Pine Lakes Or The Preserve At Pine Lakes: Same Course, Two Different Markets

Pull up two Myrtle Beach listings on the same afternoon. One is a renovated brick home on Country Club Drive with no monthly HOA fee, asking north of a million dollars. The other is a two-year-old Lennar-built home less than a mile away, carrying an HOA amenity fee, priced under $500,000. Search "Pine Lakes" and both show up under the same neighborhood name, wrapped around the same golf course.

That is not a price range. It is two different real estate products that happen to share a name and a fairway.

Two Neighborhoods, One Golf Course

The original Pine Lakes neighborhood grew up around the Pine Lakes Golf and Country Club over decades, which is why homes there run from about 10 to 70-plus years old. Some sections, including Pine Lakes Estates, are explicitly marketed as no-HOA communities, which means no shared amenity fee but also no shared amenity budget for a pool or clubhouse upkeep. Recent listings in that older section of Pine Lakes have carried asking prices of $1,050,000, $1,150,000, and $1,195,000 for renovated custom homes on larger lots.

The Preserve at Pine Lakes is a different animal entirely. Lennar is building it on the opposite side of the same golf course along Robert Grissom Parkway, wrapped around seven ponds instead of decades of mature landscaping. The Arbor Collection runs four floor plans from $456,000 to $493,000. The Coastal Collection runs four more from $473,000 to $673,000, and a planned set of townhomes is anticipated to be priced around $350,000. Those numbers reflect MLS-syndicated listing data current as of August 9, 2026. Every home is on natural gas, sits on a sidewalk-lined street, and comes with access to a resort-style pool, clubhouse, outdoor fireplace, and pickleball courts that the older neighborhood never had to pay into.

A buyer who tours a $1.1 million estate in the morning and a $470,000 new build in the afternoon has not comparison-shopped one neighborhood. They have looked at two markets that both call themselves Pine Lakes.

The Entrance Road Flip Nobody Mentions

Here is the detail that upends the obvious assumption. For most of its history, Pine Lakes Country Club was reached off Highway 17 Business, which is also the side where the oldest, most established homes sit. At some point the club relocated its main entrance to Robert Grissom Parkway, the same road The Preserve at Pine Lakes now sits on.

That means the newest homes in the area, not the oldest ones, are on the side of the course with the current front door. If your assumption walking in is that the legacy neighborhood must be closer to the clubhouse because it got there first, that assumption is backwards today. Proximity to the golf course is not the same as proximity to its entrance, and the two markets split almost exactly along that line.

The One Thing Both Markets Share

Both neighborhoods are selling proximity to the same golf course, and that course carries weight most subdivisions do not. Pine Lakes opened in 1927 as the Ocean Forest Golf Club and Inn, making it the first golf course built in Myrtle Beach. It was renamed Pine Lakes International after Fred Miles purchased it in the early 1950s, and locals still call it "The Granddaddy." The course sits on the National Register of Historic Places and was designed by Robert White, the first president of the PGA of America.

The club underwent a $27 million restoration completed in 2009, and a more recent green and bunker renovation led by architect Craig Schreiner rebuilt the greens and reshaped the bunkers while keeping the tree-lined corridors that gave the original 1920s layout its character. You can read more about that history directly from Discover South Carolina. One detail that shows up repeatedly in golfer reviews of the course is that it has no driving range, a tradeoff some players accept for the historic layout and others count against it before they buy nearby. The club is also approaching its 100th anniversary in 2027 and continues to host large-scale events, including a World Amateur Championship field of more than 3,000 players.

If you are buying because of the golf course itself, both markets deliver on that promise equally. If you are buying because of the neighborhood built around it, you need to know which neighborhood you are actually looking at.

What This Means Depending On Why You're Buying

For a second-home or vacation buyer who wants low-maintenance ownership, The Preserve's HOA-managed pool, clubhouse, and pickleball courts remove a layer of upkeep that an older, no-HOA Pine Lakes home would put back on you. For a retiree relocating for a quieter, more established setting, the mature trees and larger lots on the historic side may be worth the tradeoff of managing your own landscaping and reserves without a shared HOA fund behind you. For an investor comparing carrying costs, the natural-gas utility setup and warranty coverage on new Lennar construction change the maintenance math in ways a 40-year-old home simply cannot match, even before you factor in HOA dues.

Children in both sections of the Pine Lakes area attend Ocean Bay Elementary and Middle Schools and Myrtle Beach High School, so school assignment is one variable that does not split along the old-versus-new line. Everything else, price, HOA structure, home age, and even which side of the course you enter from, does.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Preserve at Pine Lakes actually on the golf course? It sits on the opposite side of the same golf course from the historic Pine Lakes neighborhood, built around seven ponds, with select homes backing directly up to the fairways.

Does the older Pine Lakes neighborhood have an HOA? Not universally. Pine Lakes Estates, one of the established sections, is marketed specifically as a no-HOA community, which is a meaningful contrast to The Preserve's amenity-fee structure.

When is Pine Lakes Country Club's 100th anniversary? The course opened in 1927, which puts its centennial in 2027, and the club is already being described as approaching that milestone.

If you are trying to figure out which side of Pine Lakes actually fits your budget, your maintenance tolerance, and your timeline, that is exactly the kind of comparison Kim Brooks walks Grand Strand buyers through every week. Schedule a consultation and get a straight answer on what your money buys on each side of the course.