For 37 years, the King and Prince Golf Club sat on the quiet north end of St. Simons Island doing what a lot of golf courses do: hosting daily-fee rounds, weathering hurricane seasons, and building up the kind of local reputation that outlasts ownership changes. That reputation is ending this fall. New owner South Street Partners, the Charlotte and Charleston-based investment firm behind Kiawah Island Club and Palmetto Bluff, is converting the course to a fully private club, backed by a $7 million renovation of the course and practice facilities led by golf architect Beau Welling. The course closed for construction earlier this year and is scheduled to reopen to members only in late fall 2026.
None of this happens near St. Simons Island Club. The two properties sit on opposite ends of the island, tied to different golf courses entirely. But a buyer weighing an Island Club address against everything else on the market this fall should understand what just changed in the island's golf inventory, because it reshapes the comparison even when the neighborhood itself hasn't moved an inch.
The North End Goes Private
The King and Prince Golf Club opened in 1989 on land that was once part of Hampton Plantation, designed by Joe Lee and later restored in 2009 by Billy Fuller. Its back nine carries four holes built on small marsh hammocks, reached by roughly 800 feet of elevated cart bridges, with Butler Lake coming into play on seven holes and ospreys and bald eagles working the surrounding tidal creeks. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported this month that area golfers had long known it as "the best deal in golf" on the island, a course good enough to compete with the private clubs but priced like a public one.
That pricing structure is what's disappearing. South Street's new membership program, launched in May 2026, doesn't publish its initiation costs on the club's public website. Prospective members request an invite code first, then get access to a portal with fee schedules and documentation. That's a meaningful shift from a course anyone could book online for a round. It signals a club being built for a narrower, application-based buyer rather than the walk-up golfer who used to make up its base.
Two Golf Courses, Two Ends of the Island
St. Simons Island Club sits well south of all this, off Kings Way from the causeway, built around Sea Island's Retreat Course rather than anything at King and Prince. The Retreat Course opened in 1926 under designer Dick Wilson and was renovated in 2000 by Davis Love III and his brother Mark. Island Club is its own gated neighborhood of roughly 400 homes with a property owners' association, a community pool, and tennis and pickleball courts alongside the Retreat clubhouse.
Here's the detail that trips up a lot of buyers: owning a home in Island Club doesn't automatically hand you Sea Island membership. Sea Island's Full and Beach & Sports membership categories require the purchase of qualifying real estate, but activation still runs through a separate application to Sea Island's own membership office. We covered exactly how that gap works in our earlier look at Island Club's membership rules, and it's worth revisiting before you assume any specific parcel comes with club access baked in.
Why a Course on the Wrong End of the Island Still Matters Here
None of this means King and Prince's conversion is driving prices in Island Club directly. It's a different course, a different clubhouse, a different ownership group entirely. What it does is shrink the number of ways to get a good round of golf on St. Simons Island without either a Sea Island application or a King and Prince invite code. The island's golf inventory is splitting into two tiers: courses where access requires an application and a fee schedule you have to request, and courses that don't exist in that accessible middle anymore.
For a buyer comparing neighborhoods, that split changes the math. A property where membership eligibility is tied to qualifying real estate, even with a separate application, starts to look different against an island where the remaining alternative just moved behind a portal. This isn't a claim that Island Club home values ticked up because of anything happening at King and Prince. It's that the reference point buyers use when they ask "what does golf cost here" has narrowed, and Island Club is one of the few addresses on the island where that question has always come with real estate attached to the answer.
The Median Depends on Who's Counting
Anyone who has pulled up neighborhood data on Island Club has probably seen numbers that don't agree with each other, and the gap is wide enough to matter. In June 2025, one national data tracker put the median sale price at $1.8 million, up 35.8% year over year, based on just four homes sold that month. By spring 2026, a different platform's neighborhood snapshot showed a median listing price of $1,547,500 with only 11 homes on the market at all. A separate analysis built from Census and Federal Housing Finance Agency repeat-sales data placed the broader neighborhood's median home value closer to $846,937 as of early 2026.
None of these numbers is wrong. They're measuring different things: a month of closed sales, a snapshot of active listings, and a longer repeat-sales index that blends condos and single-family homes together. In a market this thin, a single closing swings the median hard. Recent listing activity has shown the range that produces these swings: a golf-front lot on Medinah Street offered in the high $800s during the 2025 to 2026 window, a home on Augusta Street marketed between $1.0 million and $1.25 million in that same stretch, and another on Merion priced in the mid-$1 million range. Single-family homes in Island Club commonly list above $1 million, but the same neighborhood also includes condos and townhomes, so whichever slice of inventory a given data snapshot happens to catch will produce a very different headline number.
What to Verify Before You Write an Offer
If you're touring Island Club this fall, a few things are worth confirming before the number on a listing sheet does the talking for you. Ask directly what membership category, if any, attaches to the specific parcel, since ownership alone doesn't activate Sea Island access. Confirm current HOA dues with the property owners' association rather than relying on a range from an old listing (recent samples have shown figures in the neighborhood of $750 to $1,000 annually, but that should be verified directly). And if a rental strategy is part of your plan, check the association's written rental policy, since some phases have favored 30-plus night minimums.
The renovated King and Prince course reopens to its new membership late this fall, right as the island's home-shopping season typically picks back up. Anyone comparing golf-adjacent neighborhoods this winter will be looking at an island with one fewer accessible course than it had a year ago, and Island Club will be part of that conversation whether its own numbers moved or not.
If you're evaluating a specific Island Club address and want the actual membership status, current HOA documents, and real comparable sales pulled instead of a headline median, The Listing Pros Team can put those together for you. Request a Free Home Valuation and start with the numbers that actually apply to that house.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
