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RICHARD WALKER / RWALKER@STARBULLETIN.COM A nearly five-acre parcel is being developed on Kaneohe Bay Drive into 27 fee-simple, single-family homes. Royal Contracting Co. is a partner in the project.

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Developer building 27
homes near Kaneohe Bay

You can't say nobody is building homes on the Windward side of Oahu. A nearly five-acre patch of red dirt being leveled and graded along Kaneohe Bay Drive will eventually be known as Bay View Estates, a subdivision of 27 fee-simple, single-family homes.

The development runs from Kaneohe Bay Drive down to Bay View Golf Park.

"There's not much new development on the Kaneohe Bay side, that's what we're finding out," said Leonard Leong, vice president of Royal Contracting Co., which is a partner in the development. The land was purchased for $1.3 million in 2001 by BVE LLC.

Leong said the homes will have a "fabulous view" of Kaneohe Bay.

Infrastructure is being installed by engineering company Hida Okamoto & Associates Inc.

The subdivision's streets are "not yet named," Leong said, but not because the partners can't decide who's daughters to name them after. They have to have Hawaiian names and those names will be assigned by a street-naming council, Leong said.

Otherwise, "there would be a lot of daughters' names," he chuckled.

The plan is to have the site work completed by the end of July or early August. A homebuilder has not yet been contracted and home prices are also not yet set in concrete, Leong said.

"In the current market, it would be hard to speculate, but I would think homes on the golf-course-frontage side would be over $1 million," he said.

Would they be characterized as luxury homes?

"If you see $1 million, I would hope that people would classify the homes as luxury," Leong laughed.

The house-and-lot packages have not been marketed but the insanity of the current real estate environment drives calls about the project to the broker's phone every day.

The project will hit the market in a month to 40 days, said Karen Lee, principal broker of Island Homes Pacific LLC, which has been involved with the project from the beginning.