On July 23, a commercial real estate publisher put on a conference in Orange County about surf parks, and 380 people signed up. Bisnow's director of West Coast events, Sam D'Angelo, told WavePoolMag the team had hoped for 200. The room held developers, architects, general contractors, aquatic engineers, insurance brokers, and capital markets people, and the agenda ran four panels on asset class, financing, delivery, and operations, with a keynote from Jess Ponting of Surf Park Central.
Almost none of it was about wave quality. That, on its own, says something about where this industry is.
The golf comparison keeps coming up
The strongest theme of the day was that a surf lagoon works as an anchor amenity inside a larger development. Panelists reached repeatedly for golf as the parallel: essentially no golf course gets built on its own, because the surrounding housing is what makes the course financially possible. Dave Likins of Meriwether Companies, the developer behind Cabo Real Surf Club and Coral Mountain Desert Club in La Quinta, described surf as the ingredient that makes everything around it premium.
Nicholas Edelman, co-founder of Aventuur, gave the clearest version of the math. A typical site runs 30 to 50 acres, and only about five and a half of those sit under the wave technology. The rest is hotel, food and beverage, retail, wellness, parking, and housing. Aventuur is building Perth Surf Park in Western Australia and has projects in Jacksonville and Auckland, all of them shaped that way.
Anyone who has read our real estate section will recognize the pattern. It is why South Britannia in British Columbia comes with 1,050 homes, why The Desperado sits beside Waco Surf, and why Veranda West in Utah is a residential district with a wave pool in the middle of it.
The numbers behind a session fee
The operations panel is where the day got concrete, and the figures reported from the room explain a lot about how these places are priced and laid out.
Visitors spend a median of about $125 on surfing and another $100 on everything else once they are on site. Cate Thero of Surf Park Management put non-surfers at roughly 45 percent of revenue, which is the whole argument for the restaurant, the pool deck, the pickleball courts, and the spa. Around 60 percent of guests come back more than once a year. Developers were told to model conservatively at about 50 percent pool occupancy, and to expect roughly three years for a property to reach maturity.
Insurance came up as a line item worth watching: 5 to 8 percent of operating expenses for a surf park, against 1 to 2 percent for a restaurant and 7 to 10 percent for a zip line operation. Ponting's keynote framed the demand side with about 50 million surfers worldwide, four million in the United States, average annual surf travel spending near $2,000 per surfer, and a global surf tourism figure around $64.9 billion.
Two smaller numbers from the day are useful for anyone arguing about surf parks at a city council meeting. A lagoon's annual water use has been put at roughly what one golf hole consumes in irrigation, and a breaking wave in a pool measures around 70 decibels, which is ordinary white noise. Those are industry-supplied figures rather than independent findings, and they are the ones that will be quoted in every future permit hearing.
The room was mostly our directory
What stood out reading the speaker list is how much of it maps onto parks we already track. Matt Gunn of Revel Surf and Chance Gaul of Palm Springs Surf Club spoke on operations. Blake Hess of Beach Street Development, the team behind HTX Surf, was on the same panel. Jon Corn of N4FL Development, the developer of Ocean Kamp in Oceanside, and Brett Portera of Crest Surf Clubs spoke about financing and approvals. Andrew Thatcher represented Endless Surf, Tom Lochtefeld represented SurfLoch, and Shaun Tomson was in the audience.
Two names on the list are projects we have not been covering. Drew Boyles spoke for Hidden Lake Surf Resort, an Endless Surf lagoon planned in Buckeye on the west side of metro Phoenix, in the same market where PHX Surf is planning a 40-acre resort to the south. William Duncanson of BAR Architecture spoke for Neptune Beach Surf Club, a roughly $50 million, two-acre Endless Surf pool proposed for Alameda on San Francisco Bay, with a hoped-for opening around 2029. Both are early, and both are now on our list to research and add.
What this means if you just want to surf
Three practical things follow from a day like this.
More of the parks coming next will be attached to homes or memberships, because that is the structure that finances them. We have already logged that shift: São Paulo Surf Club, Boa Vista Village, and Praia da Grama in Brazil are member-access, and Cabo Real and El Nido are heading the same way. Checking whether a park sells public sessions before you plan a trip around it matters more every year.
Session prices are unlikely to fall much. When a project is modeled at half occupancy with a three-year ramp and insurance running several times a restaurant's rate, the surf line item carries a lot of weight. Our price guide puts the current global range from about $39 to $486 a session, and nothing said in Orange County suggests downward pressure.
The amenities around the water carry real weight in these plans. If nearly half the revenue comes from people who never get wet, the restaurant, the hotel, and the deck are doing as much work as the pool, which is why the newest parks feel more like resorts than sports facilities.
Bisnow says it will run the conference again in summer 2027. Given that the first one nearly doubled its target attendance, the more interesting measure by then will be how many of the projects represented in that room have water in them.
Rendering courtesy of Aventuur. Attendance figures and on-stage data points as reported by WavePoolMag; speaker lineup from Bisnow's event program.
