is work on housing at Cabot St. Lucia, where there are 42 lots for sale, starting at $750,000.
“There might be one of those left in that ball park. We’ve seen an incredible level of interest in the St. Lucia product,” said Alkenbrack, who describes St. Lucia as being like Cape Breton in that it attracts Canadians and Americans, but also “a tremendous amount” of visitors from the U.K.
“We’ve cast a little bit of a wider net on that front, so we’re pretty excited about that and the sales have been brisk despite what’s happening globally,” he said. “Not unlike Cape Breton, people see St. Lucia as a great place to be and a great place to live.”
Seven holes of the course in St. Lucia have been completed, designed by the same pair of architects that designed Cabot Cliffs.
“So, hopefully we’ll be playing a little bit of golf there next year, at least in a preview play capacity,” Alkenbrack said. “There are already a tremendous amount of high end accommodations in St. Lucia, so the focus will be on bringing that golf course to life…and then bring the rest of the site to life after that.”
