4 minute readThey are the crop of perhaps 5,000 “Coming Soon” new homebuilder communities, neighborhoods, and subdivisions, all bought, developed, planned, and ready for their Grand Open close-up moment.
They’re due to come online for active selling roughly now through mid-year 2023. They were penciled “back when” with the greatest of expectations. Now, about to start their active-selling phases, they carry homebuilder and residential developer partners’ highest hopes to steady and perhaps reverse selling trends that are down 30% already from where they were the same time a year ago, and still falling.
They’re 2023-and-beyond homebuilding’s multi-billion-dollar question.
As they do come online, what will set one new ribbon-cutting apart from another? At a moment of indefinite duration and unclear severity, a cloud of challenge and unknown obscures all but the nearest of near futures and casts a pall of risk over nearly one and all of them. Will exceptions to a rule of struggle over the next six to 18 months pronounce themselves as the case-studies in what worked when so little actually did work?
Will those new communities that do wind up achieving a pace of sales at a price-point builders and developers can profitability sustain, will the winner(s) do so as a function of cracking the secret code of pricing in more buyers currently priced out? Or rather, will it owe to having instead raise buyers’ experience of value to the point they’d feel inoculated from further property price declines should they choose to buy now?
Likely as not, conferences and meetings early in 2024 will highlight business cases of outlier success in the current business chapter that is still evolving, and devolving into a tougher and tougher selling environment. Theories abound now as to what will work and what won’t in an adverse stretch of time we don’t even know the full scope of right now. The pulse of the macro economy itself and its support of jobs, job growth, income growth, geographical mobility, and a full-stack of business sector health signs will be the ultimate determiner of how things fare widely.
Until then, it will be the outliers, new communities with that certain something that stands out. The pressure’s on. They’ll either gain distinction as an exceptionally more-attainable product line that can offset some of the mortgage interest rate and pricing trends that have consigned so many would-be buyers to the sidelines, or as a compellingly-high value positioning that can assure buyers still active in a discretionary mode that their investment can truly withstand further deterioration in the broader market.
In that context, we’ll take a look at the imminent unveiling of a community that might well stand out for its ability to launch into strong headwinds, and rather than buckle under their pressure, hold up as an outlier.
The News
The Builder’s Daily has learned:
Image courtesy of Meristem Communities Snodgrass says that Indigo’s focus on providing living arrangements for all life stages and family formations will tap a diversity of cultural heritages that exist within the Houston metro area.
Clayton and I have long been working in our careers on the fringes of the businesses we’ve lived in,” says Snodgrass. “We leaned into that curiosity as we approached this project as newcomers. If we hadn’t started the project when we did – when the market was on fire and we were able to sign up and go to contract with private homebuilders with really strong local teams who could make decisions on their own, and explore product types and layouts that are unusual for around here – we wouldn’t be one of the only ones in the market selling livability to a consumer who told us they’d trade-off square footage for more outdoor space.”
What It Means
For all ages, farmers and residential developers share common ground in livelihoods whose value cycle starts from the ground up.
To be good at either or both – literally causing and sustaining growth in agriculture or new community development – requires human gifts that draw life and resiliency from a shared tap root.
- Wisdom typically gained through experience
- Tolerance of both ups and downs in external conditions
- Constancy of practice
- Humility to accept there’s always more to learn than one already knows
We even get the word humility from its Latin roots in the ground.
Striking a balance of elevated value that comes across in the feeling of the place and a series of mindfully densified home plans and attached configurations that can hold prices to within reach of many younger and downsizing adult household budgets, the Indigo project could blend what takes to stand out for its ability to generate and sustain sales in a tough market.
Our plans took shape around the drivers toward that urban-rural blend of connection to both people and convenience as well as the land,” says Snodgrass. “The building square-footages and lot sizes allow us to make the price-points quite attainable for the area. This makes us look smarter than we were when mad the decisions. We maybe got lucky that way.”
Beginner’s luck, perhaps, compliments of a beginner’s mind.
