Black Desert, on the lava fields.

The course was designed by Tom Weiskopf and was the last design he worked on, with the routing threaded between the lava outcrops rather than bulldozing them. It runs 19 holes, the extra being a bonus par 3 near the finish that exists to settle bets. That routing decision is what makes the round memorable and occasionally punishing. The rock is not a hazard in the ordinary sense. It is scenery you should not hit into.

The important thing for anyone new to the area: it is open to the public. You do not need to be a member or a hotel guest to book a tee time, though the good windows go early and tournament season tightens the calendar considerably.

The season is the local advantage. At about 3,000 feet in the warm corner of Utah, this is a place you can play in January in a windbreaker, and the winter months are exactly when courses in the rest of the country are shut. If golf is part of why you are looking here, golf course homes in Ivins is the search that goes with it.

In October 2024 the PGA Tour played Black Desert, the first PGA Tour event held in Utah in more than sixty years, and the course now serves as a venue for both PGA Tour and LPGA events. For a town this size, tournament week is a genuine event: restaurants book out, the parkway hums, hotel rooms disappear across the whole metro, and Ivins gets several hours of national television with Red Mountain in the background.

Locals split into two camps about it, and both are reasonable. Some volunteer, walk the ropes, and treat it as the best week of the year. Others take the week to be somewhere else. Nobody is neutral, and after the first year everyone plans around it.

If you are visiting during tournament week, book everything early and expect the drive across town to take longer than usual. If you are house hunting that week, know that the market conversation gets noisier, which is worth factoring into what you hear.

You do not need clubs to go. The resort side carries dining and lodging, and the property hosts concerts and events on its lawn, so it functions as one of the few places in Ivins where a night out happens inside city limits rather than down in St. George.

That matters more than it sounds. Ivins has no supermarket and a deliberately quiet commercial footprint, so a resort that draws visitors is a real shift in what the town offers on a Friday. Whether that is a feature or a cost depends on which version of Ivins you moved here for, and residents will tell you both answers.

The resort includes residential product, condos and homes around the course, and plans have described building toward roughly a thousand residences at full buildout over time. A lot of the interest is from buyers who want a lock and leave property in a warm climate rather than a full time house.

Three pieces of fine print matter here, and I raise them with every client. First, parcels inside the Black Desert infrastructure district carry a materially different property tax situation than the rest of Ivins, so the tax area on a specific parcel is something to verify rather than assume. Second, financing a resort condo or a second home follows different rules than financing a primary residence, and those rules should be sorted before you write an offer, not after. Third, and this one surprises buyers: golf access runs through the resort rather than automatically with the deed, and the terms vary by product and phase.

None of that is a reason to avoid the area. It is a reason to check the specifics on the actual parcel. The Black Desert Resort community page and the Ivins city guide both go deeper, and I am happy to pull the details on anything you are looking at.

Before 2023, Ivins was known regionally for Tuacahn, the Kayenta art village, and the state park. It was a quiet bench town with roundabouts instead of stoplights and no grocery store. Black Desert added a fourth identity on top of the other three, and tourism is now the leading local economic engine by design rather than by accident.

Residents have not been uniformly thrilled. City surveys have shown real pushback on density and additional resort development, and approvals in Ivins move deliberately as a result. That tension is the honest story of the town right now, and anyone deciding whether to move here should know it exists rather than discover it at a council meeting.

My read as someone who works this market: the resort raised the town's profile faster than anything in its history, and it has not yet turned Ivins into a resort town. Two roads, dark skies, and no supermarket still define daily life out here.