In an eye-opening sale for the neighborhood, a newly built Pelican Hill estate has sold for $22.7 million.
The sale is a signal of more top-dollar deals to come in the Pelican Hill and nearby Pelican Crest communities in Newport Coast, where several under-construction homes are expected to hit the market this year, according to area brokers.
“The Pelicans are older but very established communities where we will start to see a transfer in prices that will rival, and even beat, Crystal Cove prices,” Coldwell Banker’s Tim Smith said.
“The homes that will come on the market this year will reset expectations” for Pelican Hill and Pelican Crest, Smith added.
New Estate
The recently traded home at 7 Harbor Light is the “only new construction estate located within Newport Coast’s prized Pelican Hill gated community,” according to marketing materials for the nearly 11,000-square-foot home.
Rex McKown and Marcy Weinstein of Compass represented the undisclosed sellers of the six-bedroom, seven-bathroom home, which traded hands about a month ago.
The undisclosed buyer was represented by Mark Stoll of Sotheby’s International Realty.
The home is on a 0.6-acre lot and wrapped construction in 2020 with interior design led by Barclay Butera. Though the home sat on the market for more than a year, it traded for about $2,070 per square foot, a record PSF price for single-lot homes in the neighborhood, according to brokers. Other notable deals in the community include Dean Koontz’s sale of 1 Canyon Terrace, which sold in April 2020 for $50 million. That home, bought by local mortgage exec Glenn Stearns, included more than one lot.
The Harbor Light deal marks “what people are willing to pay for new construction,” according to local broker Paul Daftarian of Luxe Real Estate.
“This is the only new home to hit the market for several years in Pelican Hill,” Daftarian added.
Pelican Construction
That’s expected to change this year, when several homes complete construction and come online in the gated neighborhoods of Pelican Hill and Pelican Crest, two of the neighborhoods surrounding the Resort at Pelican Hill, the Irvine Co. development that includes a hotel, a golf course, spa, retail and meeting space.
Homes in the communities kicked off construction in the late 1990s.
“Local buyers previously didn’t want to pay Crystal Cove prices in Pelican, but that will change with the new inventory of custom homes,” Smith said.
Just one lot remains to be developed in the two communities, where three homes are currently on the market; the priciest being 1 Pelican Crest, a nearly 13,500-square-foot estate with a $45 million price tag.
The newly remodeled home was first built in 2010 and counts “arguably the best view in the neighborhood,” according to Daftarian, who has the listing along with Michael Balliet.
Shrinking Inventory
New homes in Orange County have never been in more demand, as the region continues to face shrinking inventory and increasing interest from out-of-town buyers in the wake of the pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic, there were about 3,500 to 4,000 single-family homes on the market in Orange County, according to Smith. Now, that figure has been slashed to 750 homes.
“We have one-fifth of the inventory with historic demand,” Smith said.
Meanwhile, more than half of the total buyers that Smith worked with last year were from outside of California, a much higher portion than prior years.
“All eyes continue to be on Orange County,” Smith said. “It’s the most undervalued major metropolitan area in the U.S.”Â
