Castle & Cooke
to build homes
in Mililani, Kunia
It plans to spend $100 million for
By Russ Lynch
430 homes, creating hundreds of jobs
Star-BulletinCastle & Cooke Inc. plans to invest $100 million next year to build about 430 new homes at Mililani and Kunia, which will lead to jobs for hundreds of local construction workers and generate millions of dollars in business for Hawaii building suppliers.
Harry A. Saunders III, the new senior vice president for Oahu operations, said the Los Angeles-based parent company has given the green light to start building homes again after a three-year hiatus.
Prices will range from about $100,000 for townhomes built to state-city affordable-housing guidelines to about $460,000 for executive-style single-family homes.
Castle & Cooke, founded in 1851 as one of the old "Big Five" companies, has plenty of fee-simple land: 4,000 acres of developable property, more than 500 acres of which are zoned for development.
Saunders said that even if the company gets no additional zoning, the zoned acres at Mililani and Kunia have room for about 3,500 housing units, a mix of condominiums and single-family homes.The company is finally running out of inventory of built homes and is ready to start again, he said in an interview at the company's Mililani Technology Park headquarters.
Since 1968, Castle & Cooke has built about 13,000 homes in Mililani, which now has a population of roughly 38,000. The company's master plan brings the total homes to 16,000, with a population of roughly 50,000, Saunders said.
The company is taking a bullish stance after some tough times on Oahu, Saunders said. In the peak year of 1995, the whole Oahu market passed 4,000 new homes over to buyers. Then the full impact of Hawaii's economic slowdown began to be felt. In 1999, Oahu developers together turned over 1,800 homes, according to Saunders' estimates.
That's a 55 percent falloff.
"At (Castle & Cooke's) peak in 1994, we had 800. At the low in 1997, it was down to 400. Last year, it was 411. This year, we'll move 425. We're projecting as many as 450 next year, so it's an incremental increase," Saunders said.
"We were sitting on a lot of inventory at the end of 1995, and boom, the market stopped. We had to stop production and sell off that inventory," he said. In the last three years, the company sold off the inventory. Now it has to build.
Now, Saunders said, the company and the buyers are more sophisticated than ever. "What everyone wants is their own custom-built home."
As a "production" developer that makes money by building many homes of similar design, Castle & Cooke has learned to design houses with a variety of options that can wind up looking different from the neighbors' homes but still use basic big-production techniques.
The first stage of the 430 homes planned for next year is called "The Legacy," 135 homes in a strip looking out on Waikakalaua Gulch on the northwest side of Mililani Mauka.
Buyers will be offered a choice of five floor plans, each with three different exteriors. The choice doesn't stop there, however. Saunders said the single-family homes, which will range in price from $380,000 to $460,000, will feature a lot of internal options.
For example, on the model with a three-car garage, a buyer could choose to make it a two-car garage and use the other space for a workshop, he said.
Room configurations are also open to choice. While the basic home designs range from 1,900 square feet to about 2,600 square feet, buyers can easily add another 200 to 300 square feet by using different configurations.
Architects Design Partners Inc., which planned the houses to Castle & Cooke's guidelines, came up with about 12 different configurations, Saunders said.
In several other developments at Mililani, to be announced later, the company will build a total of about 170 homes. They will include townhouses and apartments that meet affordable-housing guidelines, market-priced townhouses, single-family homes in condominium clusters, and executive homes.
In all, Castle & Cooke plans to launch development and sales next year for a total of 300 homes at Mililani and another 130 in and around its Royal Kunia development.
Besides the cost of building the homes, the $100 million investment includes the price of infrastructure, such as roads.
Saunders was just promoted to his position after 13 years with Castle & Cooke Homes Hawaii. He will run all of Castle & Cooke Inc.'s Oahu commercial and residential operations, putting him in charge of the company's home-building on Oahu and other business operations such as Dole Cannery, Mililani Technology Park, Dole Plantation and Town Center of Mililani.
