New Town has top sales in multistate survey

New Town at St. Charles, Missouri, is the top-selling development out of 17,280 developments in a region that includes all or part of 16 states, according to a survey by MarketGraphics, a market research firm based in Brentwood, Tennessee. New Town closed on more than 300 houses during the period March 2005 through February 2006 to come out on top, according to Joe Zanola of the Zanola Company, which does the research for MarketGraphics in the St. Louis area. The survey covers middle- to upper-middle-size markets in the Midwest and South, including St. Louis, Minneapolis, Nashville, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, and Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina, Zanola says. This was the first time figures had been tabulated for all of the markets covered by MarketGraphics, Zanola says. The success of New Town, a relatively new development and a TND — most of the other projects are conventional — surprised the researchers, Zanola says. New Town is not only selling a lot of units, but the community has a backlog of sales, he said. “I’ve never seen a community with as many presales as New Town achieved,” he says. New Town has a backlog of $65 million in presales representing 230 to 250 houses, says developer Greg Whittaker. The presales represent firm contracts but not closings. Whittaker said he was surprised to come out on top of such a large survey. New Town was planned in February 2003 by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company. Whittaker, president of Whittaker Homes, attributes New Town’s sales volume to the fact that it is one of only a few communities in the region that adheres to New Urbanism “architectural design principles and guidelines.” The first closings were in April, 2005, and now 400 houses are occupied with 1,000 to 1,200 residents. The developer’s cafe/bookstore is open, and a privately owned general store was scheduled to open in early April. Forty small businesses, all local, are committed to locating in New Town, Whittaker says. “It’s starting to feel like a town at a pretty quick pace,” he notes. New Town is also one of the more affordable new urban communities in the US, with prices that start in the mid-100s, topping out at more than $800,000. Some of the first units sold for just over $100,000. Being developed in 10 phases, New Town is planned to eventually have 5,700 housing units served by a half dozen mixed-use neighborhood and town centers. The first houses were occupied in the spring of 2005.