The Highlands master planned community will extend from where Vista Knoll currently ends and consist of four separate villages.
Capstone Advisors first residential project in Northern Nevada is a master-planned community on just over 112 acres in Lemmon Valley.
The real estate investment and development company headquartered at Carlsbad, Calif., purchased the bulk of its land holdings in 2017 and constructed the fully leased 11,000-square-foot SkyVista Village on Vista Knoll Parkway adjacent to Walmart, said Mark Hayden, vice president of development for Capstone Advisors.
The Highlands master planned community will extend from where Vista Knoll currently ends and consist of four separate villages, Hayden told NNBW during a recent interview. There will be three single-family residential communities consisting of 219 homes along with a 288-unit multifamily apartment complex. The development also includes a 1.7-acre commercial pad site that faces Lemmon Drive.
As Capstone Advisors neared completion of the Sky Vista Village commercial site, which is anchored by Wingstop, Reno Orthopedic Center, One Nevada Credit Union, among other tenants, it conducted some market studies to determine the best uses for the rest of its land holdings in North Valleys.
“We decided on a residential project to complement new and existing retail,” Hayden said.
Brad Tuck
Capstone Advisors also will extend Vista Knoll Parkway from its current terminus near the entrance to Walmart’s parking lot through to Lemmon Drive, where a new traffic signal will be installed, Hayden said.
The current development scenario would see Capstone Advisors bringing in a homebuilder to handle the single-family homes and forming a joint venture partnership on the apartment community, Hayden said. Capstone Advisors would keep the apartment complex in its portfolio and wholly own the additional commercial development site.
Changes in the financial markets and rising interest rates have likely pushed any vertical construction deep into 2024, however.
“Interest rates have put the timing on hold for the moment,” Hayden said. “Recent indicators are positive, and there's a hope that things could turn by the late second or third quarter of next year to start putting dates on when some of this stuff might happen.”
Potential development plans for the commercial site remain fluid, he added.
“That side is not yet fully baked,” Hayden said. “We are still investigating what will happen there. We have a 9,000-square-foot multi-tenant retail building, and an approximately 3,000-square-foot pad site that could be developed by a food or coffee user.
Mark Hayden
“This is a big investment,” he added. “There’s a lot that goes into this. What will likely happen is that the site will be mass graded, and the backbone road goes in. Once mass grading is complete, we would start phasing in infrastructure for each individual development.”
Brad Tuck, president of Bradley Land Group, a consultant to Capstone Advisors, told NNBW that most regional homebuilders are currently working through existing inventory of single family lots, and lack the appetite to take on additional inventory.
“When we got rolling on this project, it was at the end of 2021 and we were in a different climate,” Tuck said. “(Home) sales have slowed substantially in the Reno area.
“We are not single-family homebuilders – there are companies that are well-oiled machines for that kind of work, and they have slowed down as their sales have dropped off,” Tuck added. “They are sitting on lots, and as a result they don’t have an appetite to load up for more lots until they can chew through the inventory they have. That is where we are at – waiting for the existing lot inventory to be absorbed.”
The multifamily community, Tuck noted, won’t mirror the luxury high-end apartments that have gone up all across the Truckee Meadows. Instead, it will be a well-designed three-story walkup community featuring a centrally situated recreational facility.
Another important aspect of The Highlands, Tuck said, is its inclusion of natural rock topography throughout the site, and its network of interconnected trailways.
“We have got this master planned community of residential units, but we maintained the rock outcroppings that are pretty neat features of the landscaping,” he said “There also is a substantial amount of open space that we won’t touch.
“All the neighborhoods are connected with walking trails and sidewalks, and we have connected that network with the North Valleys Regional Park trail network. There will be an extensive walking network the residents and community will be able to enjoy.”
Tuck said Capstone Advisors worked with Ken Krater of Krater Consulting Group to lay out the property and incorporate its existing topography into the final development plan. Additional Northern Nevada-based companies who worked with Capstone Advisor’s development team include Lumos Engineering, KLS Planning & Design Group, Headway Transportation; landscape architect L.A. Studio of Nevada, and project biologist McGinley & Associates.
Tuck said the next step for Capstone Advisors is to secure additional permits.
“We have got final engineering to get in place and further design,” he said. “We have our entitlements perfected, but we still need to get to the grading and building permit stage. We are working on those things as we wait to see how things will unfold.”
Hayden said that advancing a project in Northern Nevada proved much easier than in Southern California, where Capstone Advisors has an extensive history of developing commercial and residential real estate projects.
“Securing entitlements in Reno was a little different experience,” he said. “We were able to complete this project inside of a year, which is dang near half of what it would take in Southern California. The agencies, particularly the City of Reno planning department, were very instrumental in figuring out what we can do instead of what we can’t do.”
