Broomfield Sold the Water. The Golf Course Goes Dark October 3.

Picture 500 homeowners who bought next to a golf course. Green fairways out the back window. Turtles in the reservoir. The kind of view that gets baked right into your appraisal.

Now picture the water gone. Sold. Four million dollars, one signature, and the whole thing starts turning brown.

That is Eagle Trace Golf Club in central Broomfield right now. And on Oct. 3, 2026, it closes to the public permanently. The course said so itself, right on its own website.

What actually happened here

The official line is drought. The course website says this year left them with very little water available, so they can no longer maintain the property. Closing. Done.

But here is the part people miss. The drought did not drain Eagle Trace. A sale did.

Back in 2024, the owner sold off the water rights that had irrigated this course for years. Sold them to a local water investment group for $4 million. Once that water is gone, you do not get it back by praying for rain. A golf course without water rights is just a very large lawn you cannot afford to keep.

The course sits at 1200 Clubhouse Drive, right near 10th and Main. Across the street from Broomfield High School, north of 120th, west of Sheridan. This is not some far edge of town. This is a neighborhood course wrapped in houses, and those houses have been watching the water disappear all year.

Two on-site reservoirs used to help feed the place. One of them, Nissen No. 2, was sitting low earlier this year with cracked, dry ground around the edges. If you drove past and thought it looked rough, you were not imagining it.

Who owns this thing

The course is owned by Eagle Trace Golf Club LLC. That entity is linked to Miles Scully, a San Diego attorney. He did not respond to requests for comment. A staff member confirmed to one outlet that operations end in early October and added that nobody was available to talk about it further.

So an out of state owner sells the water, the course goes dark, and 500 families in Broomfield are left holding the view they paid for. Which is now a question mark.

Broomfield had a shot at this

And this is the part that stings if you live near there.

The City of Broomfield found out back in 2023 that Eagle Trace's water rights were up for sale. They passed. The reasoning was there was no immediate need and no money sitting in the water enterprise fund to grab them.

I mean, look, I get the logic. You do not spend public money on water you do not need yet. But water in Colorado does not wait around for you to need it. Somebody else always does. In this case a private investment group scooped it up, and now the neighborhood is scrambling to figure out what a dead golf course even becomes.

The homeowners are not staying quiet

Bruce Erley is the HOA president for Eagle Trace. His warning is blunt. Without the value that water rights bring to a property like this, the course could just be left abandoned. His words: at least 500 very upset homeowners without a solution.

Then there is Larry Cooper, who has lived next to the course for close to a decade. His worry is not property values. It is the fish and the turtles in those drying reservoirs. Which, honestly, is the detail that gets me. The market fight is real, but there is a living pond out there emptying out while the lawyers stay quiet.

The neighbors are not just complaining, though. They formed a community development corporation to chase down options if the course closes. There was a public town hall on Sept. 16 at Broomfield United Methodist Church over on West 10th. People are showing up. They know what an empty 100-plus acres in the middle of their neighborhood does to a place.

Why this matters way past Broomfield

Here is the thing about the Front Range. We talk about water like it is a rural fight. Farmers versus cities, the Western Slope versus Denver. But this is water changing your street.

When somebody can sell the water off a golf course for $4 million and let the grass die, that same math applies to a lot of open space we all assume is permanent. Parks that lean on cheap irrigation. HOA greenbelts. The pretty pond your Realtor pointed at when you toured the house. None of it is guaranteed if the water underneath it is worth more sold than kept.

And it hits property values directly. A home backing a manicured course is one price. A home backing a brown, abandoned field with a dead reservoir is another price entirely. Those 500 owners are about to learn the difference in real time.

So if you are house hunting anywhere along the Front Range, this is your reminder to ask the boring question. Who controls the water that keeps this view green? Because in Colorado, the water rights and the property value are the same conversation. They just do not always tell you that at the showing.

Eagle Trace goes dark Oct. 3. The fight over what comes next is only getting started.