Developers of a sprawling, once-foreclosed community have lined up the first builders to put up homes there.
The Olympia Companies has sold 80 acres at Skye Canyon — a fraction of the 1,700-acre project site — to Pulte Homes and Woodside Homes, executives said today.
The sales price was not disclosed, nor did officials say how many houses Pulte and Woodside would build.
But the deal would bring the first homes to the long-delayed project, planned for 9,000 homes in the northwest corner of the Las Vegas Valley.
The community, between Grand Teton Drive and U.S. 95., is slated to have hiking and biking trails, as well as gambling and other commercial properties. More homebuilders are expected to be announced soon, and the first model homes are slated to open next fall, according to today’s news release.
Skye Canyon is one of several formerly stalled master-planned communities that are coming back to life in Southern Nevada. During the recession, these mini-cities went bankrupt, were seized through foreclosure or were left on the drawing board.
They include 2,200-acre Cadence, in Henderson; 2,700-acre Park Highlands, in North Las Vegas; and 1,900-acre Inspirada, in Henderson.
No one expects a glut of new subdivisions anytime soon, as the projects will be built in phases and aren’t scheduled to be finished for at least a decade.
Developers usually build homes nowadays only after people agree to buy them, as opposed to the boom years when they frequently started construction without buyers lined up.
Nevertheless, the investors are gearing up as the valley’s homebuilding market, after recovering from the depths of the recession, slows considerably this year.
Southern Nevada builders sold about 4,850 new homes this year through October, down 22 percent from the same period last year, according to Las Vegas-based Home Builders Research. The median price of October’s closings was $287,588, up about 1 percent year-over-year.
A consortium of developers bought the Skye Canyon site for $510 million in 2005 at a federal auction. But before they built anything, the former Wachovia Bank foreclosed on the property in fall 2008, less than two weeks after Lehman Brothers Holdings went bankrupt and helped set off the national financial crisis.
Skye Canyon is now owned by Las Vegas-based Olympia, which developed the high-end Southern Highlands community, and New York investment firms Stonehill Capital Management and Spectrum Group Management. They bought the site at a steep discount.