Florida Golf Monthly - Marsh Creek Real Estate

Marsh Creek, St. Augustine: Designed by PGA Tour start Mark McCumber, Marsh Creek offers golfers a wonderful combination of beauty and challenge.

There are three secrets to developing a successful golf community, and Marsh Creek has discovered them all. What are they? Location, location, and location &emdash; of course.

Situated in St. Augustine, the charm center of Florida's First Coast, Marsh Creek possesses all the elements that elevate one's quality of life. First, there's the lure of the golf course. Designed by PGA Tour star Mark McCumber, a man with a resident's familiarity of the area and an insider's mastery of all the tricks necessary to maintain the course's natural setting, Marsh Creek offers golfers a wonderful combination of beauty and challenge.

In designing the course, McCumber was careful to attend to the needs of golfers at every level, from neophytes to pros. There are five sets of tees on every hole at Marsh Creek. The bravest players can test themselves with 6,925 yards of golf that wind through the marshes and across the sand carefully placed to enhance both the attractiveness and the challenge of the course. Other tees add up to 6,325; 5,668; 4,888 and 4,449 yards. When you figure in the omnipresent wind factor, varying daily in degree from a breeze to a gale and changing direction without notice, you have an ever-changing golf facility that always peaks the golfers' interest. In this day of blast and bash golf courses where the first hole looks like the second and the second like every one after it, the constancy of change at Marsh Creek is a precious and rare commodity. And it's an important commodity to seek out when you're looking for a golf facility where you intend to play most of the time.

Not only does the course at Marsh Creek serve the diverse needs of the residents, it also lays claim to the high regard of the PGA Senior Tour. Annually, the Senior Tour uses Marsh Creek as a venue for regional qualifying to decide the final field for Qualifying School. And you'd better believe that none of these players beats the course during the tournament. The course is strong enough to win every time, even when tested by the best.

While most Marsh Creek residents consider the golf course the focal point of this community, it's certainly not the only attraction. Marsh Creek living is luxurious, and the development offers a full range of comfortable life-styles. Residents can select custom home sites with views of the golf course, the nature preserve, the interior, the lake or the marshfront/intracoastal waterway. Prices for these custom locales range from $37,500 to $230,000 per home site. If a resident desires a smaller living space, Marsh Creek offers patio homes on the golf course, the lakefront or in wooded seclusion, and the sites range in price from $36,000 to $62,000.

When new residents move into Marsh Creek, in all likelihood they're experiencing a fantastic life-style change in addition to the change in locale. After all, life-style is what Marsh Creek is all about. Unlike many golf communities in Florida, 90 percent of Marsh Creek homes serve as the primary residence for their owners. This means Marsh Creek isn't just another place where winter visitors come to nest when the weather turns cold in the northern tundra; it's actually a great place to live.

The Marsh Creek life-style reflects the comfortable atmosphere of St. Augustine. It offers a casual way of life. The people who comprise this community have already experienced the pressures of life in the corporate world's fast lane, so there are no pretensions at Marsh Creek. This is a place where the residents have paid their dues and gained the right to be socially confident. They check all pretensions at the gate. Marsh Creek's homey character allows its residents to step down to a higher level. Here, no one needs to work at impressing the neighbors; everyone can concentrate on enjoying life. All competition is limited to the golf course and the active tennis facility, offering 13 leagues for men and women at every level and a strong junior program as well.

Because of Marsh Creek's success, you might naturally assume the developers have hard and fast plans to construct another golf course. Yet, typical of the laid back atmosphere of the community, there's no such rush. If it happens, it happens. Right now, there's still plenty of room for play on the existing course, so why disrupt the community's peace and quiet with additional construction problems?

With an outstanding, world-class golf facility right in your backyard, you would think that every Marsh Creek resident golfs regularly. Surprisingly enough, however, 50 percent don't consider themselves active golfers. For golfers and non-golfers alike, this means the overall quality of life at Marsh Creek is top-notch. This development is just the place for the avid golfer in search of a top-shelf golf community with the uncrowded atmosphere so rarely found these days.

Any change that may occur in the development of Marsh Creek's golf course still lies years away. Three more home construction phases have yet to be completed, and if active golfers fill them, the need for another course may present itself. It's a potential growth problem that developers will address if and only if the need to do so arises.

Right now, life is good at Marsh Creek. Unlike the climate of the more southerly regions of Florida, Marsh Creek residents can delight in St. Augustine's slight change of seasons. Like the social atmosphere of the area, even the change of seasons is casual. The temperature may drop to the 50s for a brief time, but the weather change won't intrude on the overall experience of living in the area.

Although St. Augustine holds many pleasures for its citizens to enjoy, none of them should be experienced at a rapid fire pace. Here, one wants to savor every moment. As the region grows, the challenge will be to maintain this slow pace and low anxiety level while accommodating an influx of people. More people means more activity. And when all the people who will visit the soon-to-be-completed World Golf Village, the largest single golf project in the world, experience the area's relaxed life-style firsthand, even more are bound to settle here in the future.

Come see for yourself. As you meander the roads of Marsh Creek, you'll realize that if any place could be immune to the pressures of the world beyond its gates, it's this place. Here, the developers have created more than a golf community. They've created a way of life, and they're not giving it up any time soon - correction - ever.