What the Nicklaus Family's New Golf Club Says About Bear's Club's Real Scarcity
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Earthmovers have been reshaping fairways in Lantana since earlier this year, cutting a new championship course into the bones of a golf property that sat behind chain link for the better part of a decade. The site used to be Sherbrooke Golf & Country Club. It closed around 2016, fell into disrepair, and by 2021 was the subject of a rezoning fight after a developer proposed 282 houses on the acreage. Neighbors objected over density and lost green space, the plan died, and the land sat fallow until the Nicklaus family bought the 153 acres in 2025 for roughly $15 million.
What's rising there now is called NOKOSI, and the golf press has covered it as a straightforward Jack Nicklaus story: his first design since reacquiring his namesake company after a long legal fight, built in partnership with Gary Nicklaus and TWG Global, the holding company with stakes in the Los Angeles Dodgers and Lakers. For anyone comparing golf-club addresses in northern Palm Beach County right now, the more useful question is what this new club, sitting about 25 minutes south of Bear's Club in Jupiter, actually changes for the older one. The answer is close to nothing, and understanding why tells you more about what a Bear's Club address is worth than the NOKOSI headlines do on their own.
NOKOSI is built around a chef-driven clubhouse and a Health, Wellness and Longevity Center offering physician-led diagnostics and preventive screening, with a walking-friendly course routing aimed at active, long-term membership rather than tournament-caliber competition. Construction on the course began this year, clubhouse and amenity work is scheduled to start this fall, and the club is targeting a late 2026 opening. It will operate strictly by invitation.
Jack Nicklaus described the project as one built around family rather than the tour-pro pedigree his name usually carries in golf real estate circles. In the announcement, he said it was "inspired and driven by our lifelong commitment to family." Gary Nicklaus, who is overseeing day-to-day development, framed the goal as members who "invest in their long-term lifestyle," language that reads more like a wellness retreat than a golf-first sanctuary.
That framing matters because it tells you what NOKOSI is not. It is not a residential community. The Sherbrooke land could have become the 282 homes proposed in 2021. Instead, the Nicklaus family and TWG Global chose to build a private club with no attached lots for sale. Whatever demand NOKOSI eventually pulls, it will not pull it in the form of new houses competing with anything in Jupiter, because there is no house to buy there at all.
Bear's Club opened on New Year's Eve 1999, with Jack playing the first round alongside his four sons and Barbara hitting the ceremonial opening tee shot. Membership has stayed capped at roughly 100, with joining fees that climb into six figures and annual dues starting around $25,000. Home construction ran from 2001 to somewhere around 2016, producing a fixed roster: sources differ slightly depending on how villas and cottages are counted, but the built total lands somewhere around 70 detached estate homes plus a smaller collection of golf villas and cottages that brings the count closer to 100 once everything is included. Either way, the number has not moved in close to a decade, because there is no undeveloped land left inside the gates to build on.
The roster of owners is public record in the sense that golf and real estate coverage has documented it for years: Michael Jordan owns property there, along with golfers including Rory McIlroy and Ernie Els. That kind of name recognition doesn't set the price on its own, but it does something else worth separating out: it means resale interest in Bear's Club isn't purely a golf-course story. It's a story about buying into a specific, closed circle that formed around Jack Nicklaus's own home course and has not admitted new construction since the mid-2010s.
As of August 2026, the trailing median sale price for a home in Bear's Club stood at just under $6 million, up 13 percent from a year earlier, with homes taking an average of 95 days to sell against a national average closer to 56. Those figures describe what closed over roughly the past year. They do not describe what you can actually buy today.
At the same point in August 2026, six homes were listed for sale in Bear's Club, and the cheapest of them was priced at $12.9 million. The most expensive was listed at $52.9 million. In other words, the floor on what's currently for sale sits more than double the trailing median.
| Bear's Club market signal (August 2026) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Median sale price, trailing period | $5.995 million, up 13% year over year |
| Average days on market | 95 days |
| Homes actively listed | 6 |
| Entry price among active listings | $12.9 million |
| Top of active price range | $52.9 million |
That gap is the actual story, and it existed before anyone in Lantana broke ground. A trailing median tells you what a mix of past sellers agreed to accept, not what current owners are willing to part with. When a community stops producing new supply, the people who still hold homes there have no pressure to price against a stale comparable. They price against what they think the address itself, and the closed circle that comes with it, is worth to the next buyer. That's why the number you'd see on a portal search bears little resemblance to what you'd actually be quoted if you called about one of the six homes on the market this month.
Read against that backdrop, NOKOSI's arrival changes very little about Bear's Club's math. It adds no comparable homes, because it isn't selling homes. It targets a different kind of member, built around wellness programming and family gathering rather than the tour-pro training ground Bear's Club has represented since 1999. And it sits far enough south, about 25 minutes from Jupiter, that it draws on a different slice of Palm Beach County's golf-minded buyers rather than pulling directly from the same pool.
If anything, a second, well-capitalized Nicklaus project reinforces what makes Bear's Club specific: it is the one place carrying the founder's name that actually comes with a house attached, and that house count has been fixed for roughly a decade. TWG Global and the Nicklaus family had land that could have become new residential supply in Palm Beach County. They built a club instead. For someone comparing golf-community options in northern Palm Beach County this fall, that choice is worth more than the headline about a new golf course opening nearby.
If the goal is access to a Nicklaus-designed course and a wellness-oriented private club experience, NOKOSI will eventually offer that, likely at membership terms distinct from Bear's Club's once the club opens and dues are set. If the goal is specifically a home inside the Nicklaus family's original compound in Jupiter, the relevant number isn't the $6 million trailing median you'll find on a portal search. It's closer to the $12.9 million floor on what's actually listed today, and the timeline runs on resales, not new construction, since the last new lot sold years before this current listing cycle.
Will NOKOSI membership include any access to Bear's Club? Nothing in the public record suggests a connection between the two. They sit under different ownership groups, roughly 25 minutes apart, and were developed a quarter century apart under distinct membership structures.
Is new home construction still happening inside Bear's Club? Development ran from 2001 to roughly 2016. Current activity inside the gates is limited to resales of existing homes, not construction on new lots.
If you're weighing a golf-club address in Jupiter against something newer elsewhere in the county, the comparison is more specific than either name suggests on its own. Hughes Browne Group can walk through what's currently listed inside Bear's Club, what closed there in the past year, and how that gap plays out for a specific offer. Start a conversation when you're ready to look at the actual numbers.
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