Earlier this month, KNEB News did a follow-up story on the eight townhouse buildings on Circle Drive that have been sitting vacant since their October ribbon cutting, and we recently had the opportunity to sit down with developer Cliff Mesner to delve into the issue.
He says his company has been doing housing developments across the state for 30 years, and says he’s seen similar wait periods for homes to begin selling.
“I went for 11 months without having a sale in Aurora and then had three sales in one week and two the next week. And now I have three of them that are trying to buy units and they’re all sold. And all the other units that we’ve built across the state are all sold, but it all takes a while to get started.”
He also noted that it does cost more to build new construction than it does in the eastern half of the state.
“And I think there are several factors that go into that. One is you don’t have as robust a housing industry. And I think a lot of that is that you’re competing with the front range and your your employers out here have to hire people against the front range wages and that’s hard to get them hired. The good news is we’re extremely happy with the workmanship on the other of the buildings.”
These houses are very nice; new construction, new appliances, and an open floor plan. The initial $305,000 price tag did raise a lot of eyebrows for many consumers here in the Valley.
“So we try to fall in line with what’s where stuff needs to be and and often, I mean, honestly, the case is in virtually every community we’re going to now the communities are finding some way to to buy down the cost, Scottsbluff included, because we have to do that. But we don’t want to buy it down any farther than the community has to buy it down.”
Mesner also adds it’s all about finding the right demographic for these homes.
“Every unit we sold in Hastings sold to empty nesters, or retirees. They’re all the units in Aurora. We’ve got our first offer the other day from somebody who wasn’t an empty nester, and we’re out of units, but that’s who moves into home. And that really was the target audience because one of the problems that we have is that we’re trying to we can’t build new construction for young families that are starting.”
Shortly after this meeting, Cliff Mesner, TCD’s Jordan Diedrich and area realtors met and decided to lower the selling price by $20,000, with the units now listed at $285,000.
