Everyone would now have to solve their irrigation problems without tapping the nation's supply. What’s more, the next generation of Cyprus’ golf courses would not be allowed to sink boreholes and use the island’s groundwater to irrigate their fairways. In the wake of this new set of government instructions a number of proposed courses were simply dropped, despite some having already sold villas and apartments on their leisure resorts to eager speculators across Europe.
Suddenly, golf properties in Cyprus didn’t seem like such safe investments anymore. And that’s about the time when the bottom fell out of the global economy, delivering the deathblow to another handful of course proposals. The rest, as they say, is history. Faced with far greater expenses for furnishing their resorts with adequate water through desalination plants*, and with far fewer buyers eager to sink their hard-earned money into what were still merely proposed golf resorts, the majority of the remaining courses were abandoned.
Less than two years after the whole of Cyprus started fighting about the fourteen licences, only a handful of courses were left in the running.
Now, in 2010, the first of the survivors (Elea Golf Resort) is nearing completion, while final planning permission was issued for another (Larnaca Golf Course & Country Club). A third, the Limni Golf Resort near Polis, championed by golfing legends Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, is currently in the final phase of gaining planning approval following endless feasibility studies and alterations to its specifications.
So where does all this leave golf properties in Cyprus?
Like the existing golf courses at Aphrodite Hills, Secret Valley, and Tsada/Minthis Hills, Cyprus’ new golf courses will be part of leisure resorts, complete with on-site residential developments of villas, townhouses, and apartments. And, like most of their counterparts globally, these will be of a highly exclusive nature. Essentially, this means is that real estate prices in the Republic’s golfing resorts are likely to fare better than those of most homes on the island. In short, these investments will make substantial returns.
However, what the potential investor must realise is that golf properties in Cyprus will simply not produce the short-term returns most overseas estate agencies claim them to produce.
If you’re thinking about buying a home on one of Cyprus’ golf courses, existing or forthcoming, you are realistically looking at a medium to long-term investment which will take five to ten years to reach maturity, regardless of what any estate agent or property website claims.
*The desalination plant being built for the Tersefanou golf course near Larnaca, for instance, will cost an estimated six million Euros.
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