Two homes went up for sale on the same street inside the gates of Bermuda Dunes Country Club last spring. Similar square footage, similar age, similar HOA statement. One buyer assumed both came as a set: house, gate, 27 holes of golf, done. The other had done her homework and asked the question no listing sheet answers on its own. Is the club membership actually included, or is that a separate deal?
It was separate. It is always separate at Bermuda Dunes, and understanding why changes how you should read every price tag in this community.
The line every listing leaves off
Bermuda Dunes Country Club sits on fee simple land, meaning buyers own the ground under the house outright rather than holding it under a ground lease. HOA dues run roughly $309 to $805 a month depending on which of the community's 17 separate homeowners associations a given home falls under, covering the 24-hour guard gate, water, cable, trash, and in some sections a shared pool or tennis court.
None of that includes the golf course. Membership at Bermuda Dunes Country Club is optional, purchased and paid for outside the HOA. That separation is not an oversight. It is the direct result of a fight this community had with itself less than a decade ago.
How the split got built in
Construction started in 1958, and Billy Bell, the architect behind La Jolla Country Club and Riviera, opened his 27-hole design the following year. Houses went up around the course in stages: some on the fairways, some in gated pockets built later, some further out with no view of a green at all. When residents agreed to gate the whole neighborhood in 1989, the result was not one HOA but a patchwork of 17, all reporting to a body called the Bermuda Dunes Security Association. The golf club itself has always been a separate legal entity, a private club that happens to share a name and an address with the houses around it.
That structure is why nobody ever folded club dues into HOA dues here the way some newer desert communities do. There was no single master developer left standing to make that call.
The vote that tried to change it
By 2018 the club had a real membership problem. Attorney Wayne Guralnick, who represented the Security Association, told the Palm Springs Desert Sun that Bermuda Dunes Country Club had roughly 160 equity members, while a 27-hole course needs somewhere between 400 and 450 to stay sustainable. The club's answer was a proposal, five years in the making according to club manager Perry Dickey, to make a $50 a month social membership mandatory for every one of the community's 1,400 homes, added quietly to HOA dues that were then $155.50 a month.
Homeowners did not take it quietly.
Homemade yard signs read "No welfare for BDCC."
The objection was never really about $50. It was about a promise. Residents who had bought into a low-fee, gate-and-pool HOA felt they were being asked to subsidize a private club they had never joined. Ron Rowell, president of the Bermuda Dunes Community Association and a supporter of the deal, pointed to what happened when Palm Springs Country Club lost its golf course about a decade earlier: the neighborhood became "miserable," in his words, and a developer eventually floated a plan to build homes on the old fairways. His argument was that $50 a month is cheap insurance against that outcome. The other side argued that if you wanted a country club, you should have bought a golf membership, not been handed one by a homeowners vote.
The mandatory arrangement never passed into the community's structure. Membership stayed optional. That outcome is the reason today's buyer still has to ask the membership question for themselves rather than finding the answer already baked into the deed.
What optional actually costs
Current membership at Bermuda Dunes Country Club runs in tiers, and the spread between them is the real number a buyer needs before comparing this community to anywhere else in the valley.
| Membership | Initiation | Monthly dues | What it gets you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social | $500 | $110 | 8 rounds of golf a year, 10% pro shop discount, fitness and bocce access |
| Associate | $1,000 | $555 individual / $655 family | 6 rounds of golf a month, 10% pro shop discount |
| Regular Golf | $10,000 | $1,015 individual / $1,185 family | Unlimited green fees, reduced guest rates, 20% pro shop discount |
Add cart rentals and food and beverage minimums of roughly $600 to $900 a month on top of any tier above Social, and the yearly cost of actually golfing at Bermuda Dunes at the Regular level runs well into five figures before a single greens fee is paid. None of that appears in a home's list price or its HOA disclosure. It shows up only if you ask.
A trial offer that tells you something
The club currently markets a Preview Membership: no initiation fee, no long-term obligation, a trial that runs from one month up to six. It is a reasonable way for a prospective buyer to test the course before committing to a full membership. It is also a signal. A club with a waiting list does not usually need to advertise a free-look period. Nearly eight years after the Security Association's fight over sustaining membership, the club is still working to fill seats, which tells a buyer the golf side of this community remains a choice worth pricing carefully, not a formality worth ignoring.
Read the sub-community, not just the city name
"Bermuda Dunes" as a citywide search label blends country club homes with several other subdivisions that have nothing to do with the golf course. Neighborhood-level pricing from early 2026 put Bermuda Golf Club Estates and Esplanade both near $740,000 in median price, Desert Breezes closer to $587,000, Woodhaven Country Club around $450,000, and Palm Desert Resort near $384,500. Inside Bermuda Dunes Country Club proper, current brokerage listings put the range from roughly $335,000 for a smaller condo up toward $1.1 million for a larger custom estate, a spread wide enough that the address alone tells you almost nothing about what you are buying.
Citywide sale-price tracking from June 2025 put the median at $625,000, up 3 percent year over year, with homes taking 132 days to sell compared with 60 days the year before. By June 2026, citywide list-price tracking showed a median of $546,000, down 2 percent year over year. Read those two numbers side by side and the honest takeaway is that this market moves unevenly from one stretch to the next and from one data source to another, which fits a community built from 17 different HOAs and one optional club rather than a single, uniform product.
Three questions worth asking before you write an offer
- Which of the 17 HOAs does this specific home fall under, and what does its monthly due actually cover?
- Does the seller currently hold a club membership, and does Bermuda Dunes Country Club allow that membership to transfer, or does a buyer start over at initiation cost?
- If golf is not the point for you, does the HOA on this particular home still include anything you would otherwise pay separately, like a pool or tennis court?
None of these show up in a standard disclosure packet. They come from knowing the community's history, not just its listing sheet.
Common questions
Do I have to join the country club to live in Bermuda Dunes Country Club? No. Membership is optional and purchased separately from the HOA. The 2018 push to make a basic social membership mandatory did not become part of the arrangement homeowners have today.
Why do food and beverage minimums matter if I only golf occasionally? Above the Social tier, minimums run $600 to $900 a month whether or not you spend it, so a membership priced attractively on dues alone can still carry a real ongoing cost once that minimum is counted.
Does a lower HOA fee mean a lower total cost of ownership? Not by itself. A home with a $309 monthly HOA and no club membership can cost less to hold than a home with an $805 HOA plus a Regular Golf membership, or the reverse, depending entirely on what the buyer wants from the property.
If you're weighing a Bermuda Dunes Country Club home against another golf community in the Coachella Valley, the membership question is the one worth asking before the pricing question. DWA Team has spent two decades sorting through exactly this kind of local detail for buyers across Palm Desert, Indian Wells, and the surrounding club communities. Search All Homes with us and let's talk through what a specific address actually includes before you write an offer.
