If you've played Grey Fox in the last couple of years, you already know the story without anyone telling you. The driving range closed. The halfway house sat locked up. Reviewers online kept mentioning the same detail: one menu item at the bar, hot dogs off a roller grill, nothing else. Golfers who'd played the course for decades wondered aloud whether the club was being kept alive on purpose or just kept open.
That question got answered in the summer of 2025, and the answer is more interesting than "someone bought it." In July of that year, a newly formed company called Rolling Pines LLC closed on both Foxfire Resort & Golf and its sister property five miles north, the Country Club of Whispering Pines. The buyer is the same ownership group behind Pine Needles, Mid Pines, and Southern Pines Golf Club, three of the most respected public courses in Moore County. What almost nobody in the village has done yet is look at what they actually paid, and what that number tells you about what happens next.
Both clubs had been listed for sale by Leisure Investment Properties Group. Whispering Pines carried an asking price of $2,995,000. Foxfire was listed at $2,495,000. Neither sold anywhere close to that.
| Club | Asking Price | Sale Price | Share of Ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Country Club of Whispering Pines | $2,995,000 | $1,633,000 (plus $411,000 for associated timeshare units) | About 55% |
| Foxfire Resort & Golf | $2,495,000 | $1,512,000 | About 61% |
Combined, Rolling Pines paid just over $3.5 million for 72 holes across two 36-hole clubs. That's not a discount that happens because a buyer talked hard in negotiation. That's a discount that happens because whoever did the walkthrough found exactly what the online reviews had already been describing for years: uneven maintenance, deferred repairs, a facility that had been running lean for a long time.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only hear "the golf courses sold" secondhand. A buyer who pays full asking price on a distressed asset either didn't look closely or is planning to flip it fast. A buyer who pays roughly half of ask, with full knowledge of what condition it's in, is making a bet that only pays off if they actually fix the thing and hold onto it.
Kelly Miller, the managing partner of the new ownership group, isn't a stranger to these two courses. He's talked publicly about rotating through both Foxfire and Whispering Pines as part of a regular golf group that included his father-in-law, Warren "Bullet" Bell, a former professional basketball player who, with his wife Peggy Kirk Bell, ran Pine Needles starting in 1953. Miller has spent decades working his way up at Pine Needles and Mid Pines, and he was hands-on in the 1994 purchase of Mid Pines and the 2020 purchase of Southern Pines Golf Club from the local Elks Club. This isn't an outside investment fund picking up distressed real estate sight unseen. It's someone who has personally played these fairways describing them, in his own words, as places that have "had their challenges" but that he's had his eye on for a while.
The reason golfers in the Sandhills pay attention when Rolling Pines announces a renovation plan is architect Kyle Franz. Franz restored Mid Pines in 2013, a project that won Golf Magazine's Best U.S. Renovation of the Year. He followed that with Pine Needles in 2017 and 2018, then an 18-month transformation of Southern Pines starting in 2020, reopening bunkers and greens that had been buried under decades of changes.
Here's the detail that matters for Foxfire specifically: all three of those prior projects were restorations of Donald Ross designs. Franz spent time in the Tufts Archives studying Ross's original drawings, then worked to put back what Ross had actually built. Neither Foxfire's Grey Fox and Red Fox courses, designed by Gene Hamm, nor Whispering Pines' River and Pines courses, designed by Ellis Maples, are Ross designs. There's no archival blueprint to restore. The public announcement uses different language for this project than it used for the Ross courses: Franz is being brought in to "tweak the courses and develop a master plan," not to restore one. That's a meaningfully different process, and as of the most recent reporting in April 2026, that master plan for Foxfire hadn't been made public yet. Anyone expecting Grey Fox to simply reopen looking like a mini Pine Needles is expecting the wrong thing. What's actually coming is closer to a new direction for a Gene Hamm course than a return to an original one.
It's worth separating what Rolling Pines has already done from what's still on the drawing board, because the two get blurred in casual conversation around the village.
Already true:
Not yet confirmed:
If you hear a neighbor say the course is "getting the Kyle Franz treatment starting next spring," that's not something that's been announced yet. What's been announced is direction, not a date.
Part of why this deal makes sense, beyond the price, is what Foxfire actually is underneath the neglect. The club sits on a 2,000-acre site anchored by Lake MacKenzie, land that real estate broker Jack Vernon and golf professional Ed Kenney first noticed flying over on a return trip from Myrtle Beach, at the time owned by Roland MacKenzie, a nationally prominent amateur golfer. Hamm's first course opened in 1968. Nine more holes followed in 1972, and the club became a full 36-hole operation in 1981. In its earlier decades, Foxfire hosted the ACC Men's Golf Championship three times, in 1970, 1973, and 1975, putting it in the same conversation as courses with real competitive pedigree, not just a quiet neighborhood amenity.
That history is likely a bigger part of the appeal than the discounted price tag. Rolling Pines isn't buying two anonymous parcels of turf. It's buying two courses with real design history and real tournament history that happened to fall into disrepair under prior ownership, which is a very different bet than buying land with no story to work with.
The honest version of this update is not "everything's fixed." It's that the entity most capable of fixing it, with a documented history of doing exactly this kind of work three times already in the same ten-mile radius, now owns both of Foxfire's courses and paid a price that only makes sense if they intend to invest in what's underneath the neglect rather than flip it. The master plan isn't public yet. The construction calendar isn't public yet. But the ownership, the architect, and the price all point the same direction, and that's worth more than another season of hot dogs off the roller grill.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific property near Foxfire or Whispering Pines, or you're just trying to make sense of what's changing in the neighborhood, Jamie McDevitt knows this stretch of Moore County from the fairway as much as from the listing sheet. Let's Connect.
Jamie will take the time to understand your goals and will work tirelessly to help you reach them. Whether you are moving to the Pinehurst, Southern Pines area to play golf, swing a tennis racket, or simply run or walk through your neighborhood, let Jamie work for you.
