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Livabl Aug 30, 2022

Everything to know about Blue Mountain Communities in Northern California

The front exterior of a detached home with white siding under blue skies.

Blue Mountain Communities began selling homes in Northern California about 12 years ago. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

Looking for a new home in Northern California? You’ve likely come across Blue Mountain Communities. If you’re on the hunt for more in-depth information about this local builder, then this is where you’ll find it.

Blue Mountain’s directors of sales and marketing discuss the builder’s plans and portfolio
Discover the new homes Blue Mountain Communities is building across the Sacramento region
Read more about what Blue Mountain Communities is doing in Northern California

What started as a family-run heating and air conditioning business in the early 1980s, Blue Mountain Enterprises has grown into a multi-family property developer, contractor, assisted living provider and HVAC service.

SEE ALSO:Blue Mountain Communities' current developments in Northern California

Since it began selling homes about 12 years ago, Blue Mountain Communities has won the 2-10 Builders Achievement Award every year from 2018 to 2021. From first-time buyers to those looking to downsize, Blue Mountain Communities offers a home for many lifestyles across a broad range of prices.

Blue Mountain Communities delivers homes for every stage of life

Blue Mountain Communities has several new home developments located across the Northern Californian region, with plans to bring more communities to the market soon. In any given year, the builder closes on 100 to 200 homes, whether it be a luxury waterfront property or a two-story attached home minutes from downtown Sacramento.

Will Scott is the director of sales for Blue Mountain Communities. Alongside Joe Klusnick, the marketing director at Blue Mountain Enterprises, the two have a deep understanding of how the Northern California real estate market is evolving and how Blue Mountain Communities will evolve along with those changes.

Klusnick and Scott share their insights on what Blue Mountain Communities is working on in Northern California and the changes they’re taking note of in the marketplace.

A modern kitchen with white cabinets and an island.

Joe Klusnick and Will Scott discuss the latest housing trends in the Northern California marketplace. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

What is Blue Mountain Enterprises, and how has the company changed over time?

Joe Klusnick: Blue Mountain has been around since the 1980s. It started as a HVAC company. During some challenging times, it has done different things over the years as the market has evolved, we realized that while we’re great at servicing homebuilders, we also do a good job of doing it ourselves.

We have grown into three divisions — our still large and existing HVAC portion, our general contracting and development division that builds assisted living and apartments, and we also have our Blue Mountain Communities group.

Where do you see the market heading in the next couple of months?

Will Scott: I’m excited for the coming months. I think that we’ve kind of gone through the shock of the rates increasing. The demand for homes hasn’t decreased. We find that supply and demand have a bigger impact than interest rates in some cases. We need to meet that demand.

There’s a lot of people that still need a place to live, and we feel that we’ve gone through a traditional summer slowdown that was exacerbated by the interest rate hike all of a sudden. This is the most drastic rise in rates that we’ve seen in our lifetime, but despite that, people are still out looking and needing places to live.

As that shock wears off and this new rate becomes the norm, I think people will get back out into the market and shift their needs, find out what their change in life is and find a house that fits what they need for that. Looking forward, I think that we’re excited that people are going to get back out there and start looking again.

How would you describe Blue Mountain Communities’ relationship and presence within the Northern California marketplace?

WS: We started building throughout the Central Valley and in parts of the Bay Area. More recently, we have narrowed our focus to the Sacramento region, specifically to the city. Our corporate office is located in Vacaville. We’re a local builder, and we want to build close to our home. We don’t necessarily focus on one segment of the market. We try to get people at all ages and lifestyles, but right now we’re focusing more on growing this geographic region.

What types of homes and communities did Blue Mountain Communities first start building?

WS: We started by building affordable homes through the Central Valley. A lot of our communities were single-story, shifting into 1,500 to 2,000 square feet on one level. It centers around a traditional-looking community — detached homes, backyard spaces, and in areas that were either growing or had new developments.

We were in Merced for two or three different communities near the university when that was growing. We’ve gone out to Hollister and Salinas and have been successful in those South Bay areas in growing communities. We generally haven’t gone right into the heart of a big city. We’ve tried to help the surrounding areas grow a little bit.

Historically, we’ve started with more entry-level housing — first-time homebuyers and things like that. Going into the Bay Area, it is difficult for first-time buyers to afford to purchase, and so we try to do our part. Because of the economic restraints, it’s more difficult in the Bay Area to be that first-time homebuyer builder, and so we have focused more out in the Sacramento region where first-time homebuyers can still afford to buy a house.

Even with rising interest rates, we do everything we can to help them buy down that rate, to make their prospect of purchasing a home affordable. I think that’s one area where we still continue to focus a lot of our business — making homeownership attainable for those that haven’t had that opportunity before.

JK: We have, oftentimes, brought in new product types to different communities. For example, our Village Station project in Santa Rosa was some of the first attached products they had seen. These were rowhomes built around courtyards. We’re doing something similar in the Natomas area in Sacramento with our Provence community. These are an attached two- and three-story product which is kind of unique to Sacramento. They had a very traditional suburb out in Natomas, and this is a new type of product offering that allows us to appeal that entry-level buyer.

We’re offering homes in the $400,000 range, which is half of what the average home sale is in California these days. We’ve even done that in some of the higher-end areas like Granite Bay, where we’re offering a luxury duet product. It’s two single-family homes that are attached in the center, and we’ve seen other builders follow suit. In some ways, I think as we go into these newer areas, we’ve become somewhat of a trend-setter and offer a product that is new and unique but does fit a niche for the buyers in those areas.

Who would you say your homebuyer audience is?

JK: Some of the company’s philosophies on that kind of lifestyle – where we build a home for every segment of life – filters into our product offerings.

We offer that first-time buyer type of product in an entry-level attached home. We offer a move-up home, single-family detached. We’re offering stuff out on the waterfront at our Delta Coves community. We’re offering acreage up at our Revere community for a larger single-family detached product. Something like the Carnelian as an ideal move-down home for a buyer who no longer needs so much space, so much acreage, so much upkeep. We’re really trying to offer a product that fits its niche within those different stages of life.

What do you think draws buyers to Blue Mountain Communities?

WS: We try to bring something unique to our homes, to design them differently. At our Revere community, the architecture is a callback to an Eichler design, which is a famous architect. We have unique architecture out there.

At Carnelian, we have a unique product line where we were the first to bring an attached product to a luxury area that has historically very expensive homes to make it affordable for people to get into that area because it’s a different type of product. Bringing three stories to Natomas, when we did it, we were one of the first to do that. A lot of times it’s finding unique product lines to make it more affordable for people to get into those areas.

At our Delta Coves community, where everyone gets a boat dock and a backyard and it’s still $1 million-plus, we’re still the least expensive point of entry out there right now, whereas our competitors are at $2 million, building three- to four-thousand square-foot homes. We went in there with 1,800- to 2,300-square-foot homes where you can get that look and access to the water without having to spend multiple millions of dollars.

In every case, we try to figure out what architecture and style and type of home will be attainable for a larger segment of the population when we go into an area.

Can you tell us more about the Oakhaven community you have in the works?

WS: Oakhaven, out by our Revere community, is going to be a larger version of what we have at Revere. We’re taking two of the existing floor plans from the Revere community and adding two larger floor plans for this new community to have four single-story homes out there from 2,500 to 3,900 square feet. They’re all on one-and-a-half- to two-and-a-half-acre lots.

It’s going to be a gated community with only 29 homes on over 90 acres. There’s over 30 acres of natural common areas inside the gates that people will be able to access and use as part of nature. It’s very spread out. It’s got some rolling hills. There is some elevation change to the community. Some home’s foundations will be higher than other homes. There is some drastic elevation changes throughout the community.

There will be some homes with a detached RV garage or a separate casita whether it’s a pool house or a mother-in-law’s quarters out in the backyard. There will be a few homes that have those options as well, but it isn’t as common in the marketplace.

With smart home technology and design, how do you follow Blue Mountain’s philosophy of making homes easier to live in?

WS: We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our offering package. I was talking to Joe, and we have been putting on our thinking caps, studying the market and looking for new alternatives to bring to the new home building industry.

Right now, the biggest trend is to make sure that the machines that you have in your house, you can operate easily, and in a lot of cases what that means from your phone, on an app, because they’re Wi-Fi enabled. We try to implement as many of those things into the home when we’re building them.

In some cases, they’re standard. In some cases, we’ll have upgrades to where you can add more technology to your home. In all of our homes, we try to make sure that we have a Wi-Fi enabled garage door opener so that you can make sure that your door is shut when you’re leaving to secure your house.

The front door, the main doors, are optional deadbolt and Bluetooth controlled and enabled. Our thermostats, because we’re an air conditioning company, is all Wi-Fi enabled. You can also upgrade to [other systems] like Nest. Even our standard options are going be Wi-Fi enabled. In some of the upgraded appliance packages, we can get into the Wi-Fi enabled features.

I think that’s a big part of the future of homebuilding is connecting them to your phone. The challenge with that is every company has their own app and their own service, but we are working constantly to try to integrate those together to find the easiest product lines or systems to use in your home.

In addition to the technology part of it, we go all the way down to how the architects design the homes. We walk and review everything in our first stages of construction to make sure that if we need to change around the swing of a door to be more accessible or move a sink over or one cabinet section to make it more accessible to where the stove is. We view every floor plan as it’s being designed and make sure that it’s going to be functionally useful once it’s finished as well.

An exterior rendering of a mid-century modern home at dusk.

Blue Mountain Communities integrates Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled features into their homes. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

The real estate market is changing. What are you seeing in the Northern California marketplace specifically?

JK: One aspect is that California is, historically, an undersupplied state. There’s still a high demand for housing. We have definitely seen a cooling off over the last few months as interest rates have climbed. I know this is a broken record, but interest rates are still historically low for where they’ve been over the last few decades.

We’re working with our buyers to try and come up with unique solutions to their needs from a financial standpoint. We’re offering a lot of flexible incentives, whether it is that they want to do a two-one buydown, lower their interest rates, lower the purchase price, apply for lower closing costs, etc. We work with five different preferred lenders that really help us to tailor our loans for these homes to best meet the buyer’s needs.

WS: Part of our focus is that even though California may have seen the first negative net migration – there’s more people leaving the state for the first time that we’ve seen in a long time – Sacramento region is not seeing that. We continue, in the Sacramento area, to see positive migration into this area. Even if people are leaving other parts of the state, they’re not leaving Sacramento. They’re coming to Sacramento from other parts.

Really, we’re trying to adapt to those changes and those migrations, and the biggest one recently we’ve seen is because of the pandemic, people have been able to work more remote. We are geographically, a little bit distant from the Silicon Valley, but close enough to where people have decided where they can in some cases, live here for less and then drive in once a week or month or whatever is required for their job. It’s close enough to go in sporadically, but now that they don’t have to go in on a daily basis, they’re okay working from home and the Sacramento area and driving into the Bay Area once in a while.

Some of our architecture and our planning has been based on that need that more people are going to need to work from home. At our community, The Glen, we have a home that has two offices. One is a traditional size-of-a-bedroom office, and one is a smaller office that is more tailored to doing Zoom calls. We are trying to adapt to those changes. In some cases, maybe both people in the house work from home — you have an individual area to do that. I think those are some of the things that we’re on a larger picture. People’s ability to move and live where they can financially afford it, rather than accepting less to make more money. We are trying to give them more for that.

JK: Even at Revere, we’re seeing that with the multi-generational approach to some of our homes that have a built-in space for in-law quarters that have living space, a bedroom, a kitchenette and a single garage all attached and part of the house, but can be locked off for mother-in-laws, returning children who’ve graduated but haven’t started their place in the workforce yet. So those homes are flexible enough that they do meet the needs of the changing lifestyles that are out there as the result of what we’ve seen in the last few years.

What makes Northern Californian different from other real estate markets?

WS: I think part of that is Northern California tends to be a little bit more into nature than Southern California.

We have communities like Carnelian that right across the street from Folsom Lake where people enjoy going walking, hiking, biking. It’s literally right across the street from where we’re building a community. It’s a well-known lake. There are horse trails right in the front of our community where right across the street you can go and ride a horse. There’s still appreciation for some of those outdoor activities where we’re selling that as an amenity — access to nature right outside the door.

You can have a beautiful home in a top school district right across from some of the best nature areas we have around. I think that is one focus in Northern California, but it’s also a blend where we have people who appreciate nature, but we also have a lot of people who are in technology.

We are, what I believe, to be one rung out from Silicon Valley. That is the hub of the internet for the world. That is what makes our area most unique is because the amount of money that the internet collects funnels into that region and then we get the overflow of people who can’t afford that area but may work in that industry. By moving a little bit further out from the Silicon Valley, but still maybe maintaining the jobs in that industry, they’re able to get that balance of affordability, access to the outdoors and nature, and yet still be close enough to work at those very high-dollar companies.

Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Whether you love lakeside or master-planned living, discover Blue Mountain Communities’ collection of Northern California homes

The exterior of a modern show home with board and batten siding under cloudy skies.

Blue Mountain homes can be found in several locations across Northern California, ranging from the mid-$400,000s to the low-$1 millions. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

You’ll find Blue Mountain Communities across Northern California, from Granite Bay to Santa Rosa.

Without focusing on just one buyer segment, Blue Mountain Communities builds homes with a variety of styles, sizes and price points. New home purchasers can have their pick from many detached, duet and townhome properties with prices ranging from the mid-$400,000s to the low-$1 million range.

Blue Mountain Communities has several new home developments located near Sacramento and beyond that are currently selling or open for registration.

Carnelian at Granite Bay – Granite Bay
Delta Coves – Bethel Island
Provence – Sacramento
Revere at Silver Springs – Rescue
The Glen – Granite Bay (Coming Soon)
Oakhaven – Rescue (Coming Soon)

A full list of local developments can be found here.

Carnelian at Granite Bay

A pair of grey, semi-detached homes with board and batten siding.

Carnelian at Granite Bay consists of five distinct duet home floor plans. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

Location: 6931 Peak Way, Granite Bay
Product Type: Duet homes
Price: $729,990 to $824,990
Size: 2,501 to 2,657 square feet

Comprised of just 28 residences, Carnelian at Granite Bay wrapped up construction in Granite Bay this year.

This gated community offers five distinct duet home floor plans ranging from 2,501 to 2,657 square feet in size with three to four bedrooms and up to three-and-a-half bathrooms. Each new residence is complete with a series of smart home technology features and contemporary finishes, including a Nest Hello video doorbell, quartz countertops, Moen plumbing fixtures and nine-foot ceilings.

Carnelian at Granite Bay is a few minutes west of Folsom Lake, where residents can enjoy their time swimming, boating or walking the sands along the beach.

An open concept living room and kitchen area with modern furniture.

Each home at Carnelian is finished with a smart home technology features. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

Provence

A Spanish-style housing complex with a green lawn under blue skies.

Located in Sacramento, Provence is not far from highways and everyday amenities. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

Location: 4478 Saone Walk, Sacramento
Product Type: Townhomes
Price: $469,990 to $552,990
Size: 1,394 to 2,298 square feet

Located an 11-minute drive from downtown Sacramento, Provence is a short distance to everyday amenities and conveniences.

Handy access to highways 5 and 80 makes it easy to get around. Residents can quickly travel to major workplaces and offices in addition to numerous local restaurants, retailers and attractions. Fill your evenings and weeks with concerts at the Golden 1 Center or explore the Old Sacramento Waterfront.

This community of Spanish- and Tuscan-style homes features three floor plans ranging from 1,394 to 2,298 square feet with three- to four-bedroom layouts. You can customize your home with various personalized features, including upgraded lighting, appliances and shaker cabinet doors with stain or paint grade colors.

The aerial view of Spanish-style homes on a sunny day.

Provence consists of three floor plans ranging from 1,394 to 2,298 square feet. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

Delta Coves

The exterior of a coastal home built into the shore of a waterway.

Delta Coves boasts a resort-oriented lifestyle on the water with private boat docks. Image courtesy Blue Mountain Communities

Location: 44 Seaward Court, Bethel Island
Product Type: Detached single-family
Price: $1,049,990 to over $1,139,990
Size: 1,864 to 2,286 square feet

This new home community in Bethel Island offers a unique, resort-oriented lifestyle on the water. Thanks to the community’s waterfront construction and private home boat docks, residents of Delta Coves can access more than 740,000 acres of low-lying river, the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean from their very own residence.

Offering five floor plans, the homes in Delta Coves feature up to five-bedroom layouts finished with Kelly Moore paints, stainless steel kitchen appliances and E-Stone bathroom vanities. Residents can access 15,000 square feet of amenities at Delta Coves’ Island Camp, where you’ll find a gym, pool, club room, event lawn and more.