Amara Golf Club in The Ridges: What Buyers Should Verify

For two decades, a home along the fairways at The Ridges came with a bundled understanding. You bought elevation, view corridors, and a Jack Nicklaus signature course you could book at semi-public rates. That bundle is gone.

When Bear's Best Las Vegas closed to public play on June 28, 2025 and began its rebuild as Amara Golf Club, the community's central amenity split into two purchases. The lot you own no longer conveys course access. Membership is a separate transaction with its own cap, its own escalating price, and its own priority list. Buyers who are still pricing Ridges homes as if fairway frontage equals fairway use are underwriting a bundle that no longer exists.

What actually changed on the land

Mulligan Holdings acquired the course for $30.5 million, closing in the spring of 2024. The partnership is led by Andrew Pascal, co-founder and CEO of PlayStudios and former president and COO of Wynn Las Vegas, and Mike Mixer, co-founder of the Colliers International Las Vegas office. Both live inside The Ridges.

Their plan invests $300 million to transform the public course into a private, members-only club, with a grand reopening targeted for October 2026. Jackson Kahn Design is guiding the architecture. A boutique clubhouse, dining venues, hospitality suites, and 15 luxury villas are set for delivery by December 2027. This is a teardown and rebuild rather than a refresh.

Pascal was blunt with the Las Vegas Review-Journal about the motive. The course sits on land zoned residential, and the partners had watched years of litigation over the shuttered Badlands golf course cost the City of Las Vegas hundreds of millions after it lost multiple times in court; protecting The Ridges from a similar fate sat above every other consideration. Structuring Amara as a private club with active membership and a clubhouse under construction makes the parcel a materially harder rezoning target.

Physical changes to know when you drive the community: a reconfigured main entrance off Flamingo Road, a new two-level clubhouse with underground parking, and a six-hole par-3 short course occupying the former driving range footprint.

The unbundling, in plain terms

Owning a Ridges home and playing the course used to be a single decision. Now it is two.

The first purchase is real estate. The Ridges spans 793 acres at the western edge of Summerlin, with roughly 380 custom homes and homesites across twelve gated enclaves. The ceiling in Azure and Promontory reaches into the mid-eight figures, and two of the valley's largest 2025 luxury closings, a $16 million sale on Sun Glow Lane and a $13.5 million sale on Flying Cloud Lane, both landed inside Azure.

The second purchase is a club membership. Amara is being structured as a fully private club with a hard cap on golf memberships and additional memberships tied to the on-course villas. Independent coverage of the club's membership program describes an initiation deposit in the low six figures that steps up as each membership tier fills, along with a holding retainer split between the initial commitment and course completion.

A buyer who is not among the first tranche of members buys the view without the tee time. A buyer who does secure a membership pays for the view at the lot line and pays again at the club.

Where the incentive structure pushes prices

The old daily-fee model kept course access cheap and made fairway frontage the amenity you paid for. The new model inverts that. Access is now the scarce good, gated by a hard membership cap. Frontage is the ambient good, available to anyone who buys the right lot.

Three practical effects on lot pricing follow.

1. View lots without frontage gain relative value. A home on the western ridgeline that faces Red Rock Canyon rather than the fairways loses nothing under the new structure. The federal conservation boundary west of the community permanently protects that view corridor, and a canyon-facing home never depended on course access to justify its premium.
2. Frontage lots split into two categories. Homes in Redhawk, Arrowhead, Silver Ridge, and Falcon Ridge that overlook the redesigned course now inherit a private-club backdrop rather than a public-course one. The visual premium widens. Whether the transaction premium widens with it depends on whether the buyer is also acquiring, or intends to acquire, a membership.
3. Verona and the smaller-lot enclaves stay accessible. For a buyer entering The Ridges below the community median, Verona still delivers the address, the guarded gate, and the broader Summerlin amenity package. Verona never traded on golf access. Amara does not change that math.

The most common pricing mistake I am watching buyers make right now is treating a fairway lot as if it still conveys the old bundle. It does not. If a listing points to Bear's Best-era comps to justify a golf-frontage premium, those comps priced a course that no longer exists on terms that no longer apply.

What to verify before you write an offer

The diligence work for a Ridges purchase in 2026 looks different than it did in 2024. A short checklist for anyone considering a fairway-adjacent home:

• Confirm whether the seller holds Amara membership priority for the address, and whether that priority is transferable at close. Not every position on the club's list moves with the deed.
• Model the club economics separately from the mortgage and the HOA. Initiation, dues, food and beverage minimums, and the holding retainer are their own line items.
• Walk the lot against the Jackson Kahn routing. Fairway edges, buffers, and hole numbering are changing. A lot that fronted the old seventh may front something different in October 2026.
• Read the Summerlin Community Association and Ridges HOA transfer packets against the club's separate instruments. Amara is a distinct legal entity, and any membership rights sit in its documents, not the community's.

The market backdrop worth holding in mind

Las Vegas luxury pricing is running well ahead of the national picture. In the three months ending May 31, 2026, luxury home prices in Las Vegas rose 13.7 percent year over year, third in the country behind Tampa at 15.6 percent and Miami at 14.2 percent, according to a Redfin report covered by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The tightest supply and least elastic demand within that number sit in the guard-gated west-side enclaves.

None of that makes the golf-lot math automatic. It makes the diligence more valuable, not less. A community with fixed supply, a rising luxury tide, and a new private club at its center will reward the buyer who understands what the frontage is actually worth in October 2026, and what it will be worth once the first 250 memberships are placed.

Frequently asked questions

Is Amara the same course I remember from Bear's Best? No. For the years it operated as a daily-fee course, Bear's Best offered 18 holes each modeled after a specific Jack Nicklaus design from his global portfolio, assembled into a single routing in northwest Las Vegas. Those 18 tribute holes are being reworked as part of a full teardown and rebuild, and the driving range footprint is becoming a six-hole par-3 course.

Do I have to be a member to live along the course? No. Ownership at any Ridges address is independent of Amara membership. The club is capped at a fixed number of golf memberships plus a small tranche tied to the on-course villas; a home purchase does not confer membership.

When will the club actually be open? Closed-door renovations kicked off in September 2025, with the grand reopening as a members-only club slated for October 2026 and 15 luxury villas set for delivery by December 2027. Timelines on projects of this scale routinely move; community association and Clark County approvals are the variables most likely to shift the date.

Why did the owners go private rather than reopen as daily-fee? Pascal told the Review-Journal the deciding factor was land protection. With the course in The Ridges zoned residential, the partners were well aware of the legal turmoil surrounding the nearby Badlands course, a lengthy battle that became a cautionary tale for what could go wrong when development clashes with community interests. A funded private club is a much harder target for that kind of fight.

The buyers who do best in The Ridges over the next eighteen months will be the ones who price the home and the club as two separate assets, then decide which combination they actually want. The Grauberger Team has been advising sellers, relocation buyers, and lot investors through the Amara transition since the sale closed. If you are weighing a purchase, a listing, or a homesite inside the community, request a home valuation and we will walk you through the enclave-by-enclave picture in detail.