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Oakbrooke Fayetteville


Sparkie

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1) It's not cost effective

2) The size of homes is increasing incredibly fast and these floor plans that were designed for smaller homes

3) Cookie-cutter materials are cheaper and easier to find, these homes will require a great deal of customization while building the standard homes you can find in Benton Co, Conway, Bryant, or Plano for that matter is very easy as most save the most expensive 20% come from cheap readily available stock materials.

4) Demand is questionable. While I would want these homes before most new ones and many others would, the majority of people want what's the current vogue. Furthermore, many people that want this style would prefer to just buy an older home in an established neighborhood, even at a premium.

I think this concept works well in places like Fayetteville and Hot Springs and part of LR that have a more stylish, artsier feel than other areas of the state. I don't think it would do well everywhere.

Brodie Creek was an interesting development in West LR consisting of fairly large, fairly expensive homes built in turn of the century San Francisco style with elegant streetscaping and a central park, pond, and gazebo. It wasn't a complete wash but people didn't want to pay the premium for those features and so though they sold the development didn't exactly take off like wildfire and later phases were greatly keyed down and cheapened. They are beautiful houses and I think they will retain their value much better than their contemporaries in surrounding neighborhoods that are the standard 1990s brick template homes common in West LR and NWA. Still, the developer would've been better off building cheaper, standard homes.

Thats depressing! Do you think that people actually like the crap that is currently being built or have they not been offered something better yet? Or do they not really care at all?

Maybe the builder of Oakbrooke can order enough material to build all the homes and gain some savings from buying in bulk.

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Thats depressing! Do you think that people actually like the crap that is currently being built or have they not been offered something better yet? Or do they not really care at all?

Maybe the builder of Oakbrooke can order enough material to build all the homes and gain some savings from buying in bulk.

Real estate development, like every other business venture, very cost driven. Homebuying is very cost-driven as well. The majority of people have crappy taste.

I don't think that in this case the materials are the primary cost, but rather the design elements involved.

The materials should all be pretty standard, and if anything, since these appear to be primarily non-masonry exteriors, the materials involved should actually be a bit cheaper.

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Good points, there are people who are going to want a type of home that will be in 'vogue'. And as was mentioned for quite a while there was certainly a big demand for larger and larger houses so then we ended up with the Mcmansions. But I do agree that something like this will work in a city like Fayetteville. I also think people who are looking for some less expensive homes will also be interested in developments like this.

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  • 1 year later...
I remember reading about something called "Rupple Row", I think to be done by the Barber Group in an earlier thread or on a website. It was supposed to be wooden "Mission" style wooden frame homes.

Is this the same thing or something different?

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I agree with Mith that these older styles (really this is 1910s=1930s) have weathered the "dated" look and have their own definitive charm and essentially like older Victorians will always be in demand. Neighborhoods in Dallas and Little Rock with this style of homes really are going at premium right now.

The problem with building homes with current trends is that ultimately in 20 years whole neighborhoods are going to look essentially the way we look at 1980s homes today (though at least we look back on these as being well-constructed compared to today's shoddy workmanship). In forty years the neighborhoods will really appear dated. This is just a way to bypass that and fit the character of the city. Not everyone will prefer to this to the current vogue but many will. I think buyers of projects like these will see that in 10-20 years they will get a better return on their investment than other homebuyers and that would be part of my motivation to buy a home in a project like this.

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I tend to think of the Craftsman style house as being a timeless American vernacular style.

The period in which they were commonly built spanned several decades so its hard to pin their construction down to a particular decade.

There is something timeless about the simplicity of lines and materials as well.

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Fayetteville isn't as overbuilt as Bentonville/Rogers, which is expected since there's much less development occuring in Fayetteville than in Bentonville/Rogers. So, it's actually a good thing Fayetteville is trailing Ben/Rog in growth so they don't end up overbuilt.
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Fayetteville isn't as overbuilt as Bentonville/Rogers, which is expected since there's much less development occuring in Fayetteville than in Bentonville/Rogers. So, it's actually a good thing Fayetteville is trailing Ben/Rog in growth so they don't end up overbuilt.
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At the last Skyline Report I attended a few months ago, they said that Fayetteville/Washington county had around a 22 month supply of residences. They said that is slightly over built but it could be worse. Rogers/Bentonville is much worse. At this time they had a 66 month supply of housing and I don't know if that has changed in the past few months.

As for commercial space, the same is true for Benton county. Way too much empty space. Meanwhile Fayetteville needed more class A commercial space. So they were just about right according to the report.

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  • 10 months later...
Those are some awful numbers for Benton County. Washington County sure seems less overbuilt to me--but 22 mos supply seems like a lot, too. Differentiation is the key if you want to sell something now. I like that. I think it's good for the area. When demand exceeds supply, the developers and builders throw up ugly crap because they can get away with it. When times are tough, they cannot do that.
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