Desert Highlands is the anti-Estancia. Where most private clubs make you wait years and win approval, here the golf runs with the land: the moment you close escrow, you are a full member of a Jack Nicklaus club — no waitlist, no application, no vetting. Membership isn’t something you apply for. It’s attached to the deed.
That single structural fact shapes everything about buying here — including a way in that most people never notice.
Read the Desert Highlands guide ↓
The Desert Highlands Guide
Membership runs with the land
Desert Highlands is the only club in Scottsdale where membership is tied to real estate rather than granted separately. Buy a home — or a lot — and full membership activates at the close of escrow. There is no waitlist, no board application, and no vetting process. Every owner is a member; every member is an owner. The current fee is a $205,000 one-time membership contribution due at closing, and dues run roughly $2,200 a month — a figure that, unusually, bundles both the club membership and the HOA into a single payment rather than billing them separately the way most golf communities do.
This is the opposite of the model at clubs like Estancia or Desert Mountain, where ownership and membership are separate, waitlists stretch for years, and getting in can hinge on timing and approval. At Desert Highlands, the deed is the membership. For a buyer who has spent years on a waitlist somewhere else, closing escrow and walking onto a Nicklaus course the same afternoon is the entire appeal.
The lot loophole
Here is the part almost no one talks about. Because membership attaches to the land and not the house, and because Desert Highlands still has vacant homesites, a lot is the least expensive deed in the community — and the least expensive deed still carries full club membership. You can own the lot, hold full golf privileges, and build later, or not for a while.
During the housing crash, this was a genuine bargain: lots traded cheaply and the membership fee was only $75,000, which made a buildable parcel one of the most affordable ways into a private Nicklaus club anywhere in Scottsdale. The window has narrowed — the fee is $205,000 now and lots aren’t what they were — but the mechanism still exists. The cheapest way to hold a Desert Highlands membership is still to own the cheapest thing with a Desert Highlands deed.
The community that started it all
Desert Highlands opened in 1983 as the first residential community in Scottsdale built around the nucleus of a country club — the template that Estancia, Silverleaf, Desert Mountain, and every other club community that followed would later adopt. Its Jack Nicklaus Signature course was the inaugural site of the Skins Game, the made-for-television event that put Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Tom Watson on the same desert course. That heritage isn’t marketing; it’s the reason the place exists in the form it does.
The land and the homes
There are roughly 560 homesites across 850 acres at the base of Pinnacle Peak, and about half of that land is preserved as open desert — a deliberate choice that keeps the mountain and the Sonoran landscape intact rather than filling every parcel. Homes are custom, no two alike, on lots from half an acre to more than an acre, ranging from the high hundreds of thousands to well past five million. The community is served by the Cave Creek Unified School District — Desert Sun Academy, Sonoran Trails Middle, and Cactus Shadows High — and sits about thirty-five minutes from Sky Harbor.
Selling in Desert Highlands
Pricing a Desert Highlands home means pricing something most comps ignore: every deed here carries a $205,000 membership and a monthly obligation that includes the club. That changes the math in both directions — it’s real value baked into the property, and it’s a real cost a buyer underwrites at closing. A home here isn’t competing with a similar house down the road in a non-club community; it’s competing with the other ways into a Nicklaus club, and it wins or loses on how well that story is told.
Marta has sold in Desert Highlands, and the work is understanding exactly that: what the membership is worth to the buyer who wants a guaranteed, waitlist-free way into a private club, and pricing a home — or a lot — against the handful of properties it genuinely competes with. That’s worth a conversation.