{"id":569096,"date":"2026-04-07T03:54:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T03:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/569096\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T03:54:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T03:54:08","slug":"tepetonka-is-mns-first-destination-golf-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/569096\/","title":{"rendered":"Tepetonka Is MN’s First Destination Golf Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five years ago, Mark Haugejorde stumbled upon some land in western Minnesota. He had grown up in the area, where his father founded Little Crow Golf Resort<\/a> in Spicer. Haugejorde played competitive golf at the University of Houston and built a career in the industry, returning to Minnesota in 2017. \u201cI was warned by an engineer: It\u2019s not easy to build a golf course in Minnesota,\u201d says Haugejorde. \u201cAnd he was right.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, Haugejorde is president of Tepetonka<\/a>, a private club set to open this summer in New London, 90 minutes west of the cities. It\u2019s the state\u2019s first fractional ownership club, limited to 100 memberships, by invitation. Haugejorde is focused on adding members from \u201cranked\u201d clubs.<\/p>\n

Designers at OCM Golf, the Australia-based architecture firm that worked on Tepetonka, told him that his land is about as optimal for a course as possible. Two summers of overwhelming rainfall hampered construction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"golf<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve created a lifestyle experience,\u201d says Haugejorde, with cabins and lodges totaling 36 rooms; 16 more will open by 2028. At nearby Green Lake, the company will open Tepetonka Beach Club, which features additional lodging. Most recently, Tepetonka Ranch, an inn set on 140-acres, was added to the master plan. The ranch will have a spa with saunas, a heated pool, and a gym.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tepetonka\u2019s setup is designed to avoid capacity issues that many other private clubs face. Each member pre-purchases a specific number of rounds and contractually becomes one of the owners of the club. Haugejorde compared it to NetJets, a fractional ownership private jet company.<\/p>\n

Haugejorde would not discuss any details about the economics of the club, but said that \u201cwe\u2019ve got this total bucket of golf that we\u2019re going to allow, 10,000 rounds by members. If you were to buy a 1% interest in the club, you would have 100 rounds.\u201d Members can share their rounds with guests. Each membership can be shared by as many as four people.<\/p>\n

The appeal of Tepetonka\u2019s approach is exclusivity, says Keven Rowe, a Salt Lake City-based attorney with experience developing and financing courses. \u201cThe marketing concept behind them is that you\u2019re paying to have limited, exclusive access to top-rate facilities that aren\u2019t available to the public,\u201d says Rowe, who estimated that the total membership cost was likely north of half a million dollars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more from this issue<\/p>\n

What Rowe finds interesting is that there is no real estate sales component to Tepetonka, which he says is uncommon for private equity clubs, which offer or require purchase of residential units to members. Rowe estimated Tepetonka will cost $25 million to $100 million to develop, depending on the scale of the facilities constructed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five years ago, Mark Haugejorde stumbled upon some land in western Minnesota. He had grown up in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-569096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}