Pajaro Valley Golf Club in North Monterey County, California, Advances a Parks Legacy Master Plan for Townhomes, Cabins, and a New Clubhouse
Parks Legacy's master plan for century-old Pajaro Valley Golf Club outside Watsonville, California, pairs 160 townhomes, cabins, RV sites, a plaza, and a new clubhouse with a leaner irrigated course. Monterey County review continues.
Pajaro Valley Golf Club has spent 2026 marking its centennial in Royal Oaks, just outside Watsonville in North Monterey County, California. Its owner is already sketching the club's second century. Parks Legacy, which acquired the club in 2023, has a master plan moving through Monterey County permitting that would add 160 attached townhomes, 88 golf cabins, 56 RV sites, a new clubhouse, and a commercial plaza along Salinas Road, according to Roseann Cattani's report for Golfweek and the Salinas Californian, published Sept. 26.
The program reads less like a standalone clubhouse replacement than a framework for a small golf village. Beside the new clubhouse, the plan calls for recreational facilities, a fitness center, a restaurant, and a banquet space sized for 200 guests. The Salinas Road plaza would hold a coffee shop, a sundries market, and a tavern, while Golfweek describes the retail as a coffee shop and community market. The cabins and RV sites give the property an overnight layer, a stay-and-play logic familiar to readers who followed the lodging village at Cabot Wilds.
None of it has been built. Mark Swartz, whom Golfweek identifies as director of operations and the Santa Cruz Sentinel describes as director of design and entitlements, told Golfweek the plan does not require a zoning change. Monterey County issued a completeness determination on the application earlier this year, and by Golfweek's account the project sits roughly halfway through California's approval process, with an estimated 18 to 24 months of permitting and public hearings still ahead.
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Water may be the most consequential line in the filing. Irrigated turf would shrink from about 110 acres to roughly 55 to 60 acres, served by a modern irrigation system and an on-site wastewater system producing recycled water for irrigation. Swartz told the Sentinel that the golf course renovation carries a budget of roughly $10 million to $12 million, about $4 million of which is earmarked for underground irrigation. That money belongs to the course and its water infrastructure, separate from the clubhouse and the rest of the development.
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The course itself is a two-author composition. Peter Hay, whose name the Hay course at Pebble Beach still carries, laid out the front nine in the 1920s, and Robert Muir Graves added the back nine decades later. The Sentinel reports that golf architects Forrest Richardson and Jim Urbina are part of the development master plan. Long before golf, the land belonged to the working economy of the region, tied to shipping at Hudson Landing and to agriculture around Elkhorn Slough. The club has marked the milestone with its own centennial look back.
Parks Legacy, which the Sentinel reports is based in Phoenix, also owns golf properties in Oregon and Washington. At Pajaro Valley, general manager Brian Robbeloth told Golfweek that during the 2023 Pajaro flood the property served as a staging area for first responders, a reminder that the club's value to the valley reaches well beyond the tee sheet.
In broad strokes, the plan follows a pattern that has reshaped golf development across the country. Housing and hospitality create a revenue base that can support long-term investment in the course, the same pairing of golf and residential capital behind projects such as Firefly Spring Hill and Panther National. What sets Pajaro Valley apart is its setting: a century-old public-facing course on the agricultural edge of the Central Coast rather than a greenfield luxury enclave.
For a North Monterey County course entering its second hundred years, the plan answers two pressures at once. Halving the irrigated footprint and turning to recycled water addresses the resource most likely to shape California golf in the decades ahead, while the townhomes, cabins, and plaza offer mixed-use capital broader than rounds alone. Whether that balance holds is now a question for Monterey County's public hearings. Pajaro Valley has already proven it can last a century. This master plan is Parks Legacy's case for how the course lasts another.
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