Robert Rowling set out to diversify the family fortune into hospitality, but he never dreamt of owning 26 golf courses.
By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff
The only beneficiary of Covid was golf,” shrugs Robert Rowling. Which is fortunate considering the $500 million that he invested into the game during the pandemic. “It’s one of those rare instances where reality transcends the vision,” he says of the Omni PGA Frisco, which he built between 2021 and 2023 on 660 acres on the former Fields Ranch in Frisco, Texas, 30 minutes north of Dallas by toll road.
The designers of the two championship courses, Beau Welling and Gil Hanse, left behind hints of the old ranch. Fence posts, gates and barbed wire sprinkle the 36-holes. Cart paths are crushed granite. Trickling through the courses, Panther Creek provides the topography for challenging play. The property includes a 500-room resort and spa, 10 guesthouses (Dolly Parton has already stayed in one), and a members-only clubhouse, all done in “Texas Modern” style. Since the spring of 2022, Omni has served as the headquarters of the PGA of America, the 30,000-member strong organization of teaching professionals (not to be confused with the PGA Tour, which solely focuses on professional tournaments).
“If you had told me thirty years ago that I would be building an Omni in Frisco, I never would have believed it,” says Rowling, a thin, tanned 70. But already they have hosted the Senior PGA Championship, and will have the Women’s PGA Championship in 2025, the PGA Championship in 2027, and Ryder Cup after that.
Trevor Paulhus for Forbes
If you want to see the real action, says Rowling, watch the beginners — like the throng of kids swinging putters on a massive two-acre green called the Dance Floor. Nearby, the 10-hole, par-3 course is lit until 10 p.m.; its halfway house is a vintage truck painted turquoise sponsored by Casamigos tequila. On a warm February weekend this year Omni maxxed out its Ice House bar and grill, seating 700 parties. There’s typically a waiting list to rent out one of the six indoor practice range spots, which come with full food and beverage service. “At most places golf is an amenity. It’s different here. It will make money,” says Rowling, sipping on a frozen margarita from a styrofoam cup.
And these 660 acres are only the beginning. The resort will eventually anchor the $10 billion, 2,500-acre master-planned Fields Ranch development, financed by the family offices of Rowling’s Dallas billionaire friends Ray Hunt and Trevor Rees-Jones. It will feature thousands of single family homes (including some $10 million mansions overlooking the course, already sold), hundreds more condos and apartment units (under construction), and millions of square feet of retail and office space.
Omni PGA Frisco Resort (not to be confused with the nearby Omni Frisco he built a few years ago with Jerry Jones) is the latest megadevelopment from Rowling’s TRT Holdings, which the oilman founded in Dallas in 1989. The company has its fingers in a bunch of pies – it owned Gold’s Gym until four years ago – but its biggest asset is Omni Hotels & Resorts, boasting 60 properties across America and Canada. In all, Omni owns 20,000 rooms and 26 golf courses including Tuscon National, Austin’s Barton Creek, Amelia Island off the coast of Florida and Homestead, in Virginia. Last year, Omni generated an estimated $3 billion in revenue, producing some $700 million in cash flow (EBITDA). The company has minimal debt. Rowling himself is worth an estimated $8.9 billion.
He grew up in the oil business. His father Reese, who died in 2001, started as a geologist in Midland for Standard Oil of Texas, then stepped out on his own and moved the family to Corpus Christi. He prospected for oil while selling pieces of deals to raise cash to drill. In those early days, laughs Rowling, the family couldn’t afford tony Corpus Christi Country Club. Rowling bought his first set of golf clubs with money saved from caddying.
“At most places golf is an amenity. It’s different here. It will make money.”
Deep in the early 1980s oil bust, the Rowlings and their Tana Oil & Gas couldn’t find any partners to back a particularly promising prospect in Live Oak County. With their lease set to expire, they bet it all on drilling one well. It was 100% risk but they found an oil field prolific enough to support 17 more wells. Only a few years later, in 1989, Texaco bought nearly all of Tana’s assets for $480 million worth of preferred stock paying 9%. “We got paid, and continued to get paid,” says Rowling, who was tasked with diversifying the fortune.
The first two hotels he acquired were a block away from each other in Corpus Christi and he chuckles that he bought them both simultaneously to reduce competition. He was drawn to hotels because, like oil wells, successful ones produce a steady stream of cash. Unlike oil wells, which dwindle to nothing over time, hospitality cash can continue to grow. “I wanted something that has lasting value.”
In 1996, ignoring his father's warning that he could lose his shirt, Rowling borrowed against the Texaco preferred to buy Omni Hotels for $500 million from Hong Kong-based Wharf Holdings. Marquee assets included eight premium hotels including the Berkshire in New York, Shoreham in Washington, D.C. and Parker House in Boston. He immediately put $60 million into updating and restoring Parker House, open since 1855. At first he was known as bottom-line Bob, but as he became more comfortable in the business Rowling became less bookkeeper, more innkeeper. He quit selling in-room X-rated movies on demand, the biggest chain to do so, sold off lower grade properties and was picky with acquisitions.
In 2010 he bought a golf resort at Amelia Island, Florida out of bankruptcy for $67 million. In 2013 he bought six properties from Irvine, California-based KSL Resorts for $1.1 billion, including Barton Creek, in Austin, Texas, featuring four courses and 2,700 members. In 2015 he grabbed the Mt. Washington resort in New Hampshire. And he put hundreds of millions more into upgrades. It was a big bet on golf, at a time when enthusiasm for the game was waning, with more courses closing than opening.
Rowling was happy to evolve Omni into an odd duck among American hotel chains. Odd because it is vertically integrated. No other big chain develops, operates and indefinitely owns such a broad portfolio of assets, while financing growth projects with cash from operations. Most big hotel brands like Mariott and Hyatt and even Four Seasons just manage and license, they don't actually own the brick and mortar. “We’re not just trying to make money through fees or as a tollgate operator,” says Omni president Kurt Alexander. “And we don’t have any financing contingencies.”
Rowling’s willingness to give his personal guarantee that a TRT Holdings project would get built made Omni very attractive to cities and municipalities. Over 15 years they’ve struck a dozen public-private partnerships to build convention center hotels paid for in part by generous tax rebates. In Fort Worth, Omni got some $50 million in tax incentives to build a $200 million hotel in 2009 (and is negotiating more for an expansion project). He got a similar deal in Oklahoma City.
In Nashville, they built an Omni connected to the Country Music Hall of Fame and a quarter mile from the Grand Ol’ Opry. In Louisville, Kentucky the city offered $130 million in tax rebates to Omni’s $300 million convention center hotel with luxury apartments. In Atlanta Omni partnered with the Braves to build at SunTrust Park. Last year Omni teamed up with the city of Tempe and Arizona State University to build a $125 million hotel on campus.
Rowling says he’s far from a corporate welfare king. The way it works, he explains, is that Omni gets paid by the city out of the hotel occupancy taxes they collect, usually over 10 years. “You’re creating the tax that they’re going to give to you. It wouldn’t exist otherwise.”
The supersized Texas golf resort wasn’t even Omni’s first foray into Frisco. In 2017 Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Rowling completed The Star, a 50/50 partnership on a 90-acre mixed-use complex with practice fields and headquarters for the Cowboys, closer to “downtown.” Frisco (pop. 220,000) straddles Denton and Collin counties, which have grown 50% in population to 2.2 million since 2010. Frisco, which according to the Census bureau was the fastest growing city in the U.S. between 2010 and 2019, bills itself as the best place in America to raise an athlete. The town is home to FC Dallas, the metro’s Major League Soccer team, and also boasts a minor league baseball park plus the headquarters of the NHL’s Dallas Stars.
But even in such a rich sporting environment, Rowling says the scope of the Omni PGA Frisco project made him nervous. “I don’t think we would have had the confidence to do this unless we had seen what was happening at the Star.” The golf project started small, with local developers initially working with the city and the PGA of America’s North Texas office. The vision expanded when, in 2018, the PGA of America announced it would move its headquarters to Frisco from Florida. The city pledged $160 million in tax rebates.
“Texas is business forward and aggressive in trying to draw people,” says Seth Waugh, CEO of the PGA of America. “The financial incentives stood out, but the real thing that stood out was 660 acres.” In Florida their office and training center was an hour away from their practice course. Here it’s all integrated. Waugh says Frisco ultimately beat out other cities for offering “not just a building, but to be part of something special, in the fastest growing city in the country.”
Waugh, former chairman of Deutsche Bank Americas, says the project would not have happened “without a straight up handshake and personal guaranty of Bob Rowling.” When the pandemic hit, Rowling's deep-pocketed fortitude enabled them to keep to building when every other resort project remained at a standstill. “No bank would have financed it,” says Waugh.
At the height of the Covid lockdowns, Omni had only six properties open and was burning through hundreds of millions in cash. They sold five underperforming hotels and paused construction in Frisco for eight months. But people began playing more golf. “Because of Covid, people sought a private environment in which they felt secure,” says golf industry consultant James J. Keegan. “Even though the pandemic has passed, it has created a style of living. The industry has seen big increases.”
TRT saved less than expected by rebidding contracts in 2021, explains son Blake Rowling, 40. But after inflation popped a year later, those new contracts paid off. If they built it now the project would probably cost $200 million more, says Rowling, who became CEO of TRT Holdings in 2022.
Omni is already on to its next big projects — convention center hotels in Fort Lauderdale and Raleigh, N.C. and a 6,000-acre residential project southwest of Fort Worth. And Bob Rowling’s favorite upcoming golf project, a new Omni in the works near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico at the Bay of Banderas — where he intends to compete with the nearby Four Seasons resort. “Now we know golf, and have a vision for what we’re getting into.”
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