Mark Lin of the Motley Fool has given ClubCorp’s stock issue a lukewarm endorsement, calling it “a rare opportunity to own a stake in the country’s largest golf club operator, with high customer retention and stable revenues.”
Lin notes that ClubCorp’s membership has fallen from 84,410, the number it hit in 2006, but he likes its quality, as the average member reportedly has an annual household income of $180,000 or more and owns a house worth somewhere between $500,000 and $600,000. He’s impressed that ClubCorp has posted revenue growth in recent years (4.7 percent in 2011 and 4.9 percent in 2012), and he believes that the company can in the future “accentuate its advantages” because it owns more than three-quarters of the properties it manages, many of them in what he calls “prime locations.”
What Lin doesn’t mention is ClubCorp’s debt, which has made other stock analysts wary.
