A rendering of the bar and golf simulator area at Clubhouse Work & Golf. (Courtesy Clubhouse Work & Golf)
Josh Kaplan can’t fit 18 holes and long fairways into the 17,000 square feet of office space he recently leased in the Denver Tech Center.
But he said what he’s doing is pretty close.
“If you tried to do this 10, 15, 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have worked. Golf fashion and business fashion — the Venn diagram is almost a circle,” he said.
On Dec. 9, Kaplan, a 41-year-old software consultant, plans to open Clubhouse Work & Golf, a coworking spot with golf simulators, on the first floor of the office building at 5680 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. in Greenwood Village.
He thinks it will be the first coworking-golf club crossover on the planet.
“Golf is traditionally the sport of business,” Kaplan said. “And it’s one of the few hobby sports that you can do and not get all sweaty.”
Josh Kaplan
Half of Clubhouse will hold 50 offices between 55 and 200 square feet, with a traditional coworking feel. The biggest ones are designed to fit up to eight people, and will rent between $900 and $3,800 a month, Kaplan said.
The other half of Clubhouse, separated by a hallway, will have three golf simulators, a 450-square-foot putting green, a bar and — back at work for a second here — most of the shared conference rooms.
The golf diversions will be available solely to coworking tenants, but about 50 “social members” that Kaplan said will have access to the space without an office.
The business owner, who is running the operation with partner Joe Skovgaard, said the entire buildout will cost about $1.7 million. He’ll start marketing offices for lease in two weeks, but has already had people reach out.
Since it’s the main attraction, Kaplan has spent a great deal of time, and tens of thousands of dollars, on the golf simulators. The hardware: Trackman simulators that use ceiling-mounted cameras to track swings and ball speed. They’ll use the latest version of Trackman’s software, which Kaplan said came out just this month.
Kaplan said he debated using other simulators, such as Uneekor, but went with Trackman since it licenses real golf courses and professionals use it.
Kaplan plans to have golf pros visit every week or two to give lessons, and to host quarterly leagues, skills competitions and putting contests. He’s hired a general manager with a background in both coworking and golf, to help run the spot.
“A lot of coworking spots talk about the community — like, get out of your house, you’re lonely, come to a coworking spot, work from there where you’ve got this community … The only true common denominator those people have is they choose to office in the same spot, whereas here it’s like going to the first tee of a golf course every day, and you’re going to meet somebody new,” Kaplan said.
The newly minted entrepreneur said he quit his day job last week to focus on Clubhouse.
A sign for Clubhouse Wolf & Golf outside the building at 5680 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. (Matt Geiger/BusinessDen)
Seven years ago, Kaplan said, he was one of the few remote employees working for a French tech firm, and he’d built himself a golf simulator in his garage. In between meetings and calls, he’d go to the simulator he’d built to “blow off some steam” and hit some balls.
That ended with the birth of his second child, who slept right above the garage. He thought about getting some buddies together and putting some simulators in a warehouse before it clicked: This could be a business.
Kaplan hired a coworking business consultant on Christmas Day in 2021, and had a business plan drawn up a few weeks later. In February 2022, Kaplan began looking for office space.
“The path was hell,” he said.
“The naive version of me was like, this should be easy,” Kaplan said. “Turns out, commercial real estate kind of works backwards from what you would expect … they’re essentially giving you a 10-year loan on a 10-year lease. And so they look at your risk. Well, you’re a startup, you don’t have a ton of money in the bank. You’ve got no assets for me to take from if you default on your lease.”
Potential leases hummed along until the securitization process, where landlords examine the risk of taking on a tenant.
“We got a couple deals in the red zone, inside the five-yard line. We had a couple of deals on the one-yard line. It wasn’t our fault, we didn’t throw the ball on fourth and two,” Kaplan said.
The plan was always to find something outside downtown, with lots of parking and ample vacancy. Kaplan said he “put a pin” on the Orchard Road and I-25 interchange, citing its close proximity to Greenwood Village, Cherry Hills Village and Centennial.
“It never, generally, was going to be a downtown product … how many people can you see taking the RTD with a golf bag and laptop bag?” he said.
Kaplan eventually changed brokerages and went with a JLL team of David Shirazi and Trevor Curtis. The duo helped lock down the space that Clubhouse is now building out. It’s located in the Triad Office Complex, which a local owner lost to foreclosure last year.
“If we can prove that it works in 17,000 square feet, then we’re willing to take the risk, and taking 20 or 25 probably in Broomfield will be the next one,” Kaplan said.
A rendering of the bar and golf simulator area at Clubhouse Work & Golf. (Courtesy Clubhouse Work & Golf)
Josh Kaplan can’t fit 18 holes and long fairways into the 17,000 square feet of office space he recently leased in the Denver Tech Center.
But he said what he’s doing is pretty close.
“If you tried to do this 10, 15, 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have worked. Golf fashion and business fashion — the Venn diagram is almost a circle,” he said.
On Dec. 9, Kaplan, a 41-year-old software consultant, plans to open Clubhouse Work & Golf, a coworking spot with golf simulators, on the first floor of the office building at 5680 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. in Greenwood Village.
He thinks it will be the first coworking-golf club crossover on the planet.
“Golf is traditionally the sport of business,” Kaplan said. “And it’s one of the few hobby sports that you can do and not get all sweaty.”
Josh Kaplan
Half of Clubhouse will hold 50 offices between 55 and 200 square feet, with a traditional coworking feel. The biggest ones are designed to fit up to eight people, and will rent between $900 and $3,800 a month, Kaplan said.
The other half of Clubhouse, separated by a hallway, will have three golf simulators, a 450-square-foot putting green, a bar and — back at work for a second here — most of the shared conference rooms.
The golf diversions will be available solely to coworking tenants, but about 50 “social members” that Kaplan said will have access to the space without an office.
The business owner, who is running the operation with partner Joe Skovgaard, said the entire buildout will cost about $1.7 million. He’ll start marketing offices for lease in two weeks, but has already had people reach out.
Since it’s the main attraction, Kaplan has spent a great deal of time, and tens of thousands of dollars, on the golf simulators. The hardware: Trackman simulators that use ceiling-mounted cameras to track swings and ball speed. They’ll use the latest version of Trackman’s software, which Kaplan said came out just this month.
Kaplan said he debated using other simulators, such as Uneekor, but went with Trackman since it licenses real golf courses and professionals use it.
Kaplan plans to have golf pros visit every week or two to give lessons, and to host quarterly leagues, skills competitions and putting contests. He’s hired a general manager with a background in both coworking and golf, to help run the spot.
“A lot of coworking spots talk about the community — like, get out of your house, you’re lonely, come to a coworking spot, work from there where you’ve got this community … The only true common denominator those people have is they choose to office in the same spot, whereas here it’s like going to the first tee of a golf course every day, and you’re going to meet somebody new,” Kaplan said.
The newly minted entrepreneur said he quit his day job last week to focus on Clubhouse.
A sign for Clubhouse Wolf & Golf outside the building at 5680 Greenwood Plaza Blvd. (Matt Geiger/BusinessDen)
Seven years ago, Kaplan said, he was one of the few remote employees working for a French tech firm, and he’d built himself a golf simulator in his garage. In between meetings and calls, he’d go to the simulator he’d built to “blow off some steam” and hit some balls.
That ended with the birth of his second child, who slept right above the garage. He thought about getting some buddies together and putting some simulators in a warehouse before it clicked: This could be a business.
Kaplan hired a coworking business consultant on Christmas Day in 2021, and had a business plan drawn up a few weeks later. In February 2022, Kaplan began looking for office space.
“The path was hell,” he said.
“The naive version of me was like, this should be easy,” Kaplan said. “Turns out, commercial real estate kind of works backwards from what you would expect … they’re essentially giving you a 10-year loan on a 10-year lease. And so they look at your risk. Well, you’re a startup, you don’t have a ton of money in the bank. You’ve got no assets for me to take from if you default on your lease.”
Potential leases hummed along until the securitization process, where landlords examine the risk of taking on a tenant.
“We got a couple deals in the red zone, inside the five-yard line. We had a couple of deals on the one-yard line. It wasn’t our fault, we didn’t throw the ball on fourth and two,” Kaplan said.
The plan was always to find something outside downtown, with lots of parking and ample vacancy. Kaplan said he “put a pin” on the Orchard Road and I-25 interchange, citing its close proximity to Greenwood Village, Cherry Hills Village and Centennial.
“It never, generally, was going to be a downtown product … how many people can you see taking the RTD with a golf bag and laptop bag?” he said.
Kaplan eventually changed brokerages and went with a JLL team of David Shirazi and Trevor Curtis. The duo helped lock down the space that Clubhouse is now building out. It’s located in the Triad Office Complex, which a local owner lost to foreclosure last year.
“If we can prove that it works in 17,000 square feet, then we’re willing to take the risk, and taking 20 or 25 probably in Broomfield will be the next one,” Kaplan said.
