Nashville-based Southern Land Company LLC has bought its first Hays Country property, with plans to build a luxury community in housing-hungry Dripping Springs.
The roughly 70-acre community will comprise 28 homes, according to company officials. Each house will sit on a fair amount of land, either 1.5 or 2 acres. Nineteen of the homes will abut Barton Creek.
“We wanted to provide larger tracts of land out there that can fit into the Hays Country environment,” said Dan Hutts, president of SLC’s Hill Country Region homebuilding group. “We want to embrace the open space that we have out there.”
While still too early to put a final price tag on the homes, Hutts said they will likely start in the $1.5 million range.
The acreage was undeveloped at the time of the purchase. It sits at the end of Silver Creek Road, near Treaty Creek Distilling on the northeast side of Dripping Springs.
Southern Land Company has made its name building mixed-use and master-planned communities, with developments in places including Colorado, Tennessee and North Texas. The company has about $2 billion of projects in the pipeline, according to an announcement. In October, the company announced it was expanding into Central Texas, with a focus on residential development in Hays, Burnet, Comal and Travis counties.
The company’s construction arm will build the houses. It has partnered with local firm Doucet & Associates Inc. to do the engineering, which is already underway. The company has its own planning, design and marketing divisions, but Brian Sewell, president and COO of Southern Land Company, said it will likely collaborate with local firms when the time comes.
“We always do that in communities that we work with,” Sewel said. “We find local resources and then we put our resources together.”
Officials expect infrastructure construction to kick off this September.
Dripping Springs is a fast-growing corner of Hays County, about 25 miles west of downtown Austin. Residential growth has exploded in recent years, so much so that Dripping Springs City Council in November adopted a building moratorium to halt new development while the city bolstered wastewater capacity and revisited its building codes. The moratorium has since been extended through mid-February.
SLC’s development began early enough and was not affected by the building moratorium.
Sewell said Central Texas has been in the developer’s sights for a while.
“It has all of the elements of quality and infrastructure and nature, and complements what we do,” he said. “We really love the terrain, we love the Hill Country views, we love the lifestyle, and the overall demographics of Dripping Springs, the proximity to Austin, the amenities. It’s a natural fit for us.”
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