Sales Associate · The McLennan Team

Cailin McLennan

At a glance

Where Cailin works

Property organized around a pursuit rather than a floor plan needs a different set of questions. These three markets share a buyer profile more than they share a subject: seasonal, discerning, and purchasing a way to spend time rather than a place to live.

Equestrian and polo

The Coachella Valley runs one of the largest winter equestrian seasons in the country. Buying into it is not the same as buying a house that happens to have a barn, and the difference is expensive to learn after the fact.

Zoning, footing, water, turnout, arena orientation and proximity to the show grounds all decide whether a property works for a string or only looks like it does. None of that appears in a listing photograph, and most of it is difficult to assess without having kept horses somewhere yourself.

Cailin competes in polo at Eldorado Polo Club, and works with riders, trainers, owners and investors on:

• Equestrian acreage and zoning suited to horses
• Barn and arena properties
• Established desert horse communities
• Homes near Desert International Horse Park in Thermal
• Seasonal residences for competitors, trainers and owners
• How to evaluate a desert horse property
• The Thermal Club, motorsport property
• Surfing in the desert, and what it changes

Motorsport

The Thermal Club in Thermal is a private motorsports country club on 426 acres, with more than five miles of circuits and villas built around collector garages holding twelve to twenty vehicles. Membership and property ownership are inseparable there, which makes it unlike anything else in the Valley.

The questions are as specific as they are on an equestrian property and equally invisible in a listing. Ceiling heights, lift capacity, door widths, turning radius, three phase power, fire suppression, and whether the garage is air conditioned. Where a villa sits on the circuit, which changes what you watch and what you hear. And the membership structure, which decides what happens at resale.

Cailin came to real estate from global hospitality and VIP operations for Formula 1, which is an unusual route into a motorsport property market and a useful one.

Surf

The newest of the three. Palm Springs Surf Club has been operating since 2024, and DSRT Surf opens in Palm Desert on what Surfer magazine calls the largest surf lagoon in North America, with 57 private villas planned in a later phase.

Nobody yet knows what proximity is worth, because no such property in the Valley has traded twice. That is worth saying plainly rather than attaching a premium to something untested. More in the desert has waves now.

The private communities

Working alongside Laurie, Cailin has built firsthand command of the Valley’s private golf and country club market, from The Madison Club and The Hideaway to Tradition, PGA WEST, The Quarry and Andalusia at Coral Mountain.

Those communities are not interchangeable. Membership structures differ, association dues cover different things, short term rental eligibility turns on the specific address, and within one club two homes at the same price can live entirely differently depending on orientation and view corridor. The team publishes detailed buyer’s guides to six of them.

Read the guides: The Madison Club · The Hideaway · Tradition Golf Club · PGA WEST · The Quarry · Andalusia · all community guides

An operating standard from somewhere else

Cailin’s background is in global hospitality and VIP operations for Formula 1, Riot Games and Fortune 500 brand activations. Those are environments where every guest interaction, every transition and every detail has to be right the first time, because there is no second take.

That is the standard she applies to every transaction: the same precision, the same responsiveness, the same intolerance for a detail slipping. A former NCAA Division I athlete, she brings the same composure under pressure to a negotiation that she brought to competition. Clients consistently name her responsiveness and attention to detail as the difference between a stressful transaction and a seamless one.

Event season and investment property

South La Quinta, Indio and Thermal sit at the centre of a calendar most markets do not have: the winter equestrian season, the polo season, and the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals. That creates genuine rental demand and a specific kind of investment buyer.

It also creates a trap. The City of La Quinta has prohibited most new short term vacation rental permits since May 20, 2021, and eligibility now turns on the specific address rather than the neighbourhood, with community and association rules frequently stricter still. Cailin verifies this before an offer rather than after, which is the only useful time to know. More on short term rental eligibility in La Quinta.

Common questions

Start with a conversation

Whether you are buying, selling, relocating, looking at equestrian property or considering a second home in the desert, the first conversation costs nothing and usually saves something.

Cailin McLennan, Sales Associate, The McLennan Team at Desert Sotheby’s International Realty
78065 Main Street, Suite 101, La Quinta, CA 92253
+1 760.413.6190
California DRE #02121998 · Working alongside Laurie McLennan