Choosing your
homesite.

Every Parterre floor plan comes with a base price and a lot premium, and buyers routinely spend more time picking cabinet finishes than they spend picking the actual piece of ground the house sits on. That's backwards. The homesite is the one thing you can't change after closing.

We walk buyers through homesite maps constantly, and the same questions come up every time: what does a premium actually pay for, is it worth it, and does it matter for resale later. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what kind of premium you're looking at — some buy you something durable, others buy you a few extra feet of side yard you'll rarely notice. Here's how to tell the difference before you sign, not after you've lived with the lot for a year.

What a lot premium is actually pricing

A lot premium is the builder's way of charging for anything about a homesite that departs from the standard, no-frills interior lot on a straight stretch of street. It gets added on top of the floor plan's base price, and it can attach to size, shape, position, or what the lot backs up to. The mistake buyers make most often is treating the premium as a single number to compare against other premiums, when in practice it's shorthand for several different things bundled together, and only some of them matter to you personally.

Before comparing premiums across homesites, it helps to separate what's actually being priced into three rough categories: lot size and shape, lot position relative to the street and neighbors, and what the lot backs onto. A corner lot premium is mostly paying for position. An open-space-backing premium is mostly paying for the view and privacy behind the house. A pie-shaped cul-de-sac lot premium is often paying for a bigger, more usable backyard than the plan's standard footprint would suggest. Ask the design center to break down what a specific premium is actually for — most will, if you ask directly instead of just checking the total against your budget.

Orientation matters more than most buyers expect

Lot premiums get most of the attention, but orientation — which direction the house faces and which way the backyard opens — is a separate variable that doesn't always carry a price tag and matters just as much day to day.

A south- or west-facing backyard picks up more afternoon sun, which most Front Range buyers want for a patio, a garden, or simply a yard that isn't shaded most of the afternoon. It also means more solar exposure on that side of the house during Colorado's long, bright summers, which can mean a warmer upstairs in July and a driveway that clears itself of snow faster in January. Neither effect is dramatic, but buyers who skip this question sometimes end up surprised by which rooms run warm in summer.

Front-door orientation affects something more mundane but genuinely useful: how much ice and shade collects on your driveway and front walk through a Front Range winter. A north-facing entry on a shaded lot can hold ice noticeably longer after a storm than a south-facing one on the same street. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing you live with every snow day for as long as you own the house.

Which premium homesites tend to hold their value

Not every premium pays you back at resale, and the ones that do aren't always the most expensive ones today. As a general pattern across new-construction communities like Parterre, homesites backing to permanent open space, greenbelt, or a trail corridor tend to hold their premium best, because that backdrop can't be built out later — it's protected, and buyers years from now will value it the same way you do today. Corner lots and cul-de-sac positions tend to hold value reasonably well too, largely because they're inherently limited in supply within any given release.

The premiums that hold up least well tend to be the ones tied to a temporary advantage rather than a permanent one — being first to have a finished streetscape, for instance, or backing to a construction staging area that will eventually become someone else's backyard. Those are worth paying for if the temporary advantage genuinely matters to you (being an early mover in Garden North vs. a later-released neighborhood like Arbor West is its own decision, covered in more detail there), but don't expect them to translate into a resale premium down the road.

Current premium pricing changes with every release

We're deliberately not publishing specific premium dollar amounts in this piece, because they move with every new homesite release and a number that's accurate today can be stale within weeks. What's stable is the ranking: interior lots carry the smallest premiums, corner and cul-de-sac lots carry moderate ones, and open-space or greenbelt-backing lots carry the largest. If you want the current premium sheet for whichever neighborhood you're considering, ask us directly and we'll get it from the builder alongside the rest of the available inventory.

Homesite selection works differently depending on how you buy

How much control you have over homesite choice depends heavily on whether you're buying a quick move-in home or building to order, and this is a decision worth making deliberately rather than defaulting into whichever path a sales office happens to steer you toward first. We laid out the broader tradeoffs between the two paths in quick move-in vs. build-to-order at Parterre, but the homesite piece specifically breaks down like this.

On a build-to-order contract, you're choosing from whatever homesites are currently released and unsold, which gives you real access to premium lots if you're early to a release — but it also means an eight-to-ten-month build timeline before you're living on it. On a quick move-in home, the homesite is already fixed; you're choosing among whatever's currently available rather than picking from the full map, which trades homesite flexibility for a much shorter path to closing. Neither path is wrong, but knowing which tradeoff you're making matters more than knowing the premium price itself.

If a specific homesite feature — south-facing yard, corner lot, open-space backing — is a genuine requirement rather than a nice-to-have, build-to-order is usually the more reliable path, and getting on a builder's early-release notification list matters more than anything else you can do. We maintain that notification list alongside our full inventory list, and having your own buyer's agent in that process costs you nothing extra — the builder's sales office pays buyer-side commission out of its existing budget either way.

Why this matters

The floor plan gets most of a buyer's attention because it's the part you can picture yourself living in. The homesite gets less attention because it's harder to picture, right up until you've lived with a shaded driveway through your first Front Range winter or realized the "premium" you paid for was really just a few extra feet you never use. Spending an hour on homesite selection before you commit to a specific lot — walking it, asking what the premium is actually pricing, and understanding your orientation — is a better use of your time than most of the design-center decisions that come after it.