Southern Highlands

Southern Highlands is the community a golf course built. Garry Goett's Olympia Companies began assembling land at the valley's southern foothills in 1995, and when the Southern Highlands Golf Club opened in April 2000, it carried a distinction no other course in Nevada can claim: the final design of Robert Trent Jones Sr., created with his son Robert Trent Jones Jr., one of only four courses the two ever built together. Around it grew roughly 2,300 acres of neighborhoods split between The Estates inside the club gates and The Villages beyond them.

The lending follows that split. Jumbo carries The Estates, where guard-gated custom homes clear the Clark County conforming limit as a matter of course, conventional is the everyday instrument across The Villages, second-home structures serve buyers who keep a Southern Highlands address alongside another state, and an equity line puts two decades of appreciation to work for the owners who never intend to leave.

Practical texture: files here read the master association plus the neighborhood association, and inside the gates a club dimension can enter the conversation, so what is mandatory and what is optional gets confirmed in writing during week one. This is unincorporated Clark County in the town of Enterprise, so the tax district lines differ from a City of Las Vegas address even though the mail says Las Vegas.

The Estates' seventeen thousand planted trees give the community a green weight the desert around it does not have, the club hosts the annual Governor's Black Tie Invitational, and UNLV's men's golf team calls the course home. Ask Art for a current read on the market before you write an offer.

When Garry Goett looked at the barren southern foothills in the mid-1990s, the valley's growth was still pointed west and northwest, and people told him nobody would come this far south. The Canadian-born developer, a lawyer for twelve years before founding Olympia Companies, bet otherwise, and made the golf course his proof: he flew to Florida in 1999 to persuade Robert Trent Jones Sr., then in his nineties, to put his name beside his son's on one last course.

The club opened on the first of April, 2000, and the community filled in behind it exactly as Goett drew it, estates inside the gates, villages outside, and a retail spine along St. Rose Parkway. The course became the home of UNLV men's golf and the stage for the Governor's Black Tie Invitational, which has raised tens of millions for Southern Nevada charities, including the Boys and Girls Club built inside the community itself. The elder Jones never designed again; Southern Highlands is where the most prolific name in golf architecture signed off.