Homes sold out at The Lakes

For the past two or three weeks, Bryan Weese, sales associate for Meritage Homes in Maricopa, said he has handed out a lot of house and mailbox keys as he has welcomed new homeowners into their houses at The Lakes at Rancho El Dorado.

And while he said he’s happy to assist new residents as they move in, he’d rather being doing what he got into the real estate business for — selling houses.

Right now he doesn’t have any to sell because Meritage has sold all the homes in its first construction phase at The Lakes.

“We don’t have anything to show,” he said. “If somebody wants to see us they can call us. We are taking names for the next phase.”

The new-home construction is keeping Prescott Norman, a construction superintendent working out of the same office as Weese, busy as he oversees contractors and subcontractors for 30 houses in The Lakes and 32 houses in Province, the 55-and-older community in Maricopa also owned by Meritage.

In about 90 days a second phase to sell about 150 yet-to-be-built houses will begin, Weese said. “But we don’t even have floor plans yet.”

Weese said he doesn’t know for certain how many homes The Lakes sold in its first phase because he has only worked for the company for about a year, but in that year he has sold 70 homes in the subdivision.

The first-phase lots were 70 feet wide, Weese said, and the lots in the second phase will be 50 feet wide with the houses ranging from 1,500 to 2,200 square feet. The prices will begin in the low $100,000s and some of the lots will be on the water, he said.

Until that second phase begins, the only way someone can buy a home in The Lakes is to get on a waiting list and answer the phone as soon as Weese calls.

“If somebody ends up canceling, if they lose a job and can’t qualify, we pick up the phone and make one phone call and it is sold the same day,” he said.

What buyers love about Meritage homes, Weese said, is their energy- and water-saving features, which he said generally save homeowners about 50 percent on their utility bills over homes without those features.

“We built like everybody else a few years back but our president decided to make the change even though it was expensive (to the company),” he said.

The features include foam insulation that creates an “igloo effect,” windows with double layers of film, compact fluorescent lighting and energy-efficient heating and cooling systems.

The homes even have something Weese said he had never seen until he worked for Meritage, sprinkler timers with weather-sensing devices that can turn the sprinklers off when it begins to rain.

Brent and Linda Vander Linden, who closed on a house in The Lakes in late April, stopped by to visit Weese Wednesday afternoon.

The two are Canadian snowbirds from Calgary, Alberta, and heard about Maricopa from other Canadians who have moved here.

“We love our new house and we love Maricopa,” Linda said. “Though we are snowbirds we wanted to be here to watch them build the pool.”

Diane and Don Morrow, who stopped in to see if Weese had any available houses, weren’t as lucky as the Vander Lindens.

Diane said the couple had been renting in Mesa, but were looking for a bigger house because her daughter and her children from California plan to move in with them.

She said they liked Maricopa because it was smaller than the big city, where have lived for the past 15 years.

“This is our first day visiting out here and we are hoping we could find something,” she said.