The Summit Club vs. Southern Highlands Golf Club: Comparing Las Vegas's Two Flagship Golf Communities

The Summit Club is a single, tightly bounded 610-acre guard-gated development of roughly 262 planned residences plus 146 custom lots — club and community are effectively the same footprint. Southern Highlands is far larger: a 2,300-acre, nine-village master-planned community, of which Southern Highlands Golf Club is the central amenity but not the entire development. A buyer choosing Southern Highlands is choosing a broad community with many price points and HOA structures; a buyer choosing The Summit Club is choosing one small, homogeneous, ultra-luxury enclave.

This is the sharpest contrast between the two. At The Summit Club, multiple real-estate sources describing the club's own rules state that membership is exclusive to and effectively required of property owners — you cannot buy in without also joining, even though a separate six-figure initiation fee and substantial annual dues still apply. At Southern Highlands, golf membership is optional and priced separately (reported roughly $50,000–$75,000-plus initiation per secondary sources); a buyer can purchase a home in Southern Highlands and never join the golf club at all.

The Summit Club is priced at the very top of the Las Vegas market: completed custom homes have traded from roughly $7.5M to $12M, with some listings above $20M, and custom lots alone have sold for as much as $10M. Southern Highlands spans a genuinely wide ladder — entry townhome/condo product from roughly $375,000 up to guard-gated luxury enclaves (Roma Hills, Olympia Hills) at $2M-plus — making it accessible to a far broader range of buyers than The Summit Club.

Both courses carry serious design and tournament pedigree: The Summit Club's Tom Fazio course hosted the PGA Tour's CJ Cup in 2022, while Southern Highlands Golf Club was one of Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s final designs, completed with his son Robert Trent Jones Jr., and its clubhouse was ranked #1 in America by Golf Digest in 2015. Neither currently hosts an annual PGA Tour event.