Gilroy
– Luxury homes will spread down the face of the Hecker Pass
hillside and surround the city’s public golf course in the next few
years, as Country Estates moves forward with the fourth and final
phase of a development project that has lasted more than 20
years.
Gilroy – Luxury homes will spread down the face of the Hecker Pass hillside and surround the city’s public golf course in the next few years, as Country Estates moves forward with the fourth and final phase of a development project that has lasted more than 20 years.
Plans now under review by city staff call for 70 custom-made homes, as well as 25 pre-designed homes clustered on smaller lots at the northern lip of the golf course, off Hecker Pass Highway.
“It’s the final phase of what has been a long and ongoing project,” City Planner Cydney Casper said. “It fills out the rest of the city in the hillside area out to the city limits.”
The 148-acre development represents the last area zoned for residential development on the western edge of the city’s northwest quadrant.
Primary access to the homes will be through side streets off Mantelli Drive or from Hecker Pass via Burchell Road. Plans also call for a new hillside road, on the eastern edge of the golf course, as a direct connection to Hecker Pass. Access to six eastern lots will be through Forest Estates, a gated community to the east.
The fourth phase continues a project started more than 20 years ago, when Country Estates received 402 building permits in the city’s annual housing competition, Casper said.
The development, while not gated, includes some of the city’s most expensive homes. The earlier phases brought houses to the ridge-line around Mantelli Drive. Despite city regulations prohibiting construction on the ridge-line, many homes lie just shy of the peak and have panoramic views of the farmland and hills south of Hecker Pass.
Gill Properties LLC, in southern California, owns the property. A local representative could not be reached.
Casper said that Gill Properties generally has sold individual lots to buyers, who then contracted with a developer to design a home. In some cases, local developers bought a cluster of lots for resale to consumers.
“(Development has) been pretty continuous,” Casper said. “Phase one took quite a while. After they got the infrastructure put in, the market dipped and it took quite a while to sell all the units.”
Patty Filice, a real estate agent with Intero Real Estate Services, said it is too early to say how much the future homes will cost. Home sizes in the community have ranged from 3,500 to 6,000 square feet, while the lots have been from 20,000 square feet to 2.5 acres.
“Upper-end homes in a development like Country Estates – their value is categorized by view, quality of construction, usability of the lot,” Filice explained. “A hillside lot with some flat usable land around the house will be worth more.”
Currently, a 4,300 square foot home on about half an acre just north of the proposed development is selling for $1.7 million, Filice said.
“This year, what has sold over there has been over a million (dollars),” she said. “There have been several sales. In general, prices in Country Estates are as high as they’ve ever been.”
City staff are reviewing tentative plans for the fourth phase of the project. Casper predicted that construction on the first batch of those homes would not begin for another two to three years. Before then, Country Estates will start construction on the third phase of their project north of Mantelli Drive, with road and utility installation beginning this summer.
