"We are like a country club without a golf course."
That's how Adam Pogue described the project to Coral Springs commissioners this past May, standing in for Life Time as the company made its final pitch for the 13.11 acres at the corner of Heron Bay Boulevard and Coral Ridge Drive. If you live in Heron Bay or anywhere along that stretch of Parkland and Coral Springs, you already know the address without needing the coordinates. It's the burned-out shell that used to be the Heron Bay Golf Course clubhouse, the one that sat empty for years before the roof finally caved in during a fire on December 27, 2025.
For most residents, that corner has read as one long story of nothing happening. It isn't. It's four separate deals with four separate owners, moving on four separate timelines, and 2026 happens to be the year all four lined up close enough to look like a single event.
The Old Fairway Belongs to Nobody Now, and Everybody
The 223 acres that once made up the Heron Bay Golf Course, the same course that hosted the PGA Tour's Honda Classic for six years from 1997 to 2002, closed in 2019. The North Springs Improvement District bought the entire property that year for $32 million to control what happened to the land, since NSID already handles water treatment and stormwater management for nearly 40,000 residents across Parkland and Coral Springs.
Parkland then bought 65 of those acres from NSID, a deal the city commission approved in a 4-1 vote in 2022 and closed in January 2023 for $25.4 million. That 65-acre purchase is the piece most residents think of as "the project." It isn't one project. It's four different pieces of ground, controlled by four different parties, each moving at its own pace.
| Piece of the old golf course | Roughly how much land | Who controls it | Where it stood as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saltgrass at Heron Bay | 21 acres | Toll Brothers | Homes open for sale |
| Life Time athletic club | 13.11 acres | City of Parkland and North Springs Improvement District, under contract to Life Time | Final zoning approved |
| Preserved green space and the planned Parkland 17 Memorial | About 150 acres | North Springs Improvement District | Stormwater and trail use ongoing |
| Village in the Park retail corridor | About 25 acres in Parkland, plus adjoining Coral Springs parcels | City of Parkland | Concept design only, no developer selected |
Read that table as the answer to the question everyone driving past that corner has been asking for years. Nothing was stuck. Four different clocks were running, and they weren't synchronized.
The Homes Got There First
Toll Brothers paid Parkland $375,000 per approved home for the 21-acre section known as the dogleg, up to $19.5 million if all 52 homes were built. The city commission signed off on that sale in August 2023. Construction broke ground in September 2025, and the community, Saltgrass at Heron Bay, opened for sale in June 2026.
The homes range from about 2,632 to more than 4,000 square feet, with three and four car garages on oversized lots along Nob Hill Road, on the dogleg section of the old course. Pricing has moved since the groundbreaking announcement, when Toll Brothers quoted homes starting at $1.6 million. The builder's own community page for Saltgrass currently lists homes starting from $1,404,995. That gap likely reflects different floor plans and lot placements coming online as the community fills out, not a single price cut, and it's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're tracking the listing over time rather than reading one press release.
The Fire That Set the Clock
The old clubhouse at 11801 Heron Bay Boulevard had sat vacant for years, waiting for a buyer, when a fire broke out on December 27, 2025. The roof collapsed and the rest of the structure suffered damage severe enough that Parkland officials deemed it a safety hazard. The city commission approved a demolition contract in February 2026, awarding the job to SoCal Shaker Plates and Construction Services for up to $185,150.
That number matters less than what pays for it. The city structured the demolition cost to be offset by reimbursement through the Life Time contract, meaning the fire didn't derail the redevelopment timeline so much as fold into it. The building coming down and the building going up were always tied to the same deal.
What Finally Cleared in Coral Springs
Life Time first proposed its club for this site in 2024, and the plan went through more than a year of revisions before reaching a vote. Between the December 2025 submission and the final design, the number of pickleball courts dropped from six to four, and the pool deck shifted roughly 20 feet farther east to widen the buffer between the amenity area and the neighboring Falls community.
Coral Springs commissioners approved the project on first reading on May 20, 2026, rezoning the 13.11-acre site from golf course to community business and clearing the way for a two-story facility of roughly 86,750 square feet. Final approval came on June 17, 2026, when the commission passed Ordinance 2026-106, amending the future land use map, and Ordinance 2026-107, completing the rezoning, along with Resolution 2026-022, allocating 9.82 acres of commercial flexibility for the site.
Membership at the finished club is expected to run $300 to $400 a month, according to Pogue's presentation to the commission. Commissioner Shawn Cerra called it a benefit to the city. Whether it reads as a country club without the golf course, as Pogue framed it, or simply the largest single amenity to land on that corner in years, the approval closes a process that had been open for two years.
The Intersection Nobody's Fixed Yet
Traffic is the piece still catching up to the paperwork. Heron Bay Boulevard currently runs as a two-way stop at NW 118th Avenue, the intersection Life Time traffic will use most heavily, and Coral Springs planning staff required a signal evaluation study before the May vote could proceed. Drivers exiting the new club will need to cross several lanes of Heron Bay Boulevard traffic that currently has no stop sign in that direction, and the developer has proposed adding a right turn lane to ease the exit.
Longer term relief is already in design. Florida's Turnpike Enterprise is expanding the Sawgrass Expressway between Sample Road and State Road 7, a project that includes reworking the interchange at Coral Ridge Drive specifically to manage the added traffic this corridor is expected to draw. That work is a state project on its own schedule, separate from anything happening on the 65 acres itself, which is exactly the kind of detail that gets lost when residents assume all the construction near their gate is one coordinated plan.
What's Still Just a Rendering
Not everything on that old fairway has a start date. The Village in the Park, the retail and green space concept designed by 505 Design for roughly 25 acres in Parkland plus adjoining Coral Springs land, exists so far as a vision book rather than a construction schedule. City materials describe a pedestrian corridor with farmers markets and food trucks, a village green built for yoga and outdoor dining, and a network of walking trails threading through it. A 2024 annexation agreement moved 8.5 acres from Coral Springs into Parkland to give the city a single set of design standards to enforce across the whole site, but the search for an actual developer for the commercial portion was always planned to happen after the residential piece took shape, and that search hasn't concluded.
The green space NSID is preserving, roughly 150 of the original 223 acres, is doing quieter work in the meantime: stormwater management for the district's water system, walking trails through what used to be fairways, and a planned site for a memorial to the 17 victims of the February 14, 2018 tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Why It Read as Stalled
None of this was ever one project moving slowly. It was Toll Brothers closing on a residential parcel while Life Time's zoning crawled through two cities' commissions, while NSID managed 150 acres of stormwater infrastructure on its own schedule, while a retail concept sat waiting for a developer who hadn't been found yet. Four owners, four processes, four different finish lines on the same old golf course. The reason 2026 finally looks like progress is that enough of those clocks reached the same hour at once. The next one to watch is whichever developer eventually takes on the Village in the Park, since that's the only piece of the 65 acres still without a name attached to it.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home in Heron Bay, or anywhere along the Parkland and Coral Springs line, that's a conversation worth having with someone who's been tracking each of these four pieces individually rather than treating them as one headline. Bill Sohl has spent decades working this exact corridor and can walk you through what's confirmed, what's still a rendering, and what it's likely to mean for the neighborhoods nearby. Contact Us to start that conversation.
