There’s really no mistaking the message stamped in big red letters across Silverstone Golf Club’s homepage. It’s the same sign golfers found tied on the front gate to Silverstone’s clubhouse this week.

Silverstone employees and homeowners living around the northwest valley course on Thursday confirmed it had been sold to a Southern California buyer and closed as of Tuesday morning.

The decision was announced in a two-page letter signed by Par 4 Golf Management Inc. CEO and Silverstone owner Paul Jaramillo, who cited the course’s ongoing financial difficulties, his own personal health and the rising price of water in explaining the move to Silverstone’s club members.

The Sept. 1 letter goes on to say the course’s new owner “intends to close” the course. It does not say whether the unnamed company plans to reopen Silverstone or what other plans it might have for the course.

Neither Jaramillo nor course co-owner Keith Flatt returned requests for comment.

Nearby residents have long suspected that the new owners would look to tear up at least part of the course and put down a residential development, an outcome Jaramillo denied in a November letter addressed to club members and obtained by the Review-Journal.

Reached for comment Thursday, new course owner Ronald Richards didn’t deny the possibility.

Richards — an attorney with a Los Angeles-based company that was criticized for its efforts to build houses on a San Diego-area golf course — said he planned to take Silverstone in a “new direction,” but did not volunteer specifics.  Read more: