Green Acres

green acres

Agriculture-focused real estate developments are springing up across the United States as Americans seek an alternative to assembly-line homes in traditional suburban developments. Here’s how three “agri-burbs” attract residents seeking the simple life.

By christiNe BirKNer | staFF writer

 cbirkner@ama.org

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Often built around parks or golf courses, residential developments have blanketed the landscape around American cities since the 1950s. But over the last decade, some real estate developers have opted to put a different kind of green space at the center of their new communities: organic farms, verdant meadows and cow pastures.

And the housing within those communities often is customized rather than cookie-cutter.

So-called “agri-burbs” have broken the mold for residential developments and are springing up outside metropolitan areas across the country, catering to eco-minded consumers who want to embrace a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. These green developments often forego backyards in favor of communal property, turn to Mother Nature for guidance on homes’ design and siting, and build social calendars around farmers markets and festivals—but they’re anything but earthy-crunchy. Homes often feature state-of-the-art, energy-efficient appliances. Communities tout their award-winning restaurants and design aesthetic.

Undeveloped lots can cost upwards of $500,000 and home prices run into the millions.

These developments have hit on a trend toward simpler, more wholesome living and their eco-focused amenities alone can attract potential homebuyers’ interest, but sustainable developments sometimes have a tough row to hoe to reach their narrow target audiences: sustainability-minded consumers with enough money to afford the communities’ take on organically luxe living. Here’s how three developers are positioning themselves for profitable growth.

Serenbe: ‘If They See It, They’ll Get It’

Serenbe, a sustainable community located 32 miles southwest of Atlanta in the Chattahoochee Hill Country, took root when founders Steve and Marie Nygren, who both have backgrounds in the hotel and hospitality industry,

for the preservation of 70% of the 65,000 acres in Chattahoochee Hill Country, with 70% of Serenbe’s 1,000 acres preserved as green space. Serenbe’s 200 residents live in eco-friendly homes that surround rolling hills, lakes, an organic farm and horse stables.

Serenbe works to boost awareness of those pastoral landscapes, along with its inn, art galleries, restaurants and events, to draw potential residents there. “We’re not in midtown Atlanta. People have to be somewhat intentional about their visit to Serenbe, so we start with giving them a reason to come down other than just to look at houses,” Berta says. To get the word out, Berta employs social media and e-mail tactics, with nearly 7,000 Facebook fans and 30,000 subscribers to Serenbe’s digital newsletter, but she scrapped a direct mail campaign targeting Atlanta and surrounding zip codes several years ago because “we realized that Serenbe has more heart than that. It takes somebody having an emotional reaction to Serenbe. They see something written about it; they want to try that chicken pot pie that’s made from farm-fresh ingredients. You can’t communicate that through something like direct mail,” she says.

The Inn at Serenbe lures visitors, and potential residents, by promising a relaxing stay in the countryside, as do its award-winning restaurants: The Farmhouse at Serenbe, The Hil, run by renowned chef Hilary White, and the Blue Eyed Daisy Bakeshop. “[The Blue Eyed Daisy] opened when Magnolia Bakery in Greenwich Village was getting all that press from their cupcakes being the best in the world. My silly, little pitch to some food writers was: ‘You guys have to come down and try the Blue Eyed Daisy Bakeshop’s cupcake. I promise it’s better than Magnolia Bakery’s.’ That worked for a couple of press hits,” Berta says.

Weekly farmers markets and festivals, including the annual May Day street festival and the Southern Chefs Series in the fall, also generate crowds. “I’m intentional about choosing vendors who have good lists, people I know will blast their list and say, ‘We’re going to be at Serenbe this weekend; come down and see us,’ ” Berta says. Once people arrive at Serenbe, “the conversation shifts from, ‘Let’s go see the Blue Eyed Daisy’s cupcake and try Hilary White’s new restaurant,’ and people start connecting the dots to what Serenbe is all about,” she says.

Sustainability is a big part of what Serenbe is about. Its homes are built to green building standards, with minimal disturbance to the land and natural terrain, and are positioned in relation to the sun for maximum energy efficiency and natural heating and cooling. Water-smart appliances are installed in its homes to conserve water.

There are no lawns and there’s minimal landscaping to keep pesticides out of the development, and residents can grow

“It’s all about getting people to come to Serenbe. If I can get them there to see it, they’ll get it. The stories are a vehicle to get people to come to Serenbe and then Serenbe sells itself.”

TUCKER BERTA, Serenbe

Bundoran Farm, near Charlottesville, Va., reserves 90% of its 2,300 acres as protected land.

opened the Serenbe Bed and Breakfast, later called the Inn at Serenbe, in 1996. The Nygrens had purchased the surrounding land a few years prior in an effort to combat urban sprawl. “Atlanta is the poster child for urban sprawl and every area around metro Atlanta was affected by it, with the exception of the Chattahoochee Hill Country.

Steve rallied all of the major landowners in the area and said: ‘Sprawl is headed this way. We’ve got to do something about it,’ ” says Tucker Berta, director of communications at Serenbe.

Nygren and other landowners helped pass the Chattahoochee Hill Country Overlay Plan, which calls

their own produce on an organic community farm. Serenbe also is the site of HGTV’s Green Home for 2012, an ecofriendly Southern farmhouse that will be given away to an HGTV contest winner in April. HGTV reached out to Serenbe for the project because Serenbe’s philosophy was in line with the network’s green home philosophy, Berta says.

David Nelson, senior vice president of Stockton, Calif.based A.G. Spanos Cos., a developer of master-planned communities that is developing The Preserve, a sustainable, farm-based community in Stockton, says organic, sustainable initiatives like Serenbe’s are an attractive real estate selling point. “There’s a real opportunity for farm-to-table or

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farm-to-fork lifestyle, underscoring how community residents can get involved in a community-based farm. It differentiates that community from the other 10 that are similar to it.”

Serenbe’s sustainability efforts communicate its values of “nature, passion, creativity and community,” the last of which took on added importance when the recession hit in 2008, Berta says. “When the downturn in the market started, people started re-evaluating. People started thinking, Do I need this huge house with a massive mortgage and huge lawn in a McMansion subdivision, where I have to drive to Starbucks that’s two miles away, or would I rather live in a place like Serenbe where I can walk everywhere and where people seem to know each other as neighbors?”

Serenbe’s marketing efforts emphasize that personal interaction and sense of community. “After people live [at Serenbe] for a while, they say their favorite thing about living there is the people. Everyone knows each other because there are so many opportunities for interaction,” Berta says.

“It’s all about getting people to come to Serenbe. If I can get them there to see it, they’ll get it. The stories are a vehicle to get people to come to Serenbe and then Serenbe sells itself.”

throughout 2011, Adams says. “That gave us affirmation that the concept was right on,” he says. Of the 30 total lots sold, six homes are occupied, three are under construction, and two are in the design and review process.

The design and review process for Bundoran’s homes and home sites is painstaking. Home sites are plotted to protect the environmental surroundings, which include pastures with grazing cattle and apple orchards. Solar orientation, prevailing winds, creeks and sloping hillsides are taken into consideration to maximize the land’s natural features while protecting water quality. Builders and architects must submit to a design review process, adhering to green building guidelines and a pattern book of architectural styles that Bundoran deems appropriate for a farm-like setting. These design guidelines maintain the overall brand image for the development, Adams says. “It gives somebody who buys at Bundoran the comfort that the house that’s built across the meadow from them is going to go through the same design and review process that they did, and it gives them a security in their investment.”

Bundoran’s design standards fit into its overall marketing message as well, says Susan Payne, partner at Payne, Ross & Associates, the Charlottesville-based agency that markets Bundoran Farm. “The brand

“People who live at Bundoran … like the fact that the vast majority of the property is untouched and it offers privacy. It’s similar to a community that would offer different amenities. This amenity just happens to be open space.” sUsan PaYne, Payne, Ross & associates Bundoran Farm: Open space is the amenity

Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains just outside of Charlottesville, Va., Bundoran Farm is a preservation development in which more than 90% of its 2,300 acres is protected land. Like the Nygrens at Serenbe, Charles Adams, one of the founders of Bundoran and its co-general manager, was inspired to create the development after watching rural landscape disappear into urban sprawl. “Towns exploded and I watched one beautiful farm after another get swallowed up and developed.

I said, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’ ” he says. Adams used his first agridevelopment, Homestead Preserve in Virginia, as a blueprint for Bundoran when he started construction in mid-2007 with partner Bob Baldwin.

“The timing couldn’t have been much worse to launch a new real estate development,” Adams says. Ten families initially purchased $500,000 lots in 2008 and 2009, but then Bundoran went for almost two years without a single sale. “Nobody was comfortable closing with all of the uncertainty in our economy. It concerned us whether it was a concept issue or a market issue, or both,” Adams says. Bundoran Farm went into foreclosure in mid-2011, but developers moved ahead with the project and Bundoran sold an additional 20 lots

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image is definitely very rural in nature. We want to show the target audience that we haven’t made compromises [on design quality],” she says. To that end, Bundoran’s print and broadcast ads direct potential residents to Bundoran’s website, where images of its homes set amid open spaces, rolling hills and grazing cattle reinforce that message. “The imagery we use [shows] people that it’s a very sustainable property and they’ll have a great quality of life,” Payne says.

Bundoran’s target audience consists of 45- to 65-year-olds, many of whom grew up on a farm and have great memories of farm life, or who are looking for room to roam for their children or grandchildren, Adams says. To market sustainability in general, Bundoran established the Baldwin Center for Preservation and Development, a nonprofit foundation that focuses on agricultural preservation. The Baldwin Center hosts events, field trips and educational programs for local residents, schools and universities to teach the surrounding community about the sustainable management of natural resources, innovative farming practices, responsible development practices and low-impact living. News and educational materials on sustainable living practices also are included on the center’s

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“The market is headed in the direction to reconnect with the earth.”

DaViD nelsOn, a.g. spanos cos

serenbe’s 200 residents live in eco-friendly homes nestled amidst rolling hills, lakes, an organic farm and horse stables.

blog. “The blog promotes sustainability rather than home site sales. It gets them thinking about living in a community that is environmentally sensitive and eco-sophisticated,” Payne says.

The Baldwin Center, along with Bundoran’s ads and website, all adhere to Bundoran’s overarching marketing philosophy: to promote the higher quality of life and rural setting that potential residents crave.

“People who live at Bundoran … like the fact that the vast majority of the property is untouched and it offers privacy,” Payne says. “It’s similar to a community that would offer different amenities. This amenity just happens to be open space.”

sterling ranch: ‘Building a Lifestyle’

Developers at Sterling Ranch, a 3,400-acre community 30 minutes from Denver in Colorado’s Douglas County, will start building homes in 2013, and the residents who fill them will embrace a lifestyle focused on sustainability and outdoor pursuits, says Harold Smethills, the development’s managing director. “People come to Denver for a lifestyle, its trails, its open space, its hiking, its biking, its fishing, its hunting—it’s an active outdoor lifestyle. We’re building a lifestyle.”

Smethills and his team found a location for their development in Douglas County, which Smethills says is the fastest-growing county in America, and then based on population research, they determined Sterling Ranch’s target demographics: first- and last-time homebuyers, single moms and women. “We looked at the aging boomer and Denver’s one of the largest [cities] in the country [with aging boomers] as a percentage. Twenty-six percent of that home-buying market is a single woman and the second-largest cohort of the home-buying market is a single woman with children, so we [determined] their wants and needs to design it around them,” he says.

The Sterling Ranch team conducted formal and informal focus groups.

“We started from the premise that the purpose of real estate development is to solve regional problems,” Smethills says. “My wife and brother-inlaw sat in hundreds of living rooms listening to what people wanted.”

From those interviews, the Sterling Ranch team created an 11-point outline of what local residents were looking for in the development, including homes that would let them see the sunrise and sunset, homes that were not built on ridges and, because of the current water shortage in Colorado, a development that kept water conservation in mind. “In this area, they have huge sewer problems and water problems. They had neighbors trucking water because the wells were failing,” Smethills says. “The way we looked at this from the beginning was, we’ll develop a community that solves regional problems and therefore gets regional support.”

The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) and Colorado State Land Board backed Sterling Ranch in part because of its land plan, which allows for 37% open space, including wildlife corridors and parks, as well as its water conservation plan. “The most important issue of the future is going to be clean water, so we developed a community that [will] set a

standard for water sustainability,” Smethills says. Sterling Ranch developers studied successful sustainable water developments around the country and conducted a year-long study with the CWCB called “A Holistic Approach to Sustainable Water Management in Northwest Douglas County.” The study found that building water conservation into a land plan can cut water demand by 50 to 60%.

Sterling Ranch’s renewable water and groundwater plan, designed to prolong the life of groundwater resources, includes water conservation principles for yard size, plant selection, and the size and placement of parks and other green spaces. Sterling Ranch also will serve as a testing site for rainwater harvesting, a practice that captures rainwater from roofs and other surfaces to be used for outdoor irrigation. Water conservation often leads to lower water bills, a benefit that Sterling Ranch also will communicate to potential residents, Smethills says. “It’s intelligent sustainability. [We] worked on our sustainability principles for them to convey some economic benefit to the homebuyer.”

That’s a wise move, says Travis Bradford, founder and president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a Chicago-based nonprofit that researches technology and processes used in promoting sustainable development. “There’s a lot of rational anxiety about resource security and resource prices,” he says. “People are beginning to realize that doing things around sustainable water development and sustainable energy is increasingly making good economic sense.”

Communicating sustainable Benefits

Economic benefits and consumers’ increased desire to get back to nature will benefit all of these agri-burbs, experts say. “A lot of suburban communities have been developed over the last couple of decades with big, sprawling open spaces that have a tendency to be underutilized, and millennials’ desire for more organic products and to be more connected to nature [means] an ag-based community makes a lot more sense than an underutilized open space,” A.G. Spanos’ Nelson says.

Bradford agrees. “For many people, [these developments] resonate more than a 1950s- or even 1990s-style suburban development,” he says. “Most people think this is a touchy-feely, feel-good motivation, and certainly people enjoy aesthetically pleasing, integrated home environments, [but] it’s also appealing to economic interests.” Therefore, marketers at these developments need to emphasize those economic benefits, he says. “Energy efficiency locks in savings in the investment in the home. [Developers should] appeal to the rational understanding that these are good long-term investment decisions and that they are cost-effective.”

Wallet-related benefits aside, agri-developments likely will remain popular for years to come, Nelson says. “The market is headed in the direction to reconnect with the earth.” So move over, McMansions and urban sprawl: Energy-efficient homes nestled into green acres are the new suburban ideal. m

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