Move In List

New Move-In Lists

A new move-in list will provide you with an accurate and timely list of new residents to your marketplace, qualified by annual income and/or price of home. As you are making your decision you will want to look at several things in order to get the kind and size of list that makes the most sense and will provide you with the best opportunities to identify appropriate membership candidates for your Club.

Here’s a great first step in the process.

The 1st Step is Determining Your Market Area

Generally speaking a private club market area does not exceed 20 to 25 minutes drive time. You can test this easily by doing the following:

Pull a zip code listing of your existing members. Where 80-85% of them reside is your primary market area. This would be the minimum area that you should draw from the new move-ins.
If you can’t pull a zip code list, go to www.zip-codes.com and under the “Free Radius Search”, type in your Club’s zip code. Just above the zip code field it will ask you “within x to x miles”. Type in within 0 to 20-25 miles. It will then give you each zip within that mileage as well as tell the distance of each zip code from yours.

Remember, that beyond a reasonable drive time radius or distance is simply the “field of dreams” radius and will likely cost you more in postage than it will return to you in new members.

The 2nd Step in the Process is Determining Annual Income/Home Price Required to Qualify as Prospective Member

So now you know your general market area, but clearly not everyone in your market area qualifies as a potential member? Remember that you probably have several kinds of memberships and several kinds of members and each may have different qualifying incomes. Generally speaking however, you can use the worksheets attached to calculate the cost of living in your market area, then determine actual gross income required to afford membership.

Remember that you will want to qualify the list you are about to receive based upon a households ability to afford membership. Generally speaking, unless you have no initiation fees and very low dues, $75,000 is going to be a minimum annual household income that will be capable of affording membership. If your initiation fee is between $10,000 and 20,000 the annual income required will be over $100,000. $20,000 to 35,000 it will likely be in the $125,000 minimum. Over $35,000 to $50,000 is likely to be a $150,000 minimum annual income. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to call the Club Mark offices at 972 788-4848.

If you are offering extended payment plans you may be able to stretch the potential market and let younger members “grow into” the membership. Otherwise remember, companies are rarely offering memberships as perquisite of employment anymore thus placing the entire financial burden on each individual member.

Price of home is a bit more difficult to ascertain as housing prices vary greatly by geographic. Home pricing can also be misleading relative to membership opportunities as high costs of homes can create “mortgage poor” conditions where the mortgage is so high, even with substantial incomes a household may not be able to afford membership. Home pricing segregators should be also taken into context with the amount of your initiation fee, the same as it is relative to income.

Affordability Worksheet

The following worksheet will allow you to review your market area for spending in each of the areas outlined. This will give you a general idea the gross annual household income required in order to afford your membership fees at the current level.

Remember, once you get to the bottom line you are still only looking at gross revenues just to afford to live in the area, not necessarily to join a Club. You can perform the same exercise looking at empty nesters or singles if you really want to look at the spectrum of membership potential. Obviously, lessor membership categories would require less annual household income which is why we always recommend that clubs look at using the social or tennis membership to attract the younger family and then work on upgrading them to golf as the family’s income increases.

Once you have all of this figured out, now we can order your lists based upon your actual market and need which will serve to cost you less in postage and maximize your potential to identify great prospects for membership.

If you need assistance, please give us a call at 972 788-4848.

Fees

Please call for quote.