Celebrating 50 Top-Selling Masterplans

By Jody Kahn, Senior Vice President, and Devyn Bachman, Senior Research Analyst

Congratulations to the leadership at all 50 top-selling communities, who sold at least 320 homes per community last year—nearly one home per day and slightly higher than in 2017. Roughly 28,000 home buyers purchased new homes in these top 50 masterplans in 2018.

Click here to download the Top 50 Master-Planned Communities of 2018 Rankings

During 2018, we devoted a lot of time to masterplans. We:

• Wrote about the mega-masterplan trend
• Summarized the shift toward, organic, unplanned, authentic, experience-based (and inexpensive!) amenities
• Photographed and analyzed 12 masterplans as part of our DesignLens™ coverage, which now includes more than 100 masterplans
• Devoted episodes 6 and 7 of our podcast series to successful masterplan amenity trends
• Garnered the insights of the top masterplan developers at our Housing Design Summit, an invitation-only event for executives at developers, builders, building products industrial designers, architects, and others interested in profitably developing the most innovative and desirable homes and communities in the country. Our next event will be in March 2019.

Developer Success

Master-planned communities continue to dominate the new home sales scene, achieving sales and pricing premiums for offering a well thought out, highly desirable lifestyle to homeowners in all life stages. For decades, our team has been helping developers maximize sales by segmenting the community by life stage, price range, lot size, and a lifestyle built around the amenities and programming suitable for the local market.

Home Builder Success—and a Little Bit of Pain

Home builders love building in the masterplans that are done right and can also pay a steep price when the segmentation results in too much competition. The recent sales slowdown has created challenges for many of these builders, some of whom are losing sales to the competition. Our Sales Booster services have been revealing all sorts of easy-to-fix issues, and occasionally the need to lower prices or increase incentives. When times are tough, the communities that are doing everything right sell the most homes.

Positioning for Strength in 2019

For help maximizing sales and price in 2019, please contact our local consulting leaders or Ken Perlman, our Consulting Principal who is Chair of the ULI Residential Neighborhood Council and has become (in our opinion) the national expert on successful masterplan segmentation and amenity programs, working closely with our local leadership.

For more information on the rankings, please contact Jody Kahn or Devyn Bachman, who passionately lead our efforts to summarize housing market conditions MSA by MSA for all of our clients.

For information on our Housing Design Summit, please contact our DesignLens™ Manager Jenni Lantz.

Click here to view prior years’ top 50 rankings and press releases.

We invest significant time and effort to identify all top-selling masterplans; however, some developers and investors don’t choose to participate. John Burns Real Estate Consulting congratulates the developers and home builders that achieved our Top 50 ranking. Please contact Jody Kahn at jkahn@realestateconsulting.com or Devyn Bachman at dbachman@realestateconsulting.com for information on any of the top masterplans. They can connect you to the appropriate person.