Glen Eagle Golf and Country Club

Glen Eagle Golf & Country Club is a private, gated golf community in East Naples, with an 18-hole course and a clubhouse at 1403 Glen Eagle Boulevard. The club counts 15 neighborhood communities inside the gate, with residences "ranging from condos to villas to private homes". Fifth Avenue South lies about 4 miles due west in a straight line, the Gulf shore about 5 miles, and RSW about 27 miles due north.

One question here outranks everything else about a house. The membership category is attached to the home by deed, and the club states the consequence in a single sentence: "You cannot purchase a golf membership separate from a home or change membership to a golf membership if the home you own is deeded as a social membership." Anyone who wants the course in season has to buy a home that already holds the golf category. Get that wrong and there's no fixing it later, at any price. So start with the category an address holds, ahead of the kitchen and the view.

What is the difference between the golf and social categories?

Access to the course in season. A golf membership, the club says, "entitles the owner to the full use of all facilities and the golf course year-round". A social membership "entitles the owner to the full use of all facilities year round and the golf course from May through October". So a social-category home has the course through the summer and not in season. The club puts the community's membership at 924 golf and 310 social, which makes golf the larger category by some margin.

Membership isn't a separate decision from owning. The club says a golf membership can't be bought apart from a home, and it calls the whole place a "private, gated, deeded, membership community". So working out what it costs to own here means working it out with a club membership in.

What are the fees at Glen Eagle?

The club publishes no fee figure, for either category. It directs anyone asking to its Administrative Office for the Master Association annual fees, and for a golf-category home the golf fees as well. The Master Association fee is an annual one in the club's framing, and both figures are worth having in writing before you make an offer. Budget around $1,200 a month for association costs, and carry it as a number to plan against rather than a bill anyone has been handed. Members of the Master Association get internet and basic cable services.

What is the golf course at Glen Eagle?

Eighteen holes, par 70, and between 4,300 and 5,600 yards depending on the tee set, with a pro shop at the club. The club's own history has the course opening in 1991 as a public course, to a design by Mark McCumber. Gordon Lewis carried out improvements to it later.

What else is inside the gate?

Four Har-Tru tennis courts sit just east of the clubhouse, with lighting for evening play, and two bocce courts are over on Weston Way by the Divot Café. The fitness center is open 24 hours a day, every day, with weight machines, stationary bikes and treadmills, and access is complimentary for residents. The pool is just behind the clubhouse and heated through the fall and winter.

Dining is spread across several rooms rather than gathered into one. The Restaurant holds a dining room, a private dining room and a full-service bar and lounge, and the covered lanai looks over the lake and the 9th fairway. The Divot Café is the casual one, and despite the name it sits beside the fitness center and the bocce courts rather than out on the course. Inside the clubhouse there are a billiards room, card rooms, and meeting and banquet rooms with catering, and the club runs leagues and a social calendar.

What kind of homes does Glen Eagle have?

More buildings than houses. Half the homes sit in low-rise buildings and another tenth in mid-rise, so three addresses in five are in a building, not a house on its own. Detached houses make up a little over a quarter, and attached villas most of the rest. Interiors start near 1,100 square feet and stretch to about 3,100, in two to five bedrooms. The housing dates from 1988 onward, and sold prices have run from the $200,000s to around $1.2 million.

What should you settle before making an offer?

Three things, in this order:

• Which category the home holds, golf or social. Nothing you do to the house changes it afterward.
• The Master Association annual fees for that address, and the golf fees too if it holds the golf category.
• Whether anything is payable to the club when the home changes hands, on top of the price agreed.

Before any of it, the land was a private hunting and fishing retreat. The club puts its own beginnings in the early 1990s, under the name Embassy Woods Golf and Country Club. In 1998 it changed hands and took the Glen Eagle name, and by 2004 the homeowners had gained full ownership and control of the club, selecting its first general manager. A public course, then a private club, then a club its own homeowners owned outright: the deeded structure that decides a purchase here sits on top of that.