Black Diamond’s Ten Trails housing development has been in the works since 2000, but it wasn’t until 2018 that the planned community welcomed its first official family.

This June, it hit its 500th.

That pace is on-track for Oakpointe, the Bellevue-based real estate developer behind the master-planned Ten Trails community and its upcoming smaller sibling to the east, Lawson Hills, Oakpointe CEO Brian Ross said.

Oakpointe estimated in 2018 that Ten Trails would bring in about 200 to 300 homes a year for about two decades. With around 520 homes sold so far, another 160 set to be delivered over the next year, Ten Trails has already hit a quadruple-digit population.

When complete, Ten Trails will hold 4800 homes. Though the market will fluctuate, “we’ve got a solid 10, 12, 14 years left,” Ross said.

So far, the development has gone as planned: “When we look back at the site plan, it is almost exactly the site,” Ross said. “The road circulation, how all of the development has played out, it’s almost identical.”

But the work has really only just begun.

Oakpointe is about to break ground on their first fire station in Lawson Hills, and has a second planned. They’re working on a community center with indoor recreation and possibly a swimming pool. They’ve set aside space for new schools and even have a place in mind where Ross would “love to see a city hall” built. Developers have plans for a big box retail site at the north end of Black Diamond off Highway 169.

And Oakpointe plans to spend around $75 million on regional transportation infrastructure improvements to make sure southeast King County can keep up with it all. Those projects are scheduled through at least 2031.

Time will tell if even that much is enough to brace for the boosted usage of Black Diamond’s roads and facilities. From the outside, it can sometimes appear as if Oakpointe is more city planner than property developer.

Ross said the size of the project allows them to take some of those human elements more into account than smaller projects, which don’t provide as much opportunity for large-scale and long-term planning.

“What we enjoy is the planning aspect, and then the ability to see people enjoying what we had envisioned,” Ross said. “I like to personally start at the end. … Who’s going to live here, where will they shop, go to school, how are they going to experience this space? … If you put yourself in the consumer’s head a little bit, then I think you’re going to be more successful.”

Here’s what’s new – and what’s to come – in one of King County’s fastest-growing housing developments.

Ten Trails: 500 down, 4300 to go

Oakpointe said they welcomed family #500 to their “residential, suburban oasis” with a surprise event and a $500 donation to the Black Diamond community center in the family’s honor.

The developments are starting to take off. But the genesis of the project was in the 1990s, Ross said, after Washington’s Growth Management Act prompted cities and counties to draw boundaries around urban areas where they foresaw and wanted to encourage growth.

Based on the boundaries drawn and the state of housing in nearby Covington and Maple Valley, “I knew it would be a matter of time before the market was ready to be in Black Diamond,” Ross said.

The project started as early as October 2000, and by 2005 Ross had assembled and placed the property required under contract. They were confident in the project and closed on the land in 2006 before having all their entitlements secured, “which is pretty unusual in our business,” Ross said.

Owning the land through the 2007-2009 recession was “painful,” Ross said.

“Given that we’re in a very cyclical business, we saw what I hope is the worst in my lifetime,” Ross said. “(Now we’re) experiencing some of the best demand that we’re likely to see, but we just have to prepare ourselves and our business for those (trends).”

Development and ground-breaking began in 2016, when Oakpointe determined the market was finally ready.

The average home sale price in Ten Trails was about $525,000 in 2018. In 2021, it’s about $750,000, according to Oakpointe.

The average square footage has remained steady during that period, “so these price increases are not due to just larger home sizes, but rather the massive price appreciation the region has seen in the last 6-12 months,” an Oakpointe spokesperson said.

Reacting to those trends is difficult given the timeframe of home building, Ross said. Over the last year, builders at Ten Trail could have sold even more homes if they had more ready to deliver.

“The development cycle between planning, constructing a lot and turning it over to a home builder is a 2.5 to 3 year cycle,” Ross said. “We can’t really react quickly to short term market phenomena. So there’s a self-limiter on product. That’s true regionally, not just in Ten Trails.”

The density of the housing – around four units to the acre – hasn’t changed much since the project started, but the types of housing have diversified, Ross said. The dichotomy of “homeowners want houses” and “renters want apartments” is breaking apart, Ross said, as town homes and houses for rent are all popular options for families and individuals. Demand for rental units in particular “has just been completely off the charts,” he said.

Both Ten Trails and Lawson Hills will have roughly 80 percent single family housing and 20 percent multi-family housing when finished, Ross said. Buyers at Ten Trails own the lot and the home they purchase, and Ross said they may at some point introduce condominium units as well which would have common ownership of the land.

Ten Trails will feature an apartment site with 176 units, which are just over 50 percent leased. There will also be a single-family neighborhood of houses for rent. There will be about 60 lots, and the homes there are about 35 percent complete.

The view from Lawson Hills

The upcoming Lawson Hills development will live on the eponymous Lawson Hill, located off Lawson Street east of SR 169, and will include about 1250 homes.

It’s no surprise that building on a hillside means the development will have different challenges and features from Ten Trails. For one, the area is less conducive to retail usage, Ross said.

And overall: “Lawson Hills will be more expensive,” Ross said.

“The construction costs will be more expensive,” he continued. “There will be view opportunities on the south side of Mt. Rainier that are, frankly, stunning. On the west and north sides, you get views of Seattle. While we’ll have some higher density housing in certain areas … the bias will be to a bigger lot and a bigger house, so more expensive overall.”

Up at the far north end of town is where Oakpointe will develop their “destination retail” area, where they hope to court big box retailers. The area is associated with the Lawson Hills entitlement but the two properties aren’t physically connected.

Keeping the big retailers up north will alleviate some traffic in Black Diamond and entice shoppers from the Maple Valley area, Ross said, but increased traffic is inevitable. Eventually they plan to have a road that directly connects the retail area to Ten Trails so traffic doesn’t need to divert through downtown Black Diamond.

“Retail demand is there sooner than we thought it would be,” Ross said. “Before I might have told you it’d be ten years … now we’d like to figure out how we can do it in three to five.”

The deals aren’t set in stone, so Ross declined to name specific brands that Oakpointe is courting to the retail location.

But big retailers don’t want to put their stores too close together, so just “look around the Covington and Maple Valley market and see what’s not there, and that will kind of inform who wants to be there,” Ross hinted.

The area might also play host to more housing development like condominiums or a high density “village,” Ross said.

“I think the density that people are willing to buy into out in the outlying area is higher than I would have thought years ago,” Ross said. “That’s going to create the ability to create little villages, whether for rent or for sale, that maybe would not have been there (otherwise).”

Building a community

You’re not done building a community of 6,000 homes after the sales are made and the ink is dry.

Oakpointe’s developments will require traffic improvements, new fire departments and schools, and spaces for residents to shop and relax.

Across all of the Black Diamond properties, Oakpointe currently has about 1.2 million square feet set aside of commercial and retail space. That’s about the size of 25 football fields. Developers have plans to bring in grocery and drug stores, banks, coffee shops, dry cleaners and all the other amenities that make up your typical retail spaces.

“When we were breaking ground and getting the infrastructure in to build the water, sewer lines, streets, I’d been working on this so long and I could see the vision of the homes (and) parks … but it was a challenge to sell that vision to homebuilders who said ‘Where’s Black Diamond?’ ” Ross said. “It was harder than I expected to get the initial group of builders up and going … but obviously that’s in the rear view mirror now.”

Crews finished a temporary traffic improvement to the SR 169 and Roberts Drive intersection this spring and are still planning for a future roundabout at the intersection.

Next year will see more turning lanes added to SR 169’s intersections with Baker and Lawson streets. (Signals will be added in 2024.) Turning lanes will also be added to 216th Ave SE at 288th Street and SE Covington-Sawyer Road.

Oakpointe is also involved in a 2022 project to install two roundabouts at the intersections of Roberts Drive, SR 169 and Black Diamond-Ravensdale Road.

As the community expands, the Enumclaw School District will be able to construct schools in the area on land reserved by Oakpointe. The district has historically been more spread out, and the higher density brought by Ten Trails could compel the district to construct larger schools.

Part of Oakpointe’s obligations include building one fire station and providing a site for a second. The first will go in at Lawson Hills. Response times in that area are already longer, Ross said, so they wanted to focus their initial efforts there.

Ten Trails will construct the actual fire station and provide some of the fire trucks to equip it. The city will use a fire mitigation fee charged on every building permit in the development to buy the station and equipment back, Ross said.