Millennials Want Big Backyards

Don’t be fooled. Despite the trend toward urbanization, density and multifamily living, millennials still love the idea of a big backyard and less interior square footage. Tri Pointe Homes Southern California is focusing on big backyards in its newest project, Viridian at Esencia in Mission Viejo. The project has been popular with first-time homebuyers.

“Millennials have demonstrated a desire to personalize their homes, and large yards provide that opportunity, especially here in California where outdoor living is ingrained in our culture,” Brian Ortwein, project manager at TRI Pointe Homes Southern California, tells GlobeSt.com. “We try to offer as many options as possible for our customers to personalize their homes, from our cabana and casita options, to interior finish selection. Viridian has demonstrated the value of providing our customers with a thoughtfully designed options catalog and exciting design studio experience. In addition, Viridian offers a popular home technology package, HomeSmart, which we’ve teamed with Amazon on, that helps automate lights, door locks, thermostats, and more.”

Tri Pointe originally intended to target luxury move-up buyers at the community, which is an extension of the developer’s Esencia neighborhood, but instead saw the demand for larger outdoor spaces among young families. “Our goal was to reposition the community to better target young families rather than move-up buyers,” explains Ortwein. “We accomplished this by re-grading the sites from 55 feet wide lots to 47 feet, but kept the depth at 100 feet, allowing us to design homes in a more attainable price point while picking up an additional 15 home sites through the new site plan. Re-grading sites certainly did present challenges from both a cost and schedule perspective. Overall, though, the value in the re-grade was a community that appealed to a larger market segment as well as more room to build additional homes to sell.”

The repositioning of the community space allowed Tri Pointe to create homes with larger yards in the community, and target young families and millennial buyers. “With the extra rear-yard depth we’ve developed an options program to allow people to personalize their home to their life stage, lifestyle, and family size,” adds Ortwein. “It is a challenge to nail down specific options that buyers are interested in because the selections have been so diverse. Millennials value having options to choose from, and that is where we believe we have delivered a unique community with Viridian where, again, we provide many opportunities for personalization.”