Yes, AGREED... That capital start up of the gym is extremely costly. First you have to lease or purchase a huge lot of land that can which you have to hire a contractor to build you actual warehouse/ gym. Then you must take into consideration the equipment purchase cost's which is for sure in the 100,000's easy as well as get 4 million permits which cost money and serious stress.( all depends on town or city). Lastly you would never to have a huge H.R./ Marketing department to build up your gym name and be able to state why people choose your gym and pay x amount of dollars more then for example a retro fitness that is 20 bucks a month.

With any successful business you really need to look at your consumer market and what their needs are not YOURS. What i mean by that is we would all love to have a gym where it bodybuilders and juicers and got natural hard lifters in general. But as you can see what people posted above WE are a small scale group in the actual realm of the GYM business.
The best bet is to open a huge gym with great equipment and ton's of it. An ideal layout for me would keeping all the bench presses, smith machines, free weights etc.... to the left wing of building lets say and in middle put a few machines in their with also a nice space for people to stretch and warm up before their lift. Then on the right side of wing you have all the cardio and ab gear. The reason i like this layout is because you keep both groups happy. I say both groups meaning your Bbuilders and just all around serious lifters are able to scream if they have to when their pushing out the last max set without the whole gym turning around and being like "wtf" is wrong with this guy. Then the people who just go to gym to do cardio and do either classes offered at gym( very important= makes gym more appealing the more classes you have and the quality of them) also you can charge more for membership because when you join classes are free to attend with membership. What i am getting at is you are able to split up 2 different types of classes of people that workout and although they will def run cross path's at time you give the people who just want to do their cardio on the bike and hook up their headphones to the tv and catch up on opera while the bbuilders are able to go alot on other side of gym with weights without feeling uncomfortable and vise versa. Also adding in full closed showers with nice locker rooms, sauna, steam room etc.... You can increase price on membership even more because of the ammen's you provide.

Main point is to make the most money and keep gym up to par you cant discriminate and try to make either a straight up sauce factory gym or just soccer mom and old man gym( people who typically do cardio and use the workout machines barely touch free weights etc..) You need both groups of people to feel comfortable and want to be workout at your gym.

But i would estimate cost for something like this would be around $600,000.

But that is how you have to do i to make it brotha...