A buyer tours a home on Hill Circle with the Kissing Camels fairways stretching out past the back windows. The agent mentions the HOA dues. The buyer, reasonably, assumes those dues include the golf course sitting fifteen feet from the patio. They do not. That question, asked almost every time someone tours a fairway-adjacent property here, is the single most common misunderstanding in this neighborhood, and it says something larger about how Kissing Camels actually works.
The gate is part of the address. The golf course is a separate transaction entirely.
The Split Nobody Puts on the Listing Sheet
Kissing Camels Estates and the Garden of the Gods Resort and Club are two different organizations with two different relationships to your ownership. The Kissing Camels Property Owners Association, known as KCPOA, is the master homeowners association. It governs security, road maintenance, snow removal and covenant enforcement for the residential community. The Club, meanwhile, owns and operates the golf course, the recreation center and the indoor tennis courts, and it runs those facilities for the benefit of its own membership, not the neighborhood's homeownership roll. A sizable share of the Club's members do not even live inside Kissing Camels Estates.
That structure means buying a home here does not make you a golfer at Kissing Camels. The Greens at Kissing Camels, one of the community's sub-associations, states this plainly to prospective owners: homeownership does not include club membership, though most residents in that section do carry it. If you want access to the course, you apply and pay for it separately, and the Club's own membership page lays out several distinct paths. A Premier Golf Membership bundles green fees into the dues. An Associate Membership carries lower monthly dues but bills green fees separately at the posted member rate. A National Membership grants full facility access on the condition that the member's residence sits outside a 60-mile radius of the Club, which by definition excludes most Kissing Camels homeowners. A Sports Membership includes tennis and the rest of the amenity package but not golf at all.
For a buyer building a budget around "gated golf community," this is the first place the math gets more complicated than the listing photo suggests.
Then There's the Question of Which HOA You're Actually In
KCPOA operates as both a master association covering everyone in Kissing Camels Estates and, for residents outside a sub-association, as the direct HOA. But large portions of the neighborhood sit inside sub-associations layered on top of KCPOA, each with its own covenants, its own dues structure, and its own bundle of services. According to KCPOA's own governing documents, Camels Ridge is built out at 92 units and never adopted the association's 2004 Master Declaration, though its homeowners still pay KCPOA assessments. The Park is a separate 73-unit section on the east side of the community. The Greens covers 37 home lots surrounding part of the golf course, where the association currently posts dues of $1,770 per quarter for homes and $531 per quarter for undeveloped lots, and in return handles almost all exterior maintenance, landscaping, irrigation and even insurance on the home's structure.
A KCPOA fee map that circulates online lists a master association due of $165 per month, or $66 per month for vacant lots, tied to security staffing, the three access gates, trash removal and road maintenance. That figure is worth knowing, and worth treating with real caution: the map itself is dated 2018. Dues change. The right move for any serious buyer is to request current statements for the specific address, not to price a home off a document that predates most of the last decade's cost increases.
The Townhomes Formula That a Judge Wrote, Not a Board
Most of Kissing Camels' internal cost-sharing gets settled the way HOAs typically settle it: a board sets a budget, the assessment gets calculated per unit or per square foot, and owners vote at an annual meeting. The Townhomes section breaks that pattern. According to KCPOA's own governing documents, the 49-unit Townhomes condominium project's financial obligation to the master association is not set by the standard assessment formula. It was determined by the outcome of a court case between the parties.
That is not a detail you will find on a flyer, and it is exactly the kind of friction that only surfaces once a buyer or their lender starts pulling the actual governing documents for a specific unit. If you are evaluating a Townhomes property, that court-determined arrangement is worth understanding before you're under contract, not after.
Fee Simple or Land Lease Matters More Than the View
One more structural wrinkle sits inside the same HOA fee map: some sections of Kissing Camels are fee simple ownership, while others include a land-lease component. That distinction affects what you actually hold title to, how a lender evaluates the loan, and what happens to the underlying land obligation over time. It is not a detail that shows up in square footage or finish level, and two homes that look identical on a tour sheet can sit on entirely different ownership footing.
What This Means When Two Homes Are Priced the Same
Put these pieces together and a pattern emerges. The list price tells you almost nothing about the total cost of holding a Kissing Camels address. Two homes at the same number can carry different master and sub-association dues, different maintenance bundles, different fee-simple-versus-land-lease status, and entirely different golf costs depending on whether the buyer wants Premier, Associate, Sports or no club membership at all.
There is a smaller version of the same pattern in how the neighborhood actually functions day to day. Despite the country-club setting, Kissing Camels carries a Walk Score of 11, and it functions as a car-oriented community even though it offers internal walking and jogging paths. Buyers picture strolling the neighborhood the way they might picture teeing off from the back deck. Neither assumption matches the reality on the ground until you check.
The practical takeaway for anyone comparing homes here: ask which sub-association a specific property sits in, request current dues rather than relying on any cached fee map, confirm fee-simple versus land-lease status before writing an offer, and treat club membership as its own line-item decision, separate from the mortgage, with its own tier and its own cost. A gated golf community is still, on paper, two different products sold under one name.
FAQ
Does buying a home in Kissing Camels include golf privileges at the Club? No. Club membership is a separate application and a separate cost, distinct from the HOA dues tied to homeownership.
Are HOA dues the same for every home in the neighborhood? No. Dues depend on which sub-association a property belongs to, and those associations bundle different services, from basic security and road maintenance up through full exterior maintenance and insurance in sections like The Greens.
Is the HOA fee map available online still accurate? Treat it as a structural guide rather than a current fee sheet. The map in circulation is dated 2018, and dues have almost certainly moved since then. Current statements should come from the specific association tied to the property you're evaluating.
Does every section of Kissing Camels sit on land the owner fully owns? Not necessarily. Some sections are fee simple and others carry a land-lease component, which is worth confirming before an offer goes in.
If you're weighing a home in Kissing Camels and want the actual dues, sub-association structure and ownership footing for a specific address before you tour, Susan Sedoryk can pull it together so you're comparing real numbers instead of listing sheet assumptions. Let's Connect.
