Asheville Draws a PGA TOUR Field Again, After More Than 80 Years

On September 17, a PGA TOUR field tees off in the Asheville area for the first time since Ben Hogan was winning here in the early 1940s. The Biltmore Championship runs September 17 to 20, 2026 at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove in Arden, a 7,167-yard Jack Nicklaus course behind a private gate. It sits on the regular PGA TOUR schedule as a FedExCup Fall event, not a senior tour stop and not an exhibition.

The history is the part worth pinning down, because the round-number version travels fast. The Asheville Open was an official PGA TOUR tournament from 1939 to 1942, last contested in 1942, with Hogan taking the final three beginning in 1940. Then it went quiet for the better part of a century. The PGA TOUR counts the Biltmore Championship as the seventh all-time TOUR event in the city and its first in more than 80 years. That is the accurate frame. You will hear it called a first ever. It is not.

What a buyer should take from a golf broadcast is narrower than what the tourism releases will claim. A nationally televised tournament does not move a comp. It moves attention. Four days of network coverage put foothills real estate in front of exactly the audience that buys second homes at altitude, and it does it at the front edge of the plateau's best season. Walnut Cove sits north of the Highlands and Cashiers market, close enough that a weekend visitor becomes a plausible buyer in either place.

The honest read is a timing one. Second-home pipelines do not open on tournament weekend. They open in the eighteen months after a market decides it is worth a look, and national golf is one of the few things that makes that decision for a buyer who has never driven US 64. The event will not tell you what a house on the plateau trades for. It tells you the discovery layer just got a lot wider, and discovery is what runs ahead of the next wave of demand, not the demand itself.

If a Cliffs address or the Highlands and Cashiers plateau is on your list, the advisory conversation is complimentary, and we will bring the current inventory read to it.