Myrtle Beach/Grand Strand vs Pawleys Island/Georgetown for Golf Living

Myrtle Beach/Grand Strand's golf identity runs on two largely separate tracks, and the dominant one is destination/vacation golf: package-trail portfolios like Legends' three courses, Barefoot Resort's four championship-architect courses (Norman, Love, Fazio, Dye), Wild Wing's 27 holes, and Arrowhead's 27 holes, sold as daily-fee tee times to visiting golfers rather than as residential amenities. Out of roughly 20 named courses and clubs screened for this market, only five qualifying anchors emerged: Grande Dunes Members Club (2005, Craig Schreiner with Nick Price's input), the only club in the Myrtle Beach core repeatedly described by golf press as genuinely exclusive, having deliberately eliminated public/packager play in 2014; its sibling Grande Dunes Ocean Club (a beach club, not golf, but the market's cleanest homeowner-to-private-amenity bundle); TPC Myrtle Beach (Tom Fazio, 1999), the state's only TPC-branded course and the only Grand Strand course with a 5-star Golf Digest rating; Barefoot Resort's narrowly-scoped members-only program, open only to owners in specific named developments; and The Dunes Golf and Beach Club (Robert Trent Jones Sr., 1948), a historic, member-owned private club and, since May 2024, host of the PGA Tour's ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic. Pawleys Island/Georgetown's golf identity splits just as cleanly, but the balance tips differently. On top sits a nationally celebrated public/resort layer -- Mike Strantz's Caledonia Golf & Fish Club and True Blue Golf Club (both again named to Golfweek's 2026 Top 100 Resort Courses), Jack Nicklaus's Pawleys Plantation, Dan Maples designs at Heritage Club and Willbrook, and the historic 1966 Litchfield Country Club -- genuinely excellent golf but, like Myrtle Beach's trail courses, carrying no private-membership barrier. Underneath that layer sits Pawleys' real 'golf-living' story: DeBordieu Club, whose Pete & P.B. Dye course is restricted exclusively to DeBordieu Colony property owners; Wachesaw Plantation Club, a member-owned equity club since 1985 on an early Tom Fazio design; and The Reserve Golf Club at Litchfield, a Greg Norman design built as the centerpiece of its own 700-acre gated community and part of the McConnell Golf reciprocal network.

This is the clearest structural contrast between the two markets. Myrtle Beach/Grand Strand carries the region's largest raw course count by far -- well over 100 courses along roughly 60 miles of coastline -- yet only five anchors qualified as genuine golf-living relationships, and even two of those five (Barefoot Resort, TPC Myrtle Beach) qualify on narrow or non-obvious grounds: Barefoot's members-only program is eligible only to owners in specific named developments within a resort otherwise built for daily-fee trail play, and TPC Myrtle Beach's private membership sits underneath a course whose adjoining Prince Creek community does not appear to require it. Grande Dunes Members Club stands out as the market's one unambiguous, deliberately exclusive private club. Pawleys Island/Georgetown, by contrast, has the highest concentration of legitimately excluded courses found anywhere in this platform's statewide South Carolina research -- eight named courses (Caledonia, True Blue, Heritage Club, Willbrook, Founders Club, Litchfield Country Club, Pawleys Plantation, Wedgefield) that are acclaimed, often top-100-ranked golf with no residential-access barrier at all. Its three qualifying anchors are fewer in absolute number than Myrtle Beach's five, but every one of them -- DeBordieu, Wachesaw, and The Reserve -- reads as a more conventional, unambiguous private or gated-community club, without Myrtle Beach's pattern of narrow eligibility carve-outs layered on top of otherwise-public trail golf. In short: Myrtle Beach's genuine golf-living layer is a thin skim atop a massive tourism base, while Pawleys' genuine golf-living layer, though smaller, is a cleaner and more consistently private set of clubs sitting beneath its own large field of acclaimed public golf.

Myrtle Beach/Grand Strand's qualifying anchors show a genuinely varied, often layered access pattern. Grande Dunes Members Club is non-equity private membership, deliberately closed to the public since 2014, but entirely separate from buying a home in the surrounding Grande Dunes development -- membership is not automatically included. Grande Dunes Ocean Club runs the opposite way: a complimentary household membership is automatic for Grande Dunes homeowners, though it is a beach club, not golf. TPC Myrtle Beach is non-equity private membership with a genuine current waiting list, unconnected to any specific residential requirement. Barefoot Resort's members-only program is the market's most tightly scoped case: eligibility is restricted to owners in specific named developments only (Centex/Pulte-built sections, North Towers/Yacht Club Villas, The Retreat, and the separate North Beach Plantation project) -- not to the resort broadly -- with real initiation fees ($15,000-$20,000) and monthly dues ($205 or $85). The Dunes Golf and Beach Club is member-owned/equity, with no residential community attached at all. Pawleys Island/Georgetown's pattern is different in kind: its clearest anchor, DeBordieu Club, restricts membership eligibility exclusively to DeBordieu Colony property owners -- the single strongest residential-integration case found anywhere in the statewide Grand Strand/Pawleys discovery pass, and structurally the opposite of Barefoot Resort's model (Barefoot restricts eligibility to a narrow subset of owners within an otherwise-public resort; DeBordieu restricts eligibility to Colony owners specifically, full stop, with no public-facing golf product at all). Wachesaw Plantation Club and The Reserve Golf Club at Litchfield both sit inside their own gated communities as the defining private amenity, though neither confirms membership as strictly mandatory for homeownership. Net effect: Myrtle Beach offers a buyer more variety of access paths -- deliberately exclusive, narrowly-eligible, or freestanding-equity -- while Pawleys Island offers a more uniform pattern of property-restricted or property-centered private clubs layered beneath its public-golf volume.

Documented pricing is thin on both sides, but the figures on record point toward Pawleys Island's private layer running notably higher at its peak than anything documented in the Myrtle Beach core. Grande Dunes reports an average home sale price around $871,593, ranging roughly $235,000-$7,395,000, with premiums for ocean views and fairway-adjacent lots -- the only community-wide price data available for Myrtle Beach's qualifying anchors this pass; Barefoot Resort's eligible developments and Prince Creek were not researched on price. In Pawleys Island, DeBordieu Colony -- the community tied to the market's clearest bundled anchor -- is reported at roughly $1.6M-$4.3M+, with a median around $1.8M-$1.9M as of 2025, well above Grande Dunes' reported average. Wachesaw Plantation, by contrast, is considerably more accessible at roughly $300,000-$700,000 for single-family homes (townhouses $120,000-$285,000), and The Reserve at Litchfield spans a wide range from roughly $500,000 golf villas/cottages up to multi-million-dollar waterfront custom homes. Club-level fees follow a similar pattern where documented: Barefoot Resort's members-only program ($15,000-$20,000 initiation) is the only officially sourced fee figure in the Myrtle Beach core, while The Dunes Golf and Beach Club ($25,001-$50,000) and Grande Dunes Members Club (a stale 2018 figure of roughly $7,500) rely on third-party estimates or outdated data. In Pawleys, DeBordieu's reported $50,001-$75,000 initiation range and Wachesaw's conflicting $5,000 resident buy-in versus $30,000-$50,000+ aggregator-reported equity cost are both third-party estimates as well. No club in either market has a current, officially published fee schedule confirmed by this research -- buyers should treat every figure here as a starting point for direct confirmation, not a locked-in number.

The two markets are not fully separable at their edge. Murrells Inlet sits directly on the Horry/Georgetown county line, and two of this comparison's anchors sit right on that seam. Wachesaw Plantation Club is physically in Murrells Inlet and is grouped with the Pawleys Island/Georgetown market per its own Hammock Coast branding, even though it borders the Myrtle Beach core geographically. TPC Myrtle Beach, conversely, carries a Georgetown County mailing address despite its Myrtle Beach branding and is grouped with the Myrtle Beach market on branding grounds -- both research passes flagged this boundary explicitly and recommended it be reconciled to avoid duplication. A buyer focused specifically on the Murrells Inlet area should review both market guides rather than assuming either one alone captures everything nearby.

There is no universal winner here -- the two markets suit different priorities, and both have real, acknowledged documentation gaps. A buyer drawn to sheer golf-course volume, a wider variety of access models (from Barefoot Resort's narrowly-eligible resident program to TPC Myrtle Beach's freestanding waitlist to Grande Dunes' deliberately closed club), a PGA Tour host club (The Dunes Golf and Beach Club), and a louder, more resort-and-entertainment coastal identity has more of that in Myrtle Beach/Grand Strand. A buyer drawn to a quieter, more consistently upscale and more genuinely gated private-club layer -- DeBordieu's property-restricted exclusivity chief among them -- a Lowcountry coastal character distinct from Myrtle Beach's tourist-strip identity, and a McConnell Golf reciprocal network (The Reserve) has more of that in Pawleys Island/Georgetown. Both markets share the same underlying lesson: their headline course counts and famous-designer names (Norman, Fazio, Dye, Nicklaus, Strantz) mostly describe excellent public and package-trail golf, not residential-access barriers -- the genuine golf-living anchors in both places are a small, specific subset that buyers should identify by name rather than assume from a market's overall golf reputation. Review each market's individual anchors, and confirm current membership terms, fees, and residential requirements directly with each club before making a purchase decision.