By Paul Wisniewski
LANCASTER — Five years after a Hong Kong-based owner sold it for $750,000, Fox Valley Country Club on Genesee Street is a private club again. Its owners say they have put $4 million into the course and buildings to get it there.
The total comes from Ravi Bansal and his sons Nitin and Rohan Bansal, the Clarence family that now owns the roughly 130-acre club at 6161 Genesee St. They described the work in a Lancaster Bee profile by James Sinner published this week.
“The club was not in very good shape after 30 years. That’s about the time when everything is end of life — all of the roofs, equipment and everything,” Ravi Bansal told the Bee. “There is not one thing you can say that didn’t need upgrades or improvement.”
Four owners in 30 years
Fox Valley opened in 1991 as a private course on what had been a horse farm. The designer kept the land’s rolling contours instead of flattening them. Arnold Palmer Golf Management bought it in 1997.
In 2014 the club went to C-Bons International Golf Group, a Hong Kong-based investment and real estate company. Under C-Bons, the Bee reported, the fairways, pool, tennis courts and hilltop clubhouse fell into disrepair.
In April 2021, Buffalo Business First reported that JPR Fox Valley Development LLC had paid $750,000 for the 130-acre property. The group was led by James Barron, president of Buffalo Drilling Co. Business First said Fox Valley was the third and last local course C-Bons sold, and the deal marked the fourth change in ownership since the club opened.
Ravi Bansal, who founded the Amherst medical oxygen equipment maker AirSep Corp. in 1987 and sold it in 2012, came in as a partner. In 2024, his sons agreed to buy the half owned by James and Paul Barron. “We need to go back to the old glory days,” Bansal told Business First that June.
Explaining the buyout, he told the Bee: “I could afford it, and they were my friends.”
Why private
The club spent a stretch as a public course. The owners say its design makes it hard to support the volume of play a public course needs to pay its bills.
“This type of place could never support the number of rounds that are required to be a well-run public course,” Nitin Bansal told the Bee. “Ultimately, this place would have just continued deteriorating because you can never get enough revenue to reinvest into what needs to be maintained.” He pointed to the small tee boxes, which wear down quickly.
According to the Bee, the spending has gone to the clubhouse, ballroom, patio and tennis courts. It also reopened a pool and pool house that had sat unused for nearly a decade, and paid for bridges, cart paths, parking lots, greens and fairways. Some of the most expensive work is erosion control along Ellicott Creek, which runs through the course.
The club now has about 120 members, up from roughly 60 a year ago, the Bee reported. It employs about 50 full- and part-time workers in peak season.
“There’s been so many transitions that people don’t know whether it’s public or private anymore,” Nitin Bansal said. “We want people to know about all of the things we’ve done and are doing that have made it a really nice place again.”
A bet on an old asset
Most East Towns development news involves new apartments, warehouses and drive-thrus going up on open land. Fox Valley is the other kind of real estate story: a 35-year-old property bought for $750,000 after years of neglect, with new owners counting on reinvestment and a private model to protect its value.
The family has not said publicly how the $4 million was financed or what membership dues cost. Those details, and any future plans for the clubhouse or grounds, are worth watching for anyone who follows Lancaster’s tax base and its open space. The Buffalo Chronicle is seeking comment from the club and will update this story.
“Our name is improving, and our members are very happy here,” Ravi Bansal said. “They are starting to bring in their friends. Things are looking very good.”
Image: A footbridge over Cayuga Creek at Como Lake Park in Lancaster. Photo by Andre Carrotflower / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).
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