Community adds new housing options, property
Expansion plans for Cimarron Hills, a luxury golf community located 6 miles outside the Georgetown city limits, got a makeover after City Council approved an amended development agreement.
The newly minted agreement approved in October with Arizona-based Desert Troon, which owns the community, includes nearly 300 additional residential lots in various sizes and about 155 acres, known as the Jensen Tract, that have been annexed into the development.
"Upon looking at the original master plan, there wasn't enough diversity [in housing options]," said Cimarron Hills Project Manager Chris Hill. "[Desert Troon has] been doing master-planned communities for over 30 years knowing that diversity needs to be in place in order to have a functional master plan. After we came in, we re–master planned it and annexed in the Jensen property to get diversity but still offer the same lifestyle."
The company took over development at Cimarron Hills in 2009 after the first two developers went through friendly foreclosures, Hill said.
"[Desert Troon] came in here and restructured membership and the [homeowners association]. We restructured a lot of these things that take a lot of time and a lot of patience and communication to get to where we are right now to be able to do the development," said Tammy Schneider, Cimarron Hills director of marketing. "They've been here for 2 1/2 years, and the whole time [they were] working on things to get to this point."
A new plan
When the development was first designed in 2000, Hill said the community featured half-acre to 1-acre estate lots with custom homes situated around a Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course.
Hill said the new master plan includes five housing types ranging from the smaller semi-custom Golf Villas on about 50-foot wide lots to the Jensen Tract with homesteads on 1–2 acres. Construction on model homes in two new sections of the community with smaller lot sizes and square footage, including the Fairways at Cimarron Hills and the Golf Villas, is expected to begin before the end of 2012.
The goal, Hill said, was to create a community that offered "luxury for every lifestyle."
Each community will offer an updated Texas/Tuscan style and have similar architecture to the estate homes already built in Cimarron Hills, but on a smaller scale, Schneider said.
"There were no move up or move down opportunities," she said. "It's a market demand. When we talk about having all these lots, we had about 600 lots [of the same size], and the demand was not there. Everybody is looking for a little something different, so we need to have something for those people."
Semi-custom homes in the new Golf Villa line will start in the $300,000s, and the Fairways will be priced from the $400,000s and up, Hill said.
Financing infrastructure
When they first designed Cimarron Hills, developers worked with the city to create a public improvement district, or PID, to help fund public infrastructure including water, sewer lines, drainage and roads. Property owners pay an assessed value set by the city, which is then used to reimburse the developer for the upfront costs.
When Desert Troon approached the city about expanding the PID, the city opted out.
"The PID doesn't cause us any issues; we just don't want to mess with it," Georgetown Chief Financial Officer Micki Rundell said. "We said, 'No, we don't want to make this any bigger.'"
At its Oct. 23 meeting, City Council voted to cap the PID's assessed value and set the final amounts property owners would pay out over time.
"The developer worked with the existing residents in coming to the conclusion of that PID," Hill said, adding that some property owners had already paid the total amount.
Desert Troon developers instead decided to create a municipal utility district, or MUD, to fund the infrastructure needed to develop the remaining 400 acres in the community.
Unlike a PID, a MUD is a public entity that has power to levy and collect taxes without the city's involvement, Rundell said.
"At the end of the day once it's completely finished, the people in the MUD will have paid approximately the same amount as the people [in the PID]," she said. "That was the goal of the city. This is a better way for the developer to get reimbursed for the improvements."
Hill said developers will begin engineering for the remaining acreage in 2013, and an election to formally create the MUD would be held in November.
