Most coverage of the Amara Golf Club rebuild reads the story one way: a $300 million private club replaces a public course, prestige rises, prices follow. That framing is not wrong, but it misses the reason two longtime Ridges homeowners spent $30.5 million to buy the land in the first place. The upside was never the headline for them. The downside was. And once you see the deal through that lens, the way a buyer should evaluate The Ridges in late 2026 shifts in a specific, useful way.
The Badlands shadow that shaped the deal
Andrew Pascal, the founder of PlayStudios and a former Wynn Resorts COO, and Mike Mixer, co-founder of Colliers International, are the buyers behind Mulligan Holdings. Both live in The Ridges. In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Pascal was direct about what worried them when they looked at Bear's Best: the land was zoned residential, the same zoning that turned the former Badlands course in Queensridge into a decade of litigation after developer Yohan Lowie tried to build housing on it. That fight cost the City of Las Vegas hundreds of millions in settlement.
"First and foremost we wanted to protect our community and this development from suffering a similar fate as Badlands," Pascal told the Review-Journal.
Read that quote as a buyer, not a golfer. The dominant risk to fairway-adjacent home values in a residentially zoned golf community is not a bad renovation. It is the course closing and getting redeveloped into something the neighbors did not sign up for. Bear's Best had been marginal as a public operation for years, and a public course with tight margins is one bad summer away from a sale to a housing developer. By converting to a members-only private club with 250 memberships and 15 additional slots reserved for villa owners, Mulligan effectively locked the land use in place for a generation. That is the real transaction. The rest is finish work.
What is actually being built, and when
The scope is unusually specific for a project this size, which makes the timeline easy to plan around.
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Land purchase | Mulligan Holdings acquired Bear's Best for $30.5 million in 2024 |
| Investment | $300 million redevelopment |
| Course architect | Jackson Kahn Design |
| Course closed | June 2025 |
| Construction start | September 2025 |
| Reopening as private club | Projected October 2026 |
| Membership cap | 250 members, plus 15 for villa owners |
| Initiation fee | $250,000, increasing every 50 members sold |
| Club Villas | 15 units, 2,000 to 2,500 sq ft, completion projected end of 2027 |
| Custom home sites | 4,000 to 6,000 sq ft, planned adjacent to the course |
| New clubhouse | Two-level, underground parking, entrance off Flamingo Road |
A buyer touring The Ridges this fall will be walking past active construction. If the projected October 2026 reopening holds, the club will just be coming online during the window most serious buyers are making decisions.
Where the value actually shows up, and where it does not
The Ridges is not one market. It is roughly 380 homesites spread across guard-gated enclaves that price on different logic. Azure, the top enclave, produced two of Las Vegas's top sales in 2025: 68 Sun Glow Lane at $16 million and 19 Flying Cloud Lane at $13.5 million, with Azure square-foot pricing running $1,250 to $1,313. Fairway Hills, the Toll Brothers attached-housing option, starts closer to $680,000. Community-wide, the 2024 median sold price was roughly $4.44 million at $813 per square foot, and Q1 2026 GLVAR data pegged the median closer to $2.95 million as inventory mix shifted toward smaller product.
Amara does not lift all of these tiers equally.
The homes with the most direct exposure are the ones sighting onto the reconfigured course corridor: fairway-fronting lots in Falcon Ridge, Boulders, Promontory, and select Azure positions. One market source projects 10 to 15 percent appreciation on these specific lots as membership demand ramps. A buyer paying a fairway premium in late 2026 is buying two things at once: the view, and a piece of the private-club adjacency that will get harder to buy once the 250 memberships fill. Interior lots and the Fairway Hills condos will benefit from the community's overall repositioning, but the mechanism there is slower and less specific.
A useful gut check: the broader Las Vegas luxury market ran a Market Action Index of 35 with 34 percent of listings carrying price reductions in April 2026 per Altos Research. Ridges homes at the top of the range have been trading on their own fundamentals through that softness. Amara reinforces that decoupling for fairway product, not for the community as a whole.
The transaction friction most buyers do not model
Three specifics are worth pricing into an offer this year.
Membership is a separate purchase, not a bundled amenity. Buying a home in The Ridges does not include an Amara membership. Membership is capped at 250, sold on a rising schedule that steps up every 50 members, and starts at $250,000 with a 50 percent holding retainer and the balance due at course completion. A fairway home purchased without a membership commitment is a different asset than the same home with one, and the pool is finite. If the private-club access matters to the buyer's thesis for the home, that decision needs to happen inside the same window as the purchase, not two years later when the roster is closed.
Construction timing shapes the diligence. With active earthwork continuing through 2026 and villa completion projected for end of 2027, buyers on fairway-adjacent lots should expect ongoing site activity, revised sightlines, and possible view changes as the routing settles. The entrance off Flamingo Road is being reconfigured, which will change traffic patterns for the whole west side of the community. A drive-by in July looks different than the finished picture, in both directions.
Nevada tax mechanics apply to the carrying cost math. Clark County assesses at 35 percent of taxable value, and Summerlin South currently runs a combined rate of $3.0512 per $100 of assessed value. On a $3.1 million Boulders home that pencils to roughly $33,080 a year in property tax. Primary-residence classification caps annual increases at 3 percent of the prior year's bill. Investment and second-home properties cap at 8 percent. That gap matters for buyers weighing a Ridges home as a secondary residence against a primary move.
Reading the deal as a buyer
The reflex in any luxury market is to price a shiny new amenity at face value and worry about the downside separately. The Amara conversion collapses those two things into one transaction. The membership cap, the private-club structure, and the villa program all serve the same purpose the owners named out loud: they take residential rezoning off the table for the parcel that most defines the western edge of The Ridges. For a buyer, that means the fairway premium is not just paying for a view of a nicer course. It is paying for a form of insurance against the single largest tail risk to Ridges land values, written by two owners who happen to sleep inside the same guard gate.
That is a different underwriting than "new club, prices up." It is also a more durable one.
FAQ
When will Amara actually be playable? Reopening as a private club is projected for October 2026, per statements from ownership. Villa completion is projected for end of 2027.
Does buying in The Ridges get you into Amara? No. Membership is a separate purchase capped at 250, plus 15 slots tied to villa ownership. Initiation starts at $250,000 and steps up every 50 members.
Which enclaves are most exposed to the Amara upside? Fairway-fronting lots in Boulders, Falcon Ridge, Promontory, and select Azure positions have the most direct exposure. Interior lots and Fairway Hills benefit from the community's repositioning, but less directly.
Is the course still Jack Nicklaus? The original Bear's Best was a Nicklaus signature design. The rebuild is being led by Jackson Kahn Design, so the finished course will be a new routing, not a Nicklaus preservation project.
If you are weighing a purchase in The Ridges this fall
The next twelve months are the window where the Amara story is still legible and the pricing has not fully absorbed it. A fairway lot bought in Q4 2026 is a very different asset than the same lot in Q4 2027 with 200 memberships sold and a clubhouse open. If you want a walk-through of specific enclaves, current fairway inventory, and how membership timing interacts with a purchase offer, the team at Elevate Real Estate Group works these transactions block by block. Get a Free Home Valuation or reach out to talk through a buy-side strategy for The Ridges.
