The fall of the golf course community and rise of the … agrihood?
Posted On January 30, 2019
The good news for the real estate market is that millennial home-buying has slowly been trending upward since 2017.
If you live in a golf course community and was hoping that’d help your property values, however, the news maybe isn’t so good.
According to the Wall Street Journal, millennials are shunning such communities because they “are not interested in golf,” leaving property values along the fairways sliding. That’s got older generations who bought up such properties as their own little slice of paradise trying to blast their way out of the bunker in some areas of the country.
So if millennials don’t like the idea of having the 18thgreen for a backyard, what do they want? They can’t live at the Apple store.
The desire of many millennials for an eco-friendly lifestyle has led to the development of what are being called agrihoods – neighborhoods built around working farms or gardens. Residents can live off the land of their own community, cooking with eggs from free-roaming chickens and honey from on-site hives, growing seasonal fruits and vegetables, and commuting along walking, biking or horse trails.
This is no Green Acres, though. These developments have all the modern amenities one expects in an upscale neighborhood, like pools, tennis courts and yoga gyms, along with hired farm hands to maintain the grounds and crops when the residents are lounging.
According to MarketWatch, there were already more than 200 such communities around the country in 2017, from southern California to Texas to Georgia to suburban Detroit and Chicago. They’re not an entirely new phenomenon, but they are increasingly targeting environmentally minded millennial families.
Sure, they’re not for everybody, but if you fancy yourself as having a green thumb, if environmental sustainability is important to you, or if you simply want to get away from the rat race – and maybe the golf course – an agrihood might be the ticket.
You can grow your kale and eat it too, and still be poolside by dusk.