In 40 recent days, the home-sales team at Virginia Lake Crossing recorded 13 sales including a couple of deals that involved competing offers from potential buyers.
So is this a sign of a developing turnaround in the residential development business in Reno and Sparks?
Bill Miller sure hopes so, but he's not about to do anything crazy.
"We're not in denial," says Miller, the chairman of SilverStar Communities, the developer of Virginia Lake Crossing. "We understand the realities, and we're doing what we need to do in this market."
Yet Miller sees little flickers of hope.
The recent flurry of sales which included three contracts in one week apparently was spurred by a price cut, one of a series that reduced prices at Virginia Lake Crossing by about 30 percent in the last year.
The good news? Some of the buyers acknowledged they'd been sitting on the sidelines, watching price cuts, and they figured that the bottom of the market was somewhere close.
More good news: At current prices, units at Virginia Lake Crossing can be rented with positive cash flow to their owners, and investors are beginning to climb aboard.
And even more good news: The sales team has seen a greater number of cars with California license plates around the project, an indication that the flow of buyers from the Golden State may be loosening up.
It's been a long 15 months since SilverStar began marketing Virginia Lake Crossing.
It's an unusual project for Reno urban infill between South Virginia Street and Virginia Lake Park, a couple of blocks south of Plumb Lane. The architecture of the 220 units in the project a mix of attached and detached projects draws heavily from cityscapes in places such as San Francisco and Boston.
And the timing, Miller acknowledges, wasn't great. SilverStar rolled out Virginia Lake Crossing about six months after the economy began its long decline.
"We didn't how deep or how long this would be," he says.
In response, SilverStar like other developers steadily cut prices to find the point that would attract buyers. And like other developers, it squeezed subcontractors and materials suppliers to reduce costs enough to support some of the price-cutting.
And SilverStar dramatically slowed construction. Originally, Miller's team figured they'd build about 20 homes at a time, starting another phase as each batch of homes sold out. Today, it's building only a handful at a time, figuring it will find a buyer for each home during the five or six months that construction is under way. The recent flurry of sales has kicked up the pace of construction, at least for a while.
The demographics of buyers, meanwhile, proved surprising as Virginia Lake Crossing came to reality.
Originally envisioned for a market that would include a lot of young professionals, many of them moving here from urban markets, the project has drawn a majority of its buyers from the 40-60 age group, and most of them are moving from other neighborhoods in Reno and Sparks.
