The Many Benefits of Amenities in New Home Communities

Building a new home comes with more than four walls and a roof. In addition to making your dream home a reality, new home communities often have amenity packages that help keep you and your family happy, healthy, and engaged with your neighbors. 

Luxury and gated communities aren’t the only neighborhoods with great amenity packages. Master planned communities with different enclaves give home shoppers beautiful new homes that work for everyone from first time homebuyers to luxury home shoppers.

Even fairly standard amenity packages can have a positive impact on your life. Amenities as simple as a pool and a playground can help you get to know your neighbors and stay active.

Here are some common new home community amenities, and how they can help you live a life you love.

Swimming Pools

A community swimming pool might just be the quintessential neighborhood amenity. Community pools earn their spot in our hearts and in our communities thanks to their money saving convenience, community building fun, and increased safety.

The MVA (Most Valuable Amenity)

According to Forbes, installing a pool costs tens of thousands of dollars, with the average pool installation coming to $35,000. If you want to include pool lighting, a hot tub, or use nice materials, the cost can quickly spiral to over $65,000. If you want to hangout poolside, but aren’t in the mood to shell out a year’s worth of salary on installation, your neighborhood pool lets you have your money and your pool float too. 

Don’t Worry, Let the Community Staff Manage the Pool

What sounds like more fun: scrubbing scuzz off the side of your backyard pool, fishing drowned animals out of a pool filter, spending bookoo bucks on additional homeowner’s insurance, and having to winterize your pool, or doing none of that and heading over to a pristine neighborhood swimming pool whenever you want to take a dip? In addition to saving you money on installation, your neighborhood pool will save you time and money on pool maintenance, while allowing you to enjoy all the benefits of an inground pool.

Using a community pool instead of installing your own has a number of fringe conveniences in addition to all the money you save. 

• You get to keep your backyard space, and can use it as a patio or garden
• You don’t have to worry about people tracking water into your house
• Going to the pool gets your family out of the house
• Even fairly basic community pools have cooler features than backyard pools
• Many communities have amazing features like splash pads, lazy rivers, and lap pools

Get to Know Your Neighbors

Spending time at the community pool is a great way to get to know your neighbors, and meet people who have common interests or are in a similar stage of life. After all, it’s much easier to become friends with your neighbors if you have a convenient space to meet them. 

 Splash pads are a great way for children to meet new friends who live close enough for convenient play days. Pool parties are great events where neighbors can mingle without things getting too awkward. Lap pools provide space for exercising with your friends without needing an expensive gym membership. 

Stay Safe

Safety is a major benefit of the community pool. Not having a backyard pool makes your home a safer space for small children, pets, and adult beverage enjoyers. Properly installed safety features in backyard pools can’t prevent every accident, and the fewer attractive nuisances in your home the safer it will be.

Community pools have less traffic than public pools and limits on who can use them, making this semi shared space less attractive for petty thieves, a more secure environment where you can send older children alone, and allowing members of the community to keep an eye on children and elderly people. Almost all community pools have lifeguards on duty, adding an additional layer of security for your family. 

Playgrounds

Playgrounds are a fantastic community amenity that can drastically improve your quality of life in your new home. Like the neighborhood pool, a community playground saves homeowners money while still providing a better quality experience. 

Neighborhood playgrounds are bigger and almost always have more play features than a playscape that can be installed in a backyard. Your children can have a fun outing to a convenient playground, have more features to explore, and can make new friends while you get to save money. 

Community playscapes provide parents with the added benefit of convenience. If you take your child to the neighborhood playground, you get to give your child a fun experience on safe equipment that you don’t have to maintain. Nobody wants to spend their day spreading mulch or gravel over their backyard, and at the community playground you don’t have to do any of that. Yow won’t ever have to replace warped wood on the community playground, worry about loose screws, or manage any other effects of an aging playscape. 

The benefits of having a gathering space for children and families can’t be understated. Children can easily meet other neighborhood kids and get together with friends they already know. While your child is running around, soaking up Vitamin D, and enjoying time away from screens, you can form a sense of community with other parents and actually talk to other grownups at the playground. The parents of the neighborhood might end up loving the playground more than the kids.

Even if you don’t have children, a community playground can be a useful part of your neighborhood amenity package. Even the most dedicated DINKs have friends with littles who come over to visit. Having a conveniently available playground where you can take the tiny and adorable chaos creature is vital when the alternative is chasing the child away from your breakables.

Sports Courts

A more age inclusive amenity included in many new home communities are a wide range of sports courts and fields. Including sports facilities in a neighborhood amenity plan allows builders to deliver a community feature that can have a massively positive impact on residents’ lives. Sports facilities of all kinds give residents a convenient spot to gather, and makes it easy and fun to stay active.

The Basics

Transforming an unused greenspace from a patch of grass into an amenity isn’t that difficult. Soccer fields and basketball courts are some of the most basic sports facilities provided in amenity packages, but they can have a transformative impact on quality of life.

A neighborhood basketball court, gives your family a great place to meet up with neighbors and shoot hoops.For families with children who want some independence, a community soccer field is a safe place they can meet up with friends with minimal adult supervision. 

The Luxurious

You don’t have to live in a country club community to enjoy the finer elements of that lifestyle. Higher end amenities like tennis courts are frequently included in the amenity packages of master planned communities to provide residents with an elevated quality of life. 

Some of the biggest beneficiaries of community tennis courts are casual tennis enjoyers. They can play a fun sport with their loved ones in a convenient location without feeling like they have to get their money’s worth out of an expensive club membership.  

The Trendy 

If you have specific tastes in your physical activities, you can very likely find a community that includes its facility in the amenity package. 

Pickleball courts are having a moment in the sun. Once a favorite in active adult communities, but now becoming popular with Gen Xers and Millennials, pickleball courts are starting to become staples in a wide range of communities.

Another trendy amenity beginning to make its way into neighborhoods near you are rock climbing walls. Climbing gyms are a great way to mix up a workout routine and perform practical strength training. For people who get bored lifting weights, climbing walls are a great alternative to picking something up and putting it back down again to stay healthy. If you live somewhere where extreme seasonal weather makes spending time outside difficult, and indoor climbing gym is a great space for you to stay active when taking advantage of outdoor amenities isn’t an option.

Community Gyms

Fitness centers are an increasingly popular amenity for many master planned communities. Often added as part of a clubhouse complex, or included as its own space within the neighborhood, private fitness centers and community gyms are a fantastic amenity for anyone who wants to stay healthy or get back in shape. 

Living in a community with an included gym saves you time and money. Why pay for a gym membership and have to make time during your day to actually drive there, when you could save time money, and mosey on over to your neighborhood clubhouse to work out whenever it suits you?

Community fitness centers have fully maintained workout machines. They often have upgraded equipment and new and trendy options machines that might be beyond an individual homeowner’s budget or home gym space allotment. 

Here is some of the costs associated with high end gym equipment:

• Tonal Smart Gym- $3,745
• SoulCycle Equinox Bike- $1,500 + $40 a month required membership
• Hydrow Rower- $2,495
• NordiTrack Ellipticals- Upwards of $1,799

Like many other neighborhood amenities, community fitness centers help foster growing bonds between residents. It’s much easier to stay on track with your fitness goals if you agree to meet your neighbor at a convenient community gym on a regular basis. If you know you can work out with people you know, and not a group of anonymous strangers, you’ll be more likely to stay on track with your fitness goals.

To better foster bonding between neighbors many community gyms have available classes that for profit gyms charge additional fees for their members to attend. Fun classes, theme days, and community wide workout events give you and your family a fun way to get to know your neighbors and give you a fun way to stay healthy and active. 

Community Gardens

As a desire to reconnect with the land has increased, new home communities are starting to add community gardens to their amenity packages. Innovative builders like David Weekly are designing their developments to highlight beautiful outdoor settings.

A community garden brings the benefits of the boondocks to the suburbs. If your neighborhood has used part of the greenspace as a community garden, you can try your hand at small-scale farming, without tearing up your beautiful backyard, or shelling out for an expensive allotment. 

A thoughtful amenity package can transform unused space in a neighborhood into a functional and fun benefit to residents. Trails and nature areas use areas unsuitable for homebuilding by preserving the natural beauty of the land to give you easy access to the great outdoors. 

Successful community gardens bring neighbors together to achieve a common goal- a beautiful garden that produces delicious organic produce. At the end of the day, after you’ve worked up a sweat in the shared farm with your friends and family, you can sit on the porch of your community center and watch your garden grow.

Trails

Community trails wind through the neighborhood and connect the nice features with residents. Neighborhoods with ponds often have walking paths around the water so people can make the most of this fantastic community feature.

Like all aspects of real estate, location matters when developing quality communities. Builders developing land in stunning locations are doing their best to preserve that natural resource for their homeowners. Communities take steps to preserve heritage trees, dramatic landscape features, waterfront areas, and other amazing aspects of the community’s natural bounty. 

Community Events

Community events aren’t just for 55+ communities anymore. As a desire to invest in lifestyles and make a house a home, home builders are increasingly adding event coordinators and a year-long schedule of neighborhood events to their amenity packages. 

If you can build your new home in a community that prioritizes cohesion and friendliness amongst neighbors, you can make a major investment in your lifestyle and happiness. Walking up to strangers at the pool and trying to strike up conversations is awkward, but community events make it easy and fun to mingle with your neighbors. 

Holiday events can bring seasonal fun to the neighborhood, from community wide trick or treating opportunities, winter holiday parties, and summer bar-b-qs can all get you into the spirit of the day. Charity drives, neighborhood fun runs, and other community building events allow you give back and enjoy good times with good people. 

Your home is so much more than a house, and a neighborhood that includes community events can be so much more than people who share a zip code.   

Community amenities are designed to help you love your life in your new home. As you shop for a new home, think about how a potential community’s amenity package can improve your life by saving you money, making it easier to stay healthy, and giving you a convenient space to mingle with your new neighbors. 

NewHomeSource makes it easy to explore new home communities that have all the amenities you want to live a life you love.