Step In, Speak Up, Shape the Future of Surf Parks

New Tools, Bigger Teams: SPC Grows Committees and Opens Member Slack

By Jess Ponting

Surf-anchored real estate development has hit an inflection point. Nearly half of global surf consumers surveyed in 2024 had visited a surf park, up from just 3% in 2015. Forty-eight percent say they’re likely or very likely to visit one in the next year. Even more striking: a third of existing visitors report returning six or more times in the past 12 months.

Developers are responding. According to Surf Park Central’s 10-year industry trend analysis, cumulative park openings have soared since 2020, with a dramatic spike projected through 2025. Surf parks are becoming a legitimate leisure category with significant consumer loyalty and high-value visitor spending—$200 to $300 on average, per visit, excluding surf sessions. At this point, it’s also clear that surf parks are more than just places to ride waves. They are experience hubs that draw foot traffic, extend dwell time, and generate high-value spending across food and beverage, coaching, retail, and lodging. But increasingly, they’re also acting as engines of real estate value creation.

Take the Revel Surf project at Cannon Beach in Mesa, Arizona. Since its announcement, retail space within the surrounding development is commanding 150% of average market rates. Why? Because tenants and investors understand that a surf park doesn’t just attract visitors—it creates community gravity. Or consider Brazil, where the announcement of a surf park and residential development led to a 10x increase in land value, more or less overnight. 

Across the board, surf parks are being leveraged as high-yield anchor attractions for everything from resort hotels to lifestyle residential communities and entire mixed-use destinations. They’re not side attractions. They’re centerpieces. This growing scale of influence brings a new set of challenges around consistency, safety, sustainability, permitting, insurance, and operations. Without coordination, each new park is left to solve the same problems in isolation.

For well over a decade, Surf Park Central has been a connector for this industry, but the changing scale requires formal mechanisms for organizing year-round to create a unified voice to speak to policymakers, insurers, and investors on a whole range of vital issues that are holding back development. Local governments and regulators are often confused as to whether surf parks are sports facilities, amusement parks, or something else entirely. Insurance providers are unsure how to rate them. Water treatment protocols vary. The lack of shared benchmarks makes it hard to assess quality and risk. If the industry doesn’t develop unified standards and a shared voice, someone else will make the rules.

For more than a decade, Surf Park Central has acted as the connective tissue of this industry. We’ve hosted the annual Surf Park Summit, published proprietary consumer insights, supported feasibility studies, and helped spark global dialogue. We have been ramping up our response to the need for industry coordination primarily through the creation of industry committees focused on sustainability, accessibility, and risk and safety. Committees have been meeting and reporting for two years now and have recently been expanded and made available to all members of Surf Park Central. We want you to participate.

We also recently launched a dedicated industry Slack channel to serve as the always-on communications hub for members and committee participants to connect, coordinate, and communicate. This is where committees operate, documents are shared, and sector-wide issues get discussed in real time.

Membership helps to fund these initiatives and also unlocks access to:

• Consumer and operations research
  
• Session recordings from the Summit
  
• Partner discounts
  
• Private webinars and trainings
  
• Committee and Slack participation
  

We’re inviting everyone who believes in the long-term health of this industry to be part of it. The goal is to double participation over the next 12 months—and we’d love to see you step in as a contributor or leader. If we don’t take these steps, I fear that we risk making it harder—not easier—for the next wave of developers to build the future. We’d like to make sure that doesn’t happen and we’re asking you to help. So, please consider:

• Becoming a member
• Joining a committee
• Joining the member Slack
• Helping to shape the next era of surf parks