Hayden Homes shows off model home at Polo Ridge

MOSES LAKE — The homes at Polo Ridge are going up and selling fast.

Polo Ridge is Hayden Homes’ latest development in Moses Lake, just a short piece down the street from Park Orchard Elementary School. When it’s done it will comprise about 60 homes, of which about half are under construction and sold, according to Senior Marketing Manager Gina Donangelo Barnecut.

Hayden’s progress was on display Tuesday at a special Business After Hours event hosted by the Moses Lake Chamber of Commerce at the newly completed model home at Polo Ridge.

“We built a model home for buyers to walk through so they can envision themselves in the home and what type of options they can add to the home,” said Hayden Marketing Coordinator Holly Anderson. “Because sometimes when you're building a house, it's hard to envision it without seeing everything.”

The model home, furnished and decorated for visitors, is Hayden’s Hudson floor plan, a three-bedroom, two-bath 1,574-square-foot house with a wide-open kitchen and dining area that can be customized to suit the buyer.

“We offer laminate flooring, which we have here,” Anderson said, gesturing around the model kitchen. “We offer a range of cabinet colors and stains, the brushed-nickel fixtures, and then that’s a quartz countertop. We wanted to be thoughtful in not putting too many options on the (model) home and making it look realistic about what people would put in their home at an affordable price.”

The Hudson starts at $359,990, according to Hayden’s website, before the options are added in. That’s about on a par with the median home price in Grant County, which is $343,495, and way below Washington state’s median price of $650,000. Since the median includes all homes — new, used, fixer–upper — that’s a reasonable cost for a new custom home.

“Any home that we build out here is pretty affordable for the area for the first-time home buyer,” Anderson said. “And then we also have some moving buyers too, people who maybe want to downsize or are just looking for something different.”

Affordability is something Hayden Homes emphasizes in its developments, according to Realtor Mark Fancher, who’s handling sales for Hayden in Moses Lake.

“Hayden’s been a leader in knowing that buyers need a little help, so they have good incentive plans to help people get into their home,” Fancher said.

The trend in interest rates isn’t very conducive to home buyers right now. Thirty-year fixed-interest mortgage rates averaged 2.96% in 2021, according to Freddie Mac, and this week they were at 6.59%. That jump makes a big difference to a home buyer, especially younger people buying their first home. Hayden is also offering help with that, Fancher said, kicking in as much as $25,000 on an FHA loan for closing costs, upgrades or to lower the interest rate in a buydown program, in which the buyer puts up more money up front in exchange for a lower interest rate, which then lowers the owner’s monthly payment.

“This program is what they call a 3-2-1 program,” Fancher said. “So, it (could) be 2.49% the first year. (In) year two, it will go up a percent. It's still much better than today's rate. And then year three, it will go up one more percent.”

After the three years are up, the interest rate goes up one more point, in this case to 5.49%, and remains fixed at that, according to Hayden’s literature.

“But here's the deal,” Fancher said. “The total savings over those three years is nowhere near the 25 grand. It's way higher. (The problem is) the monthly payment a lot of times for the home buyer. We have people who get their pre-approval letter, they’re qualified for $350,000, say, and then they see their monthly payment and they’re like ‘I’m not putting myself there. Even though I qualified, I’m not doing it.’”

“People are very cognizant of their finances,” Barnecut said. “A lot of our buyers out there are first-time homebuyers. So … it's a big investment. They're hitting their threshold. And the interest rates do have a big influence on that.”

The lower payments, even just for the first year, can make the difference for a lot of buyers, Fancher explained, because even though the payments go up later, their income is likely to as well as their career advances.

The model home serves for Hayden’s other two developments still under construction in Moses Lake, Maple Ridge and Maple Landing, as the floor plans are the same for all of them, Anderson said, and Hayden won’t be done building in Moses Lake any time soon.

“It doesn't make a lot of sense to build a model home if we're only going to have 25 home sites or 50 home sites and we're going to be sold out in a year,” Anderson said. “We knew we were going to be here for quite a while.”