More homes are planned along Grand Parkway
With the new 385-acre Exxon Mobil Corp. campus and a segment of the Grand Parkway open between Tomball and The Woodlands, developers are looking to attract new homebuyers.
After a couple years of buying up land in Tomball next to The Woodlands’ Village of Creekside Park, J. Alan Kent Development is developing a 286-acre community called Lakes at Creekside. The first model homes opened last month at Lakes at Creekside, which is currently underway off Kuykendahl and Hufsmith and is zoned for the Independent School District.
“We play off The Woodlands. We abut The Woodlands on most of our developments that we do in the north part of town. There are a lot of people who love The Woodlands; it’s a great community. But there are a lot of people who don’t want to necessarily live in The Woodlands, so we give them an alternative,” said Alan Kent, founder
of J. Alan Kent Development.
The developer completed its first phase of development last year when it developed and sold 148 lots to three homebuilders, M/I Homes, Trendmaker Homes and Village Builders. The price point for a home at Lakes at Creekside varies greatly, ranging from $300,000 to more than $1 million.
At the master-planned community’s completion, Lakes at Creekside will feature 600 single-family homes, eight lakes, a recreation center, a park, trails, sidewalks, splash pad and a pool.
The development, as of now, is strictly residential with no mixed-use or commercial real estate planned. Although no commercial development is planned, residents will be close enough to amenities in The Woodlands’ Creekside, which features several restaurants, a new H-E-B and a Walgreens off Kuykendahl.
The community is expected to be fully developed within four years, Kent said.
“We’ve seen a great uptick in our traffic, especially for the last quarter for our homes that are $1 million and up. We had two or three lookers a weekend. Now, we have 14 or 15 people who are real buyers that are looking to buy a house,” Kent said. “If you’ve driven the Grand Parkway to get to here, it makes it a lot easier for someone from the Katy area or literally any area to get north of town now.”
For Will Holder, president of Trendmaker Homes and a homebuilder in The Woodlands, the decision to build in the community of Lakes at Creekside was easy. The importance of the Grand Parkway, the Exxon Mobil move to Springwoods and the economic growth in south Montgomery County can’t be understated in the decision to develop Lakes at Creekside, the plans for which were set in motion less than four years ago.
Increased mobility in and out of the area and jobs were highly attractive, and offering residents high-end amenities via The Woodlands just a stone’s throw away was also a major selling point.
Trendmaker expects to build 23 homes during the first phase of Lakes at Creekside’s development. Its first model home will open in April, and homes will sit in the $500,000 range.
“Wherever transportation corridors have been developed in Houston, these are the life blood of residential communities. … People will migrate to these areas where they have great access,” Holder said. “Additionally, The Woodlands itself has its own gravitational pull — the retail, the job base, dining — every component of what you want for a place to live.”
With The Woodlands nearing residential buildout, selling off the last few hundred lots to homebuilders by 2017 or 2018, developers and homebuilders on the outskirts of The Woodlands feel like they can finally take a breath and work on other projects.
“The Woodlands has, for a very long time, sucked the oxygen out of the area, and projects like Lakes at Creekside are just a natural process for projects around a master-planned community,” Holder said. “When (The Woodlands Development Co.) winds down and that mantle is picked up by surrounding projects, we have to take a long-term look and we want to be up there and have a presence.”
Economic uncertainty has now shrouded much of the greater Houston area, named the top single-family housing market in the county according to Metrostudy, due to sharp drop in oil prices, going from more than $100 a barrel in mid-2014 to right around $30 a barrel for the West Texas Intermediate crude benchmark throughout February.
The slump has caused even The Woodlands Development Co. to put its high-end condominium development, Treviso at Waterway Square, on hold.
But the oil slump isn’t enough to slow down home construction for Holder, who has been in the business for 35 years.
Both Holder and Kent have seen the booms and busts in their decades of professional home development experience, and they think the pendulum will swing again.
Even if the greater Houston area starts to feel the pinch from oil and falls from its throne as the No. 1 single-family home market in the country, Kent and homebuilders like Holder are betting that Lakes at Creekside will still be a success.
“I’ve thought the sky was falling over the last 35 years, but now I realize that the market never stays the same. If it feels bad, get ready. It’s fixing to feel good,” Holder said.