No cookie-cutter homes for Toll Brothers 3,700 acres

MISSOURI CITY - Toll Brothers Inc. is more than doubling its presence in Houston by buying a 3,700-acre swath that is being eyed for about 6,500 homes.

Toll and real estate investment firm GTIS Partners have purchased the Sienna South project. Toll plans to develop the property, build up to 1,750 homes there itself and sell thousands of additional lots to other builders starting late this year.

Toll envisions prices in the Sienna South project ranging from the high $200,000s to more than $1 million. The homes that Toll itself builds there likely will cost $600,000 to $650,000.

Sienna South is part of the larger Sienna Plantation master-planned community, which Houston developer Johnson Development Corp. began building in the 1990s. Sienna Plantation neighborhoods around Sienna South already include 7,000 homes.

Hillwood Communities sold the land for more than $21,000 an acre, putting the total price in excess of $78 million. Values in the area for build-ready lots have increased about 25 percent from one year ago, according to Metrostudy.

Houston added an estimated 86,200 jobs from November 2012 to November 2013, amounting to a 3.1 percent growth rate, the highest among major U.S. metro areas. The nation as a whole saw an average growth rate of 1.7 percent in that span. The metro area generated 46,462 residential building permits in the first 11 months of last year, more than any other U.S. metro area, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Asking prices for homes in Houston were 14.9 percent higher in December than a year earlier, according to Trulia. The median listing price for Houston-area homes in fourth quarter 2013 was $233,990.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.