Developer Cabot’s map does not read like a luxury real estate portfolio. In fact, calling it a portfolio suggests something a little more paint-by-numbers, strategic even – answerable first to the numerals and decimals of the P&L.
Yes, this drives every business, but a truism in this sector is that real estate is the core around which an entire asset class is built; amenities, connectivity, and local culture are all inputs that can be dialled up or down in the home-buying process, and ultimately compromised on, if the perfect property is found.
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But for Cabot, the self-styled “luxury developer of exceptional golf, hospitality, and real estate destinations”, there is a duality in its proposition – one where two sides to their offering cannot compete with nor drive the other. To attract the right kind of ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) buyer profile, space, sport and experience must hang in equal balance.
We sat down with Cabot’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jules Cowan-Dewar, to find out how the business is putting in the long yards to reach a new horizon for the luxury golf developments.
An investment prospect with a view
Even a cursory glance at Cabot’s portfolio helps you understand the brand’s ethos is contrary to the safe, predictable nature of the golfing-real-estate-development concept.
One development began as a derelict coal mine on the Nova Scotia coast, abandoned when the pits closed and the local economy went with them. Another sits above the Arctic Circle in Norway’s Lofoten Islands, reached as much by fjord as by road. A third occupies a stretch of Caribbean coastline in Saint Lucia that had no golf infrastructure at all until Cabot broke ground.
Breathtaking locations create cinematic backdrops for world-class golfing experiences – the brand’s USP – while real estate encapsulates the entire proposition from an investment proposition, rather than one where property is at the centre, and everything else is bolted on as amenity or function.
This means for prospective buyers, the investment thesis is now tied to something else completely – similar to how hospitality brands create inclusive resorts or even branded residences – even if none of these are postcodes a UHNW buyer would instinctively search for when looking for a second home. According to Cowan-Dewar, that is precisely the point.
“It’s a real estate argument dressed as a sporting one, and it explains why Cabot's portfolio now spans six developments across two continents.”
“Buyers aren’t just buying a house near a golf course,” Cowan-Dewar tells us over a video call from Cabot’s Toronto HQ. “They’re buying certainty about what they’ll be looking at in ten years.”
That could mean a property inside a protected landscape, land that will never be redeveloped – a commodity Cowan-Dewar sees becoming rarer as UHNW buyers become more mobile and more selective about permanence.
It’s a real estate argument dressed as a sporting one, and it explains why a company that started with a single course on a derelict coal site in Nova Scotia now spans six developments across two continents.
Each has been built alongside famed golf course architects – Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw, Tom Doak, and Kyle Franz among them – making them capable of producing world-ranked golf on terrain verging on the extreme, which most developers would consider totally inaccessible.
One brand, deliberately inconsistent
Cabot’s expansion – Nova Scotia to Saint Lucia, Florida to British Columbia, the Scottish Highlands to Norway’s Lofoten Islands – is not run on a template.
“We don’t try to make every property feel the same – we try to make every property feel unmistakably itself,” Cowan-Dewar says. “If we’ve created something that could be anywhere, we’ve failed.”
What repeats across the portfolio is that experience is centred above all else – a locally made Cabot Cookie on the first tee, gender-neutral tees as standard at every course, and a consistency of hospitality Cowan-Dewar describes as the actual thread tying six unrelated landscapes into one brand.
Revelstoke pairs golf with heli-skiing access; the Lofoten development offers owners fjord hiking and boat access. Similarly, other operators use the natural advantage to create seasonal advantages; Andermatt in Switzerland, for example, runs golf in summer against skiing in winter at 1,500 metres.
British demand for golf property abroad has been pushing hard into destinations well beyond the traditional Mediterranean belt, from Barbados to Mauritius, and Cabot has built its site selection around exactly that appetite for extremity over accessibility.
The origin property still does the explaining: Cabot Cape Breton began in 2004 when Cowan-Dewar’s brother, Ben Cowan-Dewar, Cabot’s co-founder and CEO, identified potential in a stretch of Inverness, Nova Scotia coastline. Left economically depressed by coal mine closures, the resort now employs over 600 people in a community of 1,200.
Since then, this story of regeneration – repeated in miniature at every site – is the one thing the brand remains steadfastly committed to delivering consistently.
The land comes first
“Sustainability has always been at the core of Cabot’s work,” Cowan-Dewar says. “We’re proud to have all Cabot properties enrolled in Audubon International’s Platinum Signature Sanctuary certification programme, which involves a commitment to limiting water usage, protecting animal habitats, the use of indigenous flora and fauna, and more.”
That commitment functions commercially as much as environmentally, and it’s the mechanism that protects the scarcity value buyers are actually paying for.
“Golf property enquiries have risen roughly 30% since the pandemic, driven less by the sport than by the lifestyle attached to it.”
Golf property enquiries have risen roughly 30% since the pandemic, driven less by the sport than by the lifestyle attached to it. At the top end of the market, a serious golf course now adds a premium of 20% to 40% to a property’s value, according to Sphere Estates’ Robert Green.
Entry pricing at comparable top-tier golf communities – La Zagaleta, Costa Navarino – starts around US $1.6 million (£1.19 million) for a four-bedroom house with a pool; Cabot’s own Citrus Farms development in Florida opens from $1.675 million for a cottage with access to four courses. None of it is sold on square footage, which chimes with Cowan-Dewar’s point about land over floor plan.
The inclusivity question, reframed
“Working to build inclusivity in golf has been at our core from early on,” Cowan-Dewar says – pointing to gender-neutral tees across every course, junior camps run with local organisations for children who would not otherwise have access to the game, and shorter, family-oriented courses built specifically to lower the barrier to entry.
“This is a key part of our growth strategy,” she adds, noting that “the game only gets bigger – especially for future generations – if more people feel like it’s built for them.”
None of that softens the product at the top end. “We are dealing with people who are not used to the normal,” she says. “Our courses have to be world class and not like anything they play on a day-to-day basis.”
Golf Digest’s 2026–27 ranking of the World’s 100 Greatest Courses places four Cabot courses inside the top 65: Cabot Cliffs at Cape Breton at 14; Point Hardy at Cabot Saint Lucia at 23; Cabot Links at 25; and Castle Stuart at Cabot Highlands at 65.
Inclusivity and exclusivity are not two ends of one dial at Cabot – they are two separate products, access and difficulty, sold to the same household without either diluting the other.
Retention, not just acquisition
One metric Cabot looks to optimise for is repeat ownership. “We have homeowners who own properties across several of our resorts; this is perhaps one of the biggest compliments we can be paid as a brand,” Cowan-Dewar says.
During the pandemic, Cabot sold lots at Saint Lucia sight unseen, which is both a testament to the quality of their product and their ability to market their vision under incredible constraints, during some of the most precarious circumstances the sector has faced in a generation.
“People couldn’t stand with their feet on the land, so we brought the land to them through video calls, photos, and videos. We completed a number of lot sales over FaceTime during that period.” That, she says, convinced her that buyers were purchasing a story and a community rather than a floor plan, with the physical build arriving after the fact.
Today, Cowan-Dewar points to existing-owner conversations as the clearest sales tool Cabot has. “I love when prospective buyers want to connect with existing homeowners,” she says, adding that she wishes it were something more aspiring buyers would ask to do.
“Hearing from someone who is part of the community about why they bought in and what they love about it is always the best way to understand the place and the people.”
What's next for Cabot?
Cabot Revelstoke’s lodge – an expansive, “elevated mountain experience just steps from world-class golf and skiing” – is on schedule to open in stages across late 2026 and into 2027, running alongside the continued build-out at the Highlands and Lofoten sites.
That’s six sites and counting, none of them an obvious place to build. Cowan-Dewar runs marketing alongside CEO Ben Cowan-Dewar, making you wonder whether this aversion to the beaten track is a familial trait.
“It's impossible to do anything really big alone. You need to rely on others to help carry the load.”
— Jules Cowan-Dewar, Cabot’s Chief Marketing Officer
What is clear is that there is a sibling dependency to ensure they each do the right thing, and as well as they possibly can. We close our call on a question that could likely cause two siblings to tee off on one another around the family dinner table: ‘What is the best advice he’s given her – and that she’s potentially ignored?’
Cowan-Dewar pauses, then answers: “It’s impossible to do anything really big alone. You need to rely on others to help carry the load.”
It’s advice that has clearly worked both ways. Vision and value, sold, packaged and delivered with the implicit understanding one is always contingent on the other has led to the brand redefining how the model works – and setting an example to competitors there’s never any room for compromise.
