AV Homes opens sales this month for the fifth and final phase of its highly successful Solivita active adult community, and the homebuilder is prepping new home sites at an accelerated pace to keep up with demand.
Bob Kanjian, director of sales for the Arizona-based developer, told GrowthSpotter that home sales at the Poinciana retirement community have tripled since he joined the company a few years ago.
“We’re selling between 200 and 250 homes per year,” Kanjian said. “At that pace, even if we’re doing 300 per year, we’ll have about three years of lot inventory at Solivita before we start building the next section.”
Solivita is a 4,300-acre retirement community with its own town center, country club, two golf courses and 14 pools. The community is approved for 5,600 homes, and the builder has sold more than 4,400 homes so far, making it Florida’s fourth-largest retirement community.
Kanjian said AV is considering adding even more amenities, possibly a new clubhouse and more pools, to Phase 5. That decision is expected in the fall.
“We could add more,” he said. “We’re already fully amenitized, so this would be like icing. We wouldn’t have to lose any lots, it would just be a question of converting some passive recreation space to active.”
The final phase of the community is divided into five segments: 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D and 5H. AV Homes has already received permits and begun horizontal construction on segments 5A, 5B and 5H — totaling roughly 415 lots.
The builder filed engineering plans last week for segments 5C and 5D. The plans prepared by Carnahan Proctor and Cross call for 242 single-family lots on 55.6 acres — the last undeveloped tracts in the Polk County portion of the community.
The next big decision will be when and how to develop the thousands of acres of vacant land on the Osceola County side of the project. AV Homes has a 10-year-old Site Development Plan for Phase 1A in what has been dubbed “Solivita Grande” on the north side of Cypress Parkway. That plan calls for 800 residential lots on 877 acres, which covers less than a third of the total Solivita Grande acreage.
“The project will probably be much larger than that,” Kanjian said. “The number of people turning 55 grows every day, so we expect to see continued demand, and it will likely be in the same price range.”
While AV Homes offers some homes in the low $200,000s and a limited number of estate homes on 70-foot and 80-foot lots, the vast majority of sales fall between $250,000 and $350,000.
“We seem to be in the sweet spot,” Kanjian said. “When we move into Osceola, we’ll offer the same high-quality, well-built homes. We’ve come across a pretty good recipe here at Solivita.”
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