May 12, 2008
Housing: Where to live
New homes are sprouting up all over Hampton Roads, and they're getting bigger.
Just across the James River from the Peninsula, the housing
market is beginning to build - forever changing the landscape of the rural areas of Isle
of Wight County, Smithfield and Suffolk.
| Chart: Hampton Roads housing assessments |
And even in areas like Hampton and Newport News, which are mostly built out, builders are finding pockets of land to build small sections of new homes.
As new homes are built locally, the average new home is
growing larger. Homes have gone from three bedrooms to four— and they also now
include a home office, media room, children's retreat room and parents' retreat room, said
Mark Edwards of East West Realty, the real estate company selling for Richmond developer
East West Partners.
East West Partners has taken the reins on residential
development in Isle of Wight with the development and current construction of Eagle
Harbor, a 1,500-unit community located just over the James River Bridge on Route 17. The
company also plans to start building 343 custom homes on 200 acres in the Carrollton
section of Isle of Wight. And East West is in its third year of residential development at
Riverfront at Harbor View in northern Suffolk.
Branch Lawson, president of the Hampton Roads division of
East West Partners, said the 500-single-family-home development in Suffolk is selling
well.
"We're more than halfway sold out on the lots sales,
and about 160 homes have sold. Many are coming from Southside, but we also have our share
of those moving in from out of the area," Lawson said.
With those three developments on the books, the company
said it is also considering the development of 372 acres of homes in Gloucester County.
No word yet on how many homes that land will hold.
Barry Nachman, of Century 21 Nachman in Hampton, said that
not only will development like Eagle Harbor provide a much-needed inventory of homes, it
will also open the area for further development.
"More industries will move in, creating more jobs,
which will create a need for more housing," Nachman said. "And even in places
that are pretty well built out, you have pockets of people moving in to take jobs at
companies like Symantec in Newport News.
"By themselves, those pockets of people are not felt.
But combined together, it's huge," Nachman said.
Although many people in Newport News and Hampton have said
the two cities have been built out in terms of adding large developments to the map, local
developers have been able to develop small areas of single-family housing to each city,
sometimes as small as 20 sites to an area.
In James City County, where the announcement of large
housing developments has been the norm for at least the past three years, the growth is
predicted to slow down now, said Tom Caulk, president of the Williamsburg Area Association
of Realtors.
"There have only been a few announcements for new
subdivisions in the past year," Caulk said. "But the larger ones that have
already been established are still growing. Greensprings West, which is expected to hold
400 homes, has been in development for about two years, but only one-fourth of that
community is sold.
"Stonehouse, a mixed-use community located in the
western end of the county, has a large residential component to it that has barely been
started."
Homes in Stonehouse are expected to top 1,800 units.
But Caulk said additional large developments like
Stonehouse will not be the norm in the future.
"Most new subdivisions will be small because the land
mass is no longer there," Caulk said. "We also want to keep the land development
under control," he said.
Linda Kinsman, executive vice president of the Williamsburg
Area Associations of Realtors, said that the larger residential developments in the county
have arrived because they were already in the county's plans.
In the past three years, more than 4,268 homes have been
listed as new construction on the Williamsburg multiple listing service, according to
Kinsman. More actually may have been built and then independently listed and sold through
the developer, Kinsman said.
Kinsman said that trend is set to continue through 2002 -
with 701 construction starts already on the books from January through July 1.
"Williamsburg is a destination place that offers a
quality of life," Kinsman said. "And more people who have visited here want to
return here because Williamsburg is close to the beach and mountains and it's culturally
very attractive."
Copyright © 2008, The Virginia Gazette
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