A WORK IN PROGRESS
Karen Eminger is still living in a construction zone, three years after building a home in a new development. But she’s happy, because Brighton is on track to become the city’s largest subdivision in the next decade, with 6,400 homes and 15,000 residents.
The landscape was still barren — just open Prairie, a few curving roads and a developer’s plan for the future — when Karen Eminger and her husband decided to take a chance on Saskatoon’s newest neighbourhood.
Almost three years later, their home sits in the middle of a vast construction site, surrounded by houses in varying stages of completion on the edge of what is expected to become the city’s largest subdivision.
“When we first broke ground here, we were the only house, pretty much. There was one other house, not in the whole area but in our phase. There was really nobody else here,” Eminger said this week in an interview.
“Then over the winter of last year, all these houses popped up — so when we moved in (in May), we weren’t in the middle of the Prairies. It was full all around us already, so that made us feel better.”
Driving through Brighton, south of Highway 5 and northeast of Briarwood, evidence of construction is everywhere. The movie theatre is finished, the retail complex is well underway, and once-empty streets are now lined with houses.
But if the construction crews have continued working despite a significant economic slowdown, the sight of muddy fields stretching to the horizon is evidence of how much work remains for one of the country’s largest developers.
Brighton is the brainchild of the same developer responsible for building Stonebridge, which was fully built out in 2015, more than six years ahead of schedule, a pace largely attributable to a major natural resource boom over the preceding decade.
Dream Development, a subsidiary of Dream Unlimited Corp., started work on its new project in 2014. It expects the completed neighbourhood on Saskatoon’s east side, south of Highway 5, to contain 6,400 homes and about 15,000 residents.
Over the last two years, the developer has said it expects the massive project — Stonebridge has about 4,800 homes — to take about a decade to finish, a point Dream’s Saskatoon-based land development manager, Brad Zurevinski, reiterated this week.
In an interview, Zurevinski admitted he has concerns about the provincial economy, which has been hammered by weak oil and potash prices in recent years, but said Dream is still on track to finish the development in about 10 years.
“It’s really hard to estimate these things, but I would put the estimate about the same — we’re trending pretty good, and there’s no right or wrong number to finish a neighbourhood. We’re very happy with the pace Brighton has been seeing,” he said.
Eminger acknowledged that the economy is “not the greatest” and the housing market is “in the tank right now,” but said she was pleasantly surprised by the steady stream of people looking at — and buying — houses in Brighton.
Christine Graves, who moved into the area with her husband and young son last spring, echoed that view. She said their decision was prompted in part by the promise of future development, and while the economy is weak there are few warning signs.
“If it does take time, we’re still very happy here in this area. But the fact that the phase three of the development is when that school comes in and all that other residential comes in — that’s kind of what we’re banking on,” Graves said.
Zurevinski’s view is shared by the City of Saskatoon, which estimated last December — when the neighbourhood was just under nine per cent built out — that its residential lots would be fully serviced and ready for occupancy by 2027.
City records indicate that 354 residential building permits, representing 244 units, have been issued for the neighbourhood in 2018, up slightly from the 344 residential building permits issued over the course of 2017.
Although Dream’s plan leaves room for a school, the government has not committed to build one in the neighbourhood.
In the spring of 2017, there were 140-odd homes built in Brighton; Zurevinski said about 400 projects have been started to date. Construction is a constant presence in Brighton, but it’s unclear exactly how many homes are selling.
According to the Saskatoon Region Association of Realtors, the first Multiple Listing System (MLS) listings were reported in June 2016; at the end of that year, 106 homes had been listed and 13 had been sold.
In 2017, the association reported this week, there were 284 listings and 53 sales; this year, there have been 517 listings and 71 sales. MLS data does not capture private sales or builders selling directly to clients; nor does it identify homes listed twice.
Compared to Stonebridge, which came onto the market at the right time to take advantage of soaring resource prices, Brighton exists in a much different real estate market, SRAR CEO Jason Yochim said in an interview.
“I think they anticipated it would take off a lot faster. They had high expectations for a very large neighbourhood, but I think the economy and challenges in obtaining mortgage approval and money has slowed that down a little bit,” Yochim said.
Zurevinski said Brighton is outperforming other new neighbourhoods, largely because of Dream’s approach to building commercial and retail establishments — 19 are slated to open next year — and doing landscaping as early as possible.
According to people who have spent the last several months living in Brighton, the benefits of comparatively affordable new homes and a growing community of like-minded people seem to outweigh lingering fears about slow or stagnant growth.
“It’s a long-term purchase, right? We’re here for the long term,” Graves said.
There’s no right or wrong number to finish a neighbourhood. We’re very happy with the pace Brighton has been seeing.