A ramping up of construction at a big housing development in Brea is the latest sign that developers of Orange County’s largest master-planned communities are looking to build again.
Brea Mayor Roy Moore and other officials joined executives from Chevron Corp.’s housing development unit at a groundbreaking last week.
The event follows several months of early work on the 212-acre La Floresta Brea project, which had been on hiatus for nearly five years.
Plans call for 1,350 homes as well as shops on the former oil company land in northeast Brea.
La Floresta was revived a year ago when Brea’s City Council gave final approval for the project.
Since then, Chevron Land and Development Co. has been working to sell parcels of land to homebuilders and others, as well as to prepare the land for upcoming home and retail construction, said Jim Martinez, project manager for Chevron land.
The market for new homes “isn’t really where we want it to be, but it’ll get there,” he said.
Home sales at La Floresta are expected to begin in the summer of 2012. Houses are expected to be a mix of traditional homes, condominiums, apartments and lofts.
Irvine-based Standard Pacific Corp., a onetime direct investor in La Floresta before getting out of the project in 2008, is expected to enter into a pact to buy land for homebuilding later this year, according to Martinez.
Oakmont Senior Living LLC, a Redmond, Wash.-based developer, is in escrow to buy land on the site for an assisted living project. That deal should close in a few months, according to Martinez.
“It’s certainly getting busy,” he said.
There are about 60 people working on the project now, according to Martinez. Employment should jump to several hundred people once Oakmont’s construction begins, he said.
Land’s Prior Use
Chevron got the La Floresta land—longtime home to an oil research center—in its 2005 buy of El Segundo’s Unocal Corp.
The project is made up of a 120-acre parcel along Imperial Highway and Valencia Avenue that calls for about 1,100 homes and the redevelopment of 92 acres near the Birch Hills Golf Course where 247 homes are planned.
The golf course closed earlier this month and is expected to re-open around the end of the year.
La Floresta’s development comes amid signs that some of the county’s largest land owners are looking to ramp up homebuilding again, after a few barren years of sales.
There were about 2,000 new homes sold in the county last year, with about half of that on Irvine Company land.
The county averaged about 6,000 new home sales a year in the early 2000s, according to Corona del Mar-based housing consultancy Meyers LLC.
Newport Beach-based Irvine Co. has 2,600 homes in the works at its new Stonegate and Laguna Altura developments in Irvine. The county’s largest landowner has the potential for another 4,000 homes with its Orchard Hills community in north Irvine.
Nearly 30,000 homes are planned at several large projects here in the next decade
• Irvine Co. – 9,100 homes in Irvine, Anaheim Hills
• Rancho Mission Viejo – 14,000 homes in foothills near Mission Viejo
• Five Point Communities – 4,900-plus homes at former El Toro base
• Chevron – 1,350 homes in Brea
Irvine’s Great Park Neighborhoods—a venture of Aliso Viejo’s Five Point Communities LLC—has initial plans for nearly 4,900 homes at the former El Toro Marine base.
Rancho Mission Viejo LLC, the county’s second-largest land owner, soon could start moving ahead with plans for the first phase of a 14,000-home development, according to Meyers.
Talks between Rancho Mission Viejo and builders are expected to start in a few months, with lot closings slated for mid-2012, a recent report from Meyers said.
New home sales in OC could nearly double their current pace and top the 4,000 mark by 2013 if these large projects move ahead as planned, according to the report.
La Floresta is the largest housing development on tap for North County.
Late last year, Irvine Co. signed a development pact with the city of Anaheim that could bring 2,500 homes to the city’s eastern edge with a project the developer is calling Mountain Park.
Officials for the developer said last year that Mountain Park still is three to five years away from breaking ground.
Plans for the development have been in the works for nearly 20 years and once called for as many as 8,000 homes in the Gypsum Canyon area.
That number was scaled back about five years ago when Irvine Co. revised its plans for the site near the Riverside (91) Freeway and the Foothill (241) Toll Road.
