Amelia at Bay Meadows Opens Single Family Home Sales This Weekend with $2.3MM Starting Price Tag
The Registry San Francisco
January 26, 2018
Interest is running high for the third group of single-family homes set to be released this weekend in the upscale Bay Meadows development in San Mateo, a community being developed on the site of a former horse race track.
New houses built in the Victory subdivision are going for a minimum of $2.27 million, about 50 percent above the current median home sale price of $1.5 million in the Bay Area Peninsula community.
Stockbridge Capital Group of San Francisco owns the trendy mixed-use Bay Meadows development, which is slated to eventually contain 1,100 residences including 24 single-family homes, plus apartments and condos as well as mid-rise office buildings. Construction of the master-planned community, which features 18 acres of parks and open space, began in 2013.
The batch of three homes offered for sale this weekend range in size from about 2,500 to 2,900 square feet and cost up to $2.55 million, according to the web site of developer Shea Homes.
The new community is bordered to the south by Hillsdale Boulevard, to the east by Highway 101, to the north by the San Mateo County Event Center and to the west by the Caltrain commuter rail line tracks.
The three -and four-bedroom homes with three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half baths are slated for release on Saturday, following pre-sales that started in October.
All six homes in the development that have been released so far are under contract, said Janice Thacher, partner with developer Wilson Meany. “Thirty-two people are pre-qualified and that is without having the models opened; we anticipate even greater interest when the models open in late February,” said Thacher via email. “It is rare to see newly-built, single-family homes of these sizes within a mixed-use environment on the Peninsula, let alone in a vibrant community, such as Bay Meadows, that is also adjacent to Caltrain.”
A super-slim housing inventory is helping to drive demand for these and other single-family homes around the Bay Area, real estate observers say.
“The volume on the market; there’s not a lot of product, especially single-family. So, single-family homes like this is going to be a more rare event,” said Bob Steadler, principal of Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use and planning consulting firm based in San Jose.
About the home’s price tags, he added, “Sometimes people believe if you put the price higher, it will feel more exclusive. That’s what they are trying to do.”
New single-family home development is also very rare almost anywhere in the Bay Area, and the developer may be pricing a premium on that, as well.
Future releases of the houses, which are now in various stages of completion, will continue until all 24 single-family houses have been sold.
Another 780,000 square feet across five buildings in the development is devoted to LEED-certified office space. So far, office tenants include online survey firm SurveyMonkey, enterprise software company Zuora, online real estate business TenX.com and Canadian software maker OpenText. Bay Meadows also contains 40,000 square feet of retail space.
Stockbridge Capital Group owns the 83-acre development, which abuts the San Mateo Caltrain station, a location designed to make the development attractive to workers from across the Bay Area.
Affordable housing is also part of the plan. A one-acre portion of the site has been dedicated to the City of San Mateo, paving the way for 68 affordable apartments, plus 10 percent inclusionary affordable housing throughout the rest of the development, excluding the single-family homes.
Stockbridge has sold parcels of the area to different builders, including Shea Homes as well as TRI Pointe Homes, an Irvine-based homebuilder that built the 63-townhome Amelia community, which is now sold out. TRI’s Amelia townhome subdivision was designed by Irvine-based KTGY Architecture + Planning, which also has offices in Oakland.
Three apartment buildings containing a total of 336 residences have opened so far, and all are fully leased, according to a Bay Meadows spokesperson.
A decision is forthcoming on whether more condos or more apartments will be built in the remaining podium buildings to be constructed at Bay Meadows. “We will make the decision for each building on a case-by-case basis in response to market demand,” Thacher said. “Several factors come into play that range from construction costs and financing to investor preference and market demand.”
