New-home communities are welcoming for young families. (Photo: iStockphoto)
Last week, I wrote about the hidden costs of buying a new home -- from the added expense of improving the landscaping, to having to spend on new decks and patios, or possibly, finishing the basement.
But, there are also pluses to buying a new home that homebuyers may not realize. If you buy into a development of similar newly built houses, you most likely will join a community of homebuyers with similar likes and needs as yours.
Good neighbors That happened when my husband and decided to buy a home in a mini-new-home community of 10 houses being built on an old nursery site in the center of an established Central New Jersey town.
With the exception of one couple whose children are now grown and out of college, most of the people who own the new homes on our cul-de-sac are within the same age range, plus or minus 10 years. What most of us share is that upon moving in, we started building our families, with six little ones being born to five families within the same year.
Now, we get together regularly with those families, and our children go to school together. One neighbor and I co-lead a Girl Scout troop, and our girls are Daisy Scouts together.
When our house was being built, one couple, whose home was completed months before ours, made a habit of inviting us to dinner each time we stopped by to view the progress on our house. Those visits started a friendship that we now value, and that couple had a little boy about three years after my children were born.
We now go out to dinner together on occasion, our little ones in tow. We also have regular get-togethers with our other neighbors. At these neighborhood events, we talk about our children and trade stories as we travel on a similar path through life and homeownership.
Not a good fit
Meanwhile, another friend of mine bought a home in an already established neighborhood in a nearby town. While there are a few families in her neighborhood at about the same stage in life, she finds that many families that surround her are older, leaving her daughters with fewer playmates. As a result, she spends considerably less time with her neighbors. So, though I may gripe about my home from time to time, I am glad that we have the neighbors that we do.
Cyberhomes tools But you don't have to wait until after you move into a neighborhood to find out whether the demographics suit yours. With the Cyberhomes maps feature, you can research everything about a community, including the age groups of its residents, whether there are a lot of children or 20-somethings, or the the level of crime there.
Just choose maps in the pull-down menu in the Cyberhomes search box at the top of this page and enter your target community. You can then search the map for various demographics by using the search parameters ("Lots of babies and toddlers", etc.) in the left column.
You can also look up demographic information for your target community by choosing "Neighborhoods" in the search box's pull-down menu and entering your town. If you click on the "People" tab, you can then look at neighborhood statistics like the male-female ratio, occupation, household income, level of education obtained, etc. The statistics can give you a good look at what your neighbors might be like before you move in.—Lauren Baier Kim