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City Ventures Sees Green in Eco-Friendly Homes

You could call City Ventures the Prius of homebuilders.

The Irvine-based developer and homebuilder, formed in 2009, has been on the forefront of adding eco-friendly features to its stable of new-home offerings across the state, most of which fall on the affordable side when compared to other new-home offerings in their respective markets.

The company’s stated goal is to build sustainable communities whose homes are designed to reduce occupants’ electric bills and eliminate gas bills altogether.

Adding a do-good factor to the home-buying process adds oomph to the company’s business strategy, according Phil Kerr, chief executive of the company’s homebuilding operations.

“People want to feel good about buying their homes,” Kerr said.

And for City Ventures, “We think this is the right way to build at this point.”

The strategy appears to be working. The privately held company is on pace to sell about 600 homes this year, and is growing at about 30% to 40% annually, according to Kerr, who said the company controls about 3,000 home lots.

About 30 of the company’s 120 employees work out of its Orange County headquarters; City Ventures’ main office is at the Park Place mixed-use campus near John Wayne Airport.

It also has divisions in Los Angeles, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Long Beach, Riverside

City Ventures, which largely builds on infill locations rather than creating larger master-planned communities, has one project selling in OC, a mix of attached and detached homes at the Luna development in La Habra. It’s also been an active builder in Santa Ana and Garden Grove over the past few years.

Its newest communities, which opened over the past two months, are outside Orange County.

Last month, it took the wraps off the 40-unit Huxton townhome project in downtown Long Beach. Between Broadway and Third Street, it’s among the first for-sale home communities to be built in the city’s downtown district in nearly a decade.

City Ventures is also billing it as Long Beach’s first solar, all-electric new-home neighborhood.

Beyond use of solar panels, notable environmentally friendly features are high-performance appliances that require less power to operate; high-efficiency LED lighting; dual-glaze windows with ultraviolet coating; water-saving plumbing fixtures; and an advanced framing technology that uses less lumber and therefore saves trees, the company said.

Other standard features the company lays out include cutting-edge thermostats for climate control; radiant-barrier roof sheathing; HVAC systems tested for optimal refrigerant charge and duct performance; and low-to-zero volatile organic compounds in paints, stains and adhesives.

Huxton’s homes start in the upper $600,000s. Kerr said most eco-friendly features are relatively small investments, costing less than $20,000 per unit all together.

“We’ve figured out how to do it [inexpensively],” he said.

Keeping costs down is part of a company strategy that offers renters aspiring to buy homes a good business proposition, according to Kerr.

“We want to go [and build] in locations where the median price point to buy is close to what they’d pay for rent,” Kerr said.

As of last week, about a quarter of Huxton’s homes were sold.

Along with the Long Beach offerings, City Ventures’ new Los Angeles County projects include a 46-unit townhome development in Gardena where homes start at about $600,000.

In the Inland Empire, it recently took the wraps off the 171-unit Tramonte project in Riverside’s Citrus Heights community.

Homes there are substantially larger than the L.A. offerings, up to 5,279 square feet, and start around $650,000.

Kerr said the company’s getting strong interest in them from OC residents, particularly older homeowners who don’t need to worry about a work commute—and who can cash out of their OC homes.

No IPO

City Ventures was formed after the last housing downturn by Chairman Craig Atkins (see Luxury Homes, page 86), founder of now-defunct Irvine land brokerage O’Donnell/Atkins, and Chief Executive Mark Buckland, co-founder of Seal Beach-based infill builder Olson Cos.

The builder and its land-owning subsidiary filed to go public in 2013 when it was selling under 200 homes a year. It pulled the estimated $150 million initial public offering plans the following year, saying an IPO was “not in the best interests of the company.”

There are no plans to take the builder public now, said Kerr, who previously worked for Newport Beach-based developer Intracorp.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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