The Pellucid Perspective - March 2017 - 12

INDUSTRY
SCORECARD

future. Regardless, years where you can play golf north of the
Mason Dixon line in January or February are few and far between. Interestingly though, while the national picture is way
up, the current picture is one of two stories as the West Coast is
having a very poor weather start to their year. This is one of the
reasons we developed Weather Impact Tracking from facility
level aggregating to regions aggregating to national. Looking
at the map on the preceding page, you see nothing but a sea
of red west of the Rockies through February compared to '16.
It's also instructive that the vast majority of GPH favorability is concentrated on weekdays so that's also going to depress
our upside for "bluebird" rounds for the vast majority of the
golf population (except the retirees, God bless 'em). That said,
we'll take the +5% rounds results for January even though that
represents a double-digit Utilization drop; it's not uncommon

in off-season geographies that we're not going to capture even
half the upside so I'm not panicking on that front. At the 61
market level and focusing on our Top 25 (in-season) markets
for YtD Utilization, we see Seattle as the top performer in Utilization gain (demand beating horrendous weather "comps")
while Atlanta has the biggest Utilization deficit. This is a great
"teaching moment" for the importance of knowing Utilization;
Atlanta is up in rounds while Seattle is down, so just looking
at rounds doesn't indicate operational proficiency. The market
breadth across the 34 in-season market universe is negative for
January at 2:1. As always, the national picture is a "mosaic" of
markets and regions so while it's helpful to know how weather
treated us at a national aggregate; you have to also understand
whether that's uniformly good, bad or offsetting winners and
n
losers. Our clients do."

Rounds by Facility Type Jan 2017
All Fac.
Types

Public
Access

Private

9.0% ___________________________________________
8.0% ___________________________________________
7.7% 7.7%
7.0% ___________________________________________
6.0% ___________________________________________
5.2% 5.2%
5.0% ___________________________________________
4.4% 4.4%
4.0% ___________________________________________
3.0% ___________________________________________
2.0% ___________________________________________
1.0% ___________________________________________
0.0% ___________________________________________

Source: GDT/NGCOA/NGF alliance

For those new to the By-the-Numbers section, Utilization and
Point Change vs. Year Ago (YA) is a new view which replaces
the former tables on Revenue and Rate (until a PerformanceTrak successor emerges). The comparative benchmark is the
Year End (YE) '16 value (52%) to quantify how rounds demand
is being influenced by favorable/unfavorable weather. For those
not familiar with Pellucid's Weather Impact tracking, the underlying concept is relatively simple. In a theoretical world of
rounds following weather, a 5% increase in Golf Playable Hours
(Available Rounds) would produce a 5% gain in actual Rounds
Played. By comparing Played Rounds to Available Rounds, we
can determine the Utilization of the average facility and how it's
changing across the year vs. the benchmark.
The first set of bars above show that January posted a Utilization rate of ~42% which was a significant decline vs. the YE '16
value (but understanding that Pellucid's weather model doesn't
open and close courses on a daily basis when there's a short burst
of good weather so we see this happening occasionally in the offseason if we get unseasonably warm weather pockets). In other
words, the month's 5% gain in Rounds Played paled comparatively to the 30%+ gain for GPH. The second set of bars show
the Year-to-Date (YtD) values which are the same in January

12 The Pellucid Perspective

n Curr Month
n Curr YtD

Looking at demand for the current month, rounds followed
weather higher posting a 5% increase vs. Year Ago (YA) driven
by higher gains in the Private sector. For the Year-to-Date (YtD)
period, the figures are the same given that we only have 1 month
of history so far for '17. As correctly "forecast" in the February
issue, we called for a double-digit increase in rounds demand behind the +31% GPH results previously reported and were looking for a 10-15% gain. While it's not quite as robust as we had
hoped, we'll take it and move on to the next hole (February).

with only one month in play. So, a soft Utilization result for the
initial month but driven by the weather anomaly in a traditional
off-season month across large parts of the north. Nothing to
jump out of a window about yet. We'll see how the balance of
the 1st quarter plays out before issuing an alarm.

Utilization & Point Change Jan 2017
n %Utilization
Curr. Month

n Pt. Chng vs. FY '15
YtD

0.0
45.0% ______________________________________
41.5%
41.5%
40.0% ______________________________________
-2.0
35.0% ______________________________________
30.0% ______________________________________ -4.0
25.0% ______________________________________
-6.0
20.0% ______________________________________
15.0% ______________________________________ -8.0
10.0% ______________________________________
-10.0
-10.1
-10.1
5.0% ______________________________________
0.0% ______________________________________ -12%
Source: GDT/NGCOA/NGF alliance; Pellucid

March 2017

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