$3.6M deal sets stage for high-end homes at ‘hot corner’

JOHNSTOWN – Windsor builder Hartford Homes Inc. will cater to the highest reaches of the new home market with a new development near Northern Colorado’s hot corner, the junction of Interstate 25 and U.S. Highway 34.
The biggest real estate closing so far for Chrisland Inc., the $3.6 million sale of 104 acres overlooking the Big Thompson River – recently annexed by Johnstown – will bring about 170 new high-end homes to one of the most desirable land parcels in the region.
“There isn’t another piece of ground in the region that I would trade this for,” Hartford president Gary Hoover said. “It has the ambiance of rural living, but right in the core of everything that’s happening there. It’s going to be in the eye of the hurricane.”
Chrisland managing principal Nick Christensen said Hartford won the parcel in a competitive process with two other builders who made full-price offers on the land perched above the river at “2534,” as the 500-acre, mixed-use development is known.
Just north of the new development, on the north side of U.S. 34, the region’s largest open-air shopping mall is taking shape, headed for an opening late next year. On the opposite corner Medical Center of the Rockies, a new $250 million regional hospital, is going up.
Knowing that cardiologists, neurosurgeons and other specialists will want to live near the new hospital, Hoover and Christensen said the market for $1 million-plus homes was assured.
“We already have eight or nine on a waiting list,” Hoover said. “Most doctors really have to live within a few minutes of the hospital, and this puts them there.”
The parcel’s rolling terrain will mean nearly a third of it will remain as open space, preserving wildlife habitat along the Big Thompson and separating home clusters with greenbelts.
“It’s just an awesome site,” Christensen said. “You feel like you’re in the country, and the views are just incredible.”
An emerging plan in the hands of Fort Collins landscape architecture firm EDAW Inc. will accommodate a housing mix that includes:
n 30 large estate lots for homes prices exceeding $1 million;
n 30 to 40 patio homes at more than $300,000 each;
n another 100 or so single-family homes in a range from $400,000 to $600,000.
Hartford likely will draw other custom-home builders into the development process, Hoover said.
With several full-price offers on the property, Christensen said he and the owners – Dale and Dick Boehner and Steve Wyatt – evaluated the builders’ credentials and settled on Hartford.
“We all wanted someone who could really do this right,” he said. “Hartford went up against some big national companies and came out on top.”
Hartford is among Northern Colorado’s top-tier homebuilders, on track to build 74 homes this year with an average sale price of $370,000. Twenty of those are single-family homes in the half-million-dollar range near Windsor’s new Highland Meadows golf course.
The 500 acres of 2534, formerly known as Thompson Crossing, are included in a metropolitan district that funds new water and sewer line construction, including a new sewage plant substation on the development’s northern edge.
Hoover said Johnstown’s speedy approval process for the acreage should allow for home construction to start in less than a year.
“It should fall on the heels on the opening of the new shopping mall, and just prior to the opening of the hospital,” he said.
Beginning in January, the Colorado Department of Wildlife will work with Hoover on a habitat analysis of the site focusing on the Big Thompson valley, one of the region’s most important wildlife corridors.
EDAW, one of the region’s top land-planning firms, is fine-tuning a master plan for the 2534 owners, including a fast-developing commercial and health care sector on the northeastern portion of the parcel. Among the businesses that will locate there is the 48,000-square-foot Northern Colorado Rehabilitation Hospital, scheduled to open in 2006.
“EDAW is good, and they’re doing the rest of 2534, so it made sense to have them continue on with us,” Hoover said.