Optimism on Afton: Tech exec buys Swannanoa Golf and Country Club

For eight years, the founder and CEO of real estate data company CoStar Group — which counts apartments.com and homes.com among its properties — has been restoring a century-old hunting lodge along the Blue Ridge Parkway. And in late July, Florance acquired the recently shuttered mountaintop golf course, the Swannanoa Golf and Country Club, a high-profile property he hopes to preserve.

“There were a number of developers looking at building as many housing units as they possibly could on that golf course, and I didn’t think that was the right thing to happen,” the Washington, D.C., native told The Daily Progress. “And so I purchased it.”

The family of late course founder Randolph “Pete” Lang Sr. listed the property for sale last year, and for the first time in nearly 50 years, the public course did not open in the spring. Augusta County land records show that one of Florance’s companies took title of the 241-acre tract on July 29 for the asking price of $3.5 million. 

“We’re doing a study period and analyzing the feasibility of restoring it back to what it was,” said Florance. “In the meantime, we just cleaned it up and fixed it up.”

Anyone passing by the closed links off Howardsville Turnpike can already see some fresh asphalt, mowed grass and a pile of dead and dying trees recently felled and gathered. Florance said he also took down some abandoned outbuildings.

Florance’s affection for Afton was evident in 2017 when he bought Elk Mountain, a low-slung, stone lodge built in 1929 by Thomas Fortune Ryan, the turn-of-the-century financier who commissioned the better known Nelson County showplace Oak Ridge. Now in his eighth year of restoring Elk Mountain, Florance said he found it on one of CoStar’s own sites, land.com.

“At the time, I was working on virtual reality headsets for looking at properties, and I put the headset on, and I looked at the view up there on the mountain. I thought, ‘This is the most beautiful place I’ve seen,'” he said. “And sure enough, it is.”

Florance said that he restored every historical detail in the former hunting lodge, including the taxidermy elk busts that conveyed as part of the deal. And now that he has made a home out of it, he said he’s eager to improve other parts of the neighborhood.

Like many others, Florance doesn’t like what he has seen nearby at exit 99 on Interstate 64. There, bisected by U.S. Route 250, the Blue Ridge Parkway meets Skyline Drive. And there, the ruins of a former Holiday Inn loom over the shells of burned-out cabins and a long-shuttered Howard Johnson’s, whose trademark orange roof now barely peeks through vines. 

“What a shame it is,” said Florance. “It’s been allowed to fester and become a place where criminal activity occurs for decades now.”

However, the days of arson and drug-addled squatters may soon be ending, as Florance isn’t the only new face on the mountain. After the 2023 death of James “Phil” Dulaney, who held the controlling interest on the moldering commercial village, Dulaney’s heirs took over. One of them, by virtue of marriage, is William Hurd, a Richmond-based lawyer with a track record of wins at both the U.S. and the Virginia Supreme Court.

“We are in active discussions with potential developers,” Hurd told The Daily Progress. “We are optimistic that we will get things moving fairly quickly.”

In protecting what Hurd calls “the lower mountain,” Florance said he’d be willing to participate.

“I’d be open to the opportunity should it arise,” Florance said. “I have a vested interest in trying to keep that area safe and clean and productive.”

Informed that Hurd hoped to soon obtain business partners, Florance emphasized his interest.

“Feel free to give him my phone number,” said Florance.

When it comes to to Swannanoa — the opulent but crumbling 112-year-old, Italian Renaissance revival villa in the neighborhood, from which Florance’s new golf course takes its name — the executive is less eager.

“I just restored something, so it’s not really in my wheelhouse, and it’s a big project,” said Florance, who estimates that Swannanoa would cost about $100 million in today’s money to build.

With CoStar, the firm he founded in his Princeton University dormitory, now a publicly traded international business valued at $31 billion, the 61-year-old Florance could presumably live anywhere. But as he told the Wall Street Journal this past July, after the sale of his $28.5 million house on Florida’s Gulf Coast he has been eager to return to his mid-Atlantic roots.

Florance is the son of the late Coke Florance, a renowned Washington, D.C., architect responsible for the Capital One Arena and the visitor center at the National Cathedral. The younger Florance had a privileged but troubled childhood that at one point left him homeless on the streets of Richmond. 

Today, a CoStar office tower looms large over that same city.

Although he is a native of Washington and his company remains headquartered there, Florance has been turning his eye to neighboring Virginia more and more.

In 2021, Florance bought a James River-fronting condominium in Richmond, announced a half-billion-dollar expansion of CoStar’s footprint in the city and opened a CoStar office in Charlottesville. 

CoStar recently offered $18 million to Virginia Commonwealth University to create a 213,000-square-foot complex to place VCU’s innovation programs and its celebrated School of the Arts under one roof. That project is slated to open in early 2027.

And on Nov. 1 of this year, Florance announced that CoStar would move its Washington headquarters across the Potomac River to Arlington.

While several Afton Mountain neighbors expressed gratitude for Florance’s interest in his Virginia home, the man himself cautions that water availability will determine whether he can bring back golfing at Swannanoa. He said he hopes to get his answer about the future of the golf course in about a year.

“Yay,” said neighbor Ann Etchison when told of Florance’s quest. “Most of us living up here would be pretty happy if it remained a golf course, and my husband and I would be inaugural members.”