The New Home Company hit a particular residential market exactly right with its recently opened 50-acre, 175-home Lambert Ranch in Irvine. In its first three weeks on the market, 32 homes in the $1 million range were sold in what New Home Company CEO Larry Webb calls “the most expensive neighborhood in Irvine aside from Shady Canyon.”
How did he do it? Webb credits his company’s experience selling homes in the Irvine Company’s adjacent community of Woodbury. “We found that 75% of the homebuyers in Woodbury were Asian, and that 80% of those were Chinese,” he says. “The buyers love Irvine because they desire a master-planned, upscale community with excellent schools.”
Catering to research done for the Asian market, the homes on the Lambert Ranch – a non-Irvine Company window of land in Irvine – provide the opportunity for housing multi-generational families. They are large – 2,700 to 4,800 square feet, include stand-alone casitas as a standard part of the package, and one of the three neighborhoods includes an opportunity to purchase two homes on a double lot without a dividing fence.
New Home also found that in addition to the usual kitchen opening to the family room, these buyers want a part of the kitchen that can be closed off from cooking odors; that homebuyers do not like Mello-Roos taxes; and that buyers of $1 million homes want to be able to personalize their homes as much as possible. They want a gated community.
Webb says that Lambert Ranch can satisfy all of these desires and hence the rapid sales.
