Griffin Ranch or The Citrus? What La Quinta's HOA Number Doesn't Tell You

Two buyers toured La Quinta gates on the same Saturday last spring. One walked a home in Griffin Ranch listed near $2 million. The other walked a home in The Citrus at a similar price. Both pulled the HOA disclosure from the listing packet. Both assumed that number was the whole monthly picture.

It wasn't for either of them.

That's the piece worth sitting with before you fall in love with a floor plan in either community. Griffin Ranch and The Citrus sit a short drive apart in La Quinta, both behind guarded gates, both drawing buyers who want the same version of desert life. But they run on two different financial models, and the HOA figure on a disclosure sheet tells you almost nothing about which model you're looking at until you know what's bundled in and what's sold separately.

Griffin Ranch Bundles the Lifestyle Into the Fee

Griffin Ranch was conceived by Merv Griffin, and it was built without a golf course. Instead of fairways, the community leans on a pastoral look: white split-rail fences lining tree-shaded streets, a mountain-view setting that reads more equestrian than resort. At the center sits a clubhouse with a resort-style pool, spa, fitness center, tennis, pickleball, and bocce, all included in the monthly HOA rather than gated behind a separate membership.

That inclusion is the whole model. You pay one number, and the clubhouse, the pool, the courts, and the guarded entrance are already yours to use. Buyers who want golf still have it close at hand. The community sits adjacent to PGA West, and residents can access nearby courses without the community itself carrying golf course maintenance costs in the HOA.

The Citrus Runs the Opposite Way

The Citrus was built around its own Pete Dye-designed private golf course, threaded through the citrus groves the community is named for. The HOA on Citrus homes tends to run lower than Griffin Ranch's, but that lower number reflects a narrower scope. It covers the neighborhood's common areas and gate, not a private clubhouse's daily operating cost, because the clubhouse and its amenities sit on a separate membership system entirely.

That system has three tiers. Social membership covers pools, spas, tennis on Har-Tru and clay courts, pickleball, fitness centers, and discounted access to dining and Spa La Quinta. Sport membership adds unlimited play on five resort courses at discounted rates. Golf membership is the full tier, with unlimited access to the Citrus course itself plus the Mountain and Dunes courses at La Quinta Resort. Each tier is optional, and none of it is bundled into the HOA the way Griffin Ranch's amenities are.

Here's where the confusion starts. Older listing pages describe The Citrus with a flat monthly dues figure well over $1,000 alongside a six-figure membership cost, worded in a way that makes it sound mandatory. But the club's own membership materials, along with La Quinta Resort's membership page, are explicit that owning a home in The Citrus and joining The Citrus Club are two separate decisions. You can buy the house and never touch the membership tiers at all.

A Side by Side Look

The Fee Also Depends on Which Phase You're Buying Into

Griffin Ranch adds one more layer buyers should ask about directly: the community was built in phases across different builders, and the HOA figure has shifted enough between phases that quoting a single number is misleading. Homes from the original build, dated roughly 2007 through 2020, carry HOA figures that different brokerages have listed anywhere from the low $500s to over $800 a month depending on when the listing was pulled and which section of the community the home sits in. More recently, Toll Brothers began a new phase inside Griffin Ranch limited to 37 new-construction estate homes, single-story designs between 4,100 and 4,200-plus square feet, built around their own roughly 10,000-square-foot clubhouse and dues schedule.

That range isn't a data error. It's a reflection of a community that has been built out over roughly two decades, where older resale sections and a newer built-to-suit phase can carry different obligations. If you're comparing two Griffin Ranch homes with different HOA numbers, the difference may say more about which phase you're in than about anything wrong with either listing.

Right across the street, Rancho Santana offers a useful contrast point. It's a newer gated community with no golf course, and its HOA runs meaningfully lower than Griffin Ranch's, closer to the low hundreds per month for a comparably sized new build. That gap illustrates the same principle from another angle. Two gated communities within sight of each other can carry very different fee structures depending on how much is bundled into HOA versus left as pure land and gate maintenance.

As of August 2026, Griffin Ranch homes carried a median list price of $2.32 million and were spending a median of 19 days on market, a sharp drop from the same month a year earlier, a sign that demand for the community's bundled-amenity model hasn't slowed even as the broader La Quinta market has cooled.

What's Changing Across the Street From The Citrus

The Citrus sits directly across from the public SilverRock golf course, and that stretch of La Quinta has been the subject of a long-running redevelopment story that buyers evaluating the area right now should have on their radar. The city's SilverRock resort project, more recently known as Talus, spent years tied up first in the Great Recession and then in a developer bankruptcy filed in August 2024. That bankruptcy case resolved when the site sold at auction for $65 million, with escrow closing in December 2025 to Turnbridge Equities, the investment firm that won the site at auction.

The plan Turnbridge has presented to the City Council scales the project back from the original two-hotel concept to a single luxury hotel, with a realigned golf course, a new clubhouse moved closer to the property's entrance, and the addition of dozens of condominiums. City officials have continued to provide updates on the project's progress through 2026 as the new developer works through permitting and infrastructure planning. None of this changes what a Citrus home costs to carry today, but it is a live factor in how the immediate surroundings of the community are likely to look and function over the next several years, and it's worth asking your agent for the latest status before assuming the view across the street stays static.

The Question to Ask Before You Compare Two HOA Numbers

If you're cross-shopping these two communities, the HOA figure on a disclosure sheet is a starting point, not an answer. Ask what's actually included in that number. Ask whether the community's recreational amenities sit inside the HOA or outside it. Ask, if you're looking at The Citrus, which membership tier you'd realistically use and what that tier costs today, since none of it is optional in the sense of being avoidable if you want the golf course lifestyle the community is built around. Ask, if you're looking at Griffin Ranch, which phase and builder the home belongs to, since that answers most of the HOA variance you'll see across listings.

The two communities aren't better or worse than each other. They're built on different financial logic, and the only way to compare them honestly is to price out the whole picture rather than the one number that happens to sit on the same line of every disclosure packet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is golf club membership required to buy a home in The Citrus? No. Homeownership and Citrus Club membership are handled as separate decisions under the club's current structure, with Social, Sport, and Golf tiers available to homeowners and non-homeowners alike.

Does Griffin Ranch have its own golf course? No. Griffin Ranch was built around a pastoral, non-golf setting with split-rail fencing and mountain views. Golf access is available through proximity to PGA West rather than an on-site course.

Will the SilverRock and Talus redevelopment affect The Citrus? The site sits directly across the street from The Citrus, and its ownership and plans have changed as recently as the escrow closing in December 2025. The project is still working through city approvals, so its eventual footprint and timeline are worth checking on directly rather than assuming they're settled.

If you're weighing Griffin Ranch against The Citrus, or trying to figure out what either community's fee structure actually means for your monthly budget, Donna Ambrose can walk through the current HOA schedule, club fee structure, and phase-specific details for any home you're considering. Let's Connect.