Many builders specialize in certain types of housing. If they’re good at one thing, the reasoning goes, they tend to stick with it.
But some builders are finding opportunity in flouting that conventional wisdom. Colonial Enterprises, for example, had been building single-family houses for about a decade when it was offered an opportunity to take over a townhouse community whose original developers had hit the financial wall.
It seemed like a sensible step. So Colonial bought Springbrook Villas in west suburban Bloomingdale, where about 70 of the planned 95 townhouses already had been built. Early last summer Colonial proceeded to offer the remaining 25. By December, they were almost sold out, according to Robert W. Kling Jr., the company’s vice president of marketing and sales.
By the company’s measure, going into the townhouse business was a sensible step. Now Colonial is looking for land where it can build more townhouses, probably farther west in DuPage County, Kling said.
Colonial has a lot of company. Indeed, townhouses are bustin’ out all over. Whether on formerly overgrown city lots or on pastoral suburban knolls, builders are betting that a sizable number of customers desire homes that happen to share a wall or two with their neighbors.
By some counts, as many as 50 percent of all new-home sales these days may be townhouses. Getting specific figures is tricky, partly because the housing statisticians of this country haven’t caught up with the buying appetites of this country and devised a truly specific category for tracking townhouses alone. (Usually they lump them together in the much broader category of condominiums and “multifamily housing” in general.)
Another reason they’re hard to count is that nobody can quite agree on just what a townhouse is, which we’ll come to later. (See also the story above.)
Whichever way they’re they’re categorized, observers agree that they’re going up everywhere. “It’s a dramatic increase,” agrees Laura Rowley, editor in chief of Multi-Housing News, a trade publication. “We (at the magazine) call `multifamily’ anything that’s attached, having two or more units. But the (Bureau of Census) says that some townhomes are considered single-family homes if they have a firewall between the units and don’t share plumbing.
“In any case, we see a huge amount of that kind of construction now, compared to the last couple of years,” she said.
The surge probably is tied to a number of factors, principally land costs and demographic changes, experts say. You don’t need to be a University of Chicago economist to reason that if a small piece of land (such as these `in-fill’ sites in built-out areas) has a big price tag but is in a high-demand area, a builder might improve his profit margin by putting more than one dwelling on it.
“You can always make more money if you do higher density,” agrees Rowley, adding the caveat that such success also depends on the market.
But just as that market long has been influenced by land costs, so, too, has it been whipped around by changes in home buyers’ lifestyles and buying habits. Builders of single-family homes have generally learned to watch for and adapt to these shifts, but this savvy has been slower to develop in multifamily housing, Rowley says.
Nonetheless, the light bulb appears to have clicked `on’ in the industry’s collective head. Somebody out there noticed perceived a bigger market for townhouses.
One of the driving demographic reasons for this is–stop us if you’ve heard this one before–age. Those ubiquitous baby boomers are beginning to weary of trading up, up, up in housing. They’ve hit a plateau where their homes are larger than their increasingly empty-nest status calls for–not to mention that they are increasingly weary of big-home maintenance and big-home property taxes.
So, where do they want to go? The demographically simple answer is usually “not far,” and that’s where townhouses come in.
Take the intertwined desires to downsize but stay near the kids/grandkids/familiar community, and you have a fairly moneyed group of customers who pay keen attention to what you’re building. Some developers have answered the call by building smaller single-family homes and calling them “villas” or “club homes” or any number of other names, and providing the maintenance and upkeep that these nesters are eager to leave behind.
Trouble is, even downsized, these homes take up a fair amount of land, which gets sticky when these nesters are mainly interested in resettling in or near the towns where they already are: There just isn’t much buildable land left in well-established suburbs.
Answer: townhouses.
Builders can construct more of them per acre, yet their compact arrangements make them fairly easy to maintain. Al and Toni Quentere run a busy restaurant, Q’s Pizzeria, in Bloomingdale, that dominates their days. When they decided they needed to downsize, once was not enough.
“We sold our 4,000-square-foot home a few years ago and moved into Bloomingdale Club. It was a leisure club,” Al Quentere explained. “It had the luxuries of a townhouse environment and the outside maintenance. That was very nice, but the house, at 2,800 square feet, was still a little too much.
“When we were looking around, we ran into the Colonial unit and we decided we want to go with a ranch, just for convenience,” he said of the 1,300-square-foot unit where the couple now live.
Downsizers such as the Quenteres are hardly the whole story of who is buying townhouses.
“They clearly are not any single kind of buyer profile,” according to Ed Fitch, vice president of marketing for Town & Country Homes, which currently has several active townhouse communities.
“Of course you have empty-nester townhouse projects, but you also have first-time-buyer communities. The townhouse profile is diversified by virtue of the price point,” he explained, lapsing unapologetically into builderese.
“When you have people who are looking to establish some equity–that is, make their move into home ownership–then it’s a great first step.
Kristen and Derrick Hoffland are first-time buyers who closed on a townhouse in June at a Town & Country development in Lake in the Hills. Initially the couple had set out to buy a single-family home, Derrick said.
“But we found that what was available (in that area and in their price range) was smaller. We knew we wanted new construction, and the townhouses seemed to offer a lot of benefits,” in the way of maintenance, he said.
Their community, called North Star, will consist of 330 townhouses when complete. Prices range from $105,900 to $131,900 for two-story units that range from 1,243 to 1,516 square feet.
In moving from an apartment, the Hofflands were attracted to their 1,516-square-foot plan for a couple of reasons, he said. Its loft area gave it a sense of openness, while the two-story aspect afforded more privacy.
Just as first-time and move-down buyers have diversified the townhouse market, they’ve diversifed the prices, too. In the Chicago area, townhouses may range from less than $100,000 to $300,000 and up.
Obviously, that also means a huge range of townhouse features and sizes. But what may be more interesting–though, unfortunately, also confusing–is the broad-as-a-barn definition of just what a townhouse is.
Historically (and probably in the mind of anyone who has been out of the house-buying loop for a while), townhouses have been synonymous with rowhouses, a phenomenon that blossomed in the second half of the 19th Century.
Typically, rowhouses/townhouses were found in cities, in columns of four to six or more identical, brick-fronted, two-story walk-ups.
In a sense, they’re still being built–or make that “re-created.” The Brookwood Companies, for example, recently began sales for its Brookwood Courte townhouse development in Glenview, where the 20 units are being marketed as “Victorian,” complete with gas lamplights.
Constructed in two brick-and-limestone courtyard arrangements, the units’ oak staircases and trim, marble foyers and other upscale-but-standard niceties may be augmented with all manner of customization. Prices begin at $279,000.
Although townhouses’ historically posh image is in many ways an accurate one, it’s not the whole one.
“It’s a pretty old housing type,” agrees Kevin Harrington , professor of humanities and architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology. “It goes back rather a while. Pompeii is mostly built of townhouses, in the sense that they’re attached. Ancient Greek cities , as well, would meet the model of a townhouse, a building attached to the building beside it that presents a distinct, unified facade.”
More recently–say, in the last two to three centuries–in the United States, “you can see plenty of examples (of townhouses) for the aristocracy, certainly the gentry,” Harrington said “But it goes all the way down to workers’ housing too. Pullman is a good example here in Chicago. It’s housing done for workers.”
Rowhouses are not nearly as ubiquitous here as in Eastern cities, however. “Chicago is kind of interesting among big American cities,” Harrington said. “Chicago is just young enough not to have a really significant rowhouse tradition. There are rowhouses in Chicago, but they have tended to be taken down” over the years.
These days, new townhouses may not be built like traditional townhouses at all.
Take, for example, the “ranch townhouse.” Such is the stuff of which oxymorons are made. If you have a two-story with a stoop in front, how could you also have a single-level townhouse that is, a “ranch”? The answer lies, again, in that boomer marketplace.
To picture “ranch townhouses,” think “flats.” At least that’s what Town & Country’s Ed Fitch does. “I think if you were identifying areas where there has been a shift in townhome living, that would be one,” he explains of the development of single-level floor plans, where a “townhouse” might consist of four single-level units in a building, stacked two-on-two.
“They sell very well,” Fitch said. “We have found that pretty much true to form, the first-floor flat sells to the empty-nester. The second floor sells well to younger-profile buyers.”
But those second-floor dwellers tend to have just as much household stuff as the next guy, and they have indicated to builders a yearning for space in which to stow it, or at least room to spread out in. Wiseman-Hughes Enterprises responded by including basements, even for second-floor units, with its ranch townhouses at Baileywood in Naperville. These spaces open up the homes not only to such needs as storage, but also for home offices, media rooms, playrooms etc.
Another twist on the ranch theme may be seen at the type that the Quenteres bought at Colonial’s Springbrook Villas community in Bloomingdale, where two, two-story, shared-wall townhhouses are flanked by a single-level unit on either end. The Quinteres got their ranch, but they sidestepped worries about having somebody thumping around upstairs.
A singular variation on the townhouse idea may be seen in Plainfield Township, where Riverside Townes offers what it calls “single-family townhomes” that technically aren’t townhouses at all. (A review of one of the community’s four model home begins on page 1.) At Riverside Townes, there are no shared walls, just freestanding homes separated by six feet that nonetheless have a townhouse “feel.”
“We were going after something that had all of the characteristics of a townhome, in terms off offering (buyers) an association that handled their maintenance, etc., but we were trying to create something unique,” explains John Barcelona, president of Woodhill Corp., developers of the 200-unit community. The homes, which have about 900 to 1,400 square feet and are base-priced from $91,990 to $115,990, are drawing first-time buyers .
“Some people tend away from attached products because they hear their neighbors or feel they are too close,’ Barcelona said. “(Riverside Townes) gave us an opportunity to eliminate this objection. The other thing was to get a two-car garage in a low price range,” he said.
By company estimates, the homes have been well received, particularly in the months before the models opened in November, when buyers were seeing only floor plans. “We have done well, considering that this is a market that needs to touch and feel, and this is a product that is unique and a concept that’s brand-new,” said sales manager Tammy Paul. She said that as of early December, 86 had been sold.
“People’s buying attitudes have changed somewhat,” Barcelona said. “They are not setting their sights as high as they used to, and a townhouse becomes a lot more acceptable to them, financially. We have a lot of people who have bought these units who are qualified to buy a lot more house. . . . They are saying, `I am not going to take that risk of buying something more expensive.’ “
The separation of the units at Riverside Townes also is a response to a big buyer concern: Nobody wants to hear more from their neighbors than they have to. Fitch says that Town & Country, among other builders, has upgraded its soundproofing features and plans to do more.
Laura Rowley of Multi-Housing News said that, unsurprisingly, builders of luxury units pay particular attention to this consumer concern. Her publication surveyed consumers around the country about features they want in multifamily homes.
“One-third indicated they specifically wanted soundproofing,” she said. “When you got to people who earned $50,000 to $64,000 a year, it was ranked `very important’ by 42 percent. Among people earning $75,000 or more, 68 percent called it `very important.’ “
The studies also indicated that buyers in all income brackets would be willing to pay extra to get the soundproofing, she said.
