Real estate agents may want to brush up on their golf games, as the trend towards developing golf courses into homes to be sold continues unabated. It was announced recently that  Canada’s most famous course – Glen Abbey in Oakville – may soon see its sand traps turned into sandboxes.

ClubLink, the company that owns Glen Abbey, has started the process to turn the famed course into a 3,000-home residential community along with some retail and commercial space.

“What we are doing is … protecting the future zoning,” ClubLink CEO Rai Sahi told the Globe and Mail. “When that might get developed is some time in the future. It could be five years, 10 years. This is just a very preliminary thing. Sahi is head of Morguard, a major real estate development company with $19 billion worth of assets under management.

Any redevelopment could also be delayed by opposition from the town of Oakville and residents.

“I have huge issues," town councillor Allan Elgar told the Hamilton Spectator. “It is Oakville. That is how everyone knows Oakville, the Canadian Open in Oakville … I think this will galvanize the town. This will galvanize all the residents, and so it should.”

The trend of developing golf course land can be seen throughout the GTA, with the recent $400 million sale of York Downs, the turning of Newmarket’s Glenway golf course into a subdivision and ClubLink’s recent closure of another of its courses, Highland Gate, in Aurora, Ont, for the purpose of redevelopment.