The Silvercrest Advantage

Silvercrest offers you the most complete and fully prepared community possible, taking all the questions out of your purchase decision and minimizing the time and cost to complete your mountain home. Here’s the difference in a nutshell: most developments sell plots of unimproved land that require thousands of dollars and months of work before you can even think about building your dream home. At Silvercrest, we offer finished homesites, not raw land. Our lots are builder-ready, with graded house pads, cleared views, gravel drives, pre-engineered septic systems, underground electricity, piped well water, and paved roads – all at no extra cost to you. In short, all the prep work is done; as soon as you purchase your home site, you are ready to call your builder and start planning your layout. And our amenities don’t stop at your property line; you will also enjoy wide roads, decorative fencing, and three private parks complete with stunning views, spring-fed ponds and beautiful waterfalls. Plus, our 2+ acre homesites are reasonably priced, we have a proven track record as developers, and Silvercrest offers some of the most beautiful land you’ll find anywhere. Together, this unique combination of features makes up what we call the Silvercrest Advantage.

Level House Pads

Each home site is carefully positioned to provide the best combination of view, shade, and privacy, with careful consideration given to the location of nearby home sites. Once the site is chosen, it is cleared, leveled, and surfaced. The typical house site measures 40 feet deep by 60 feet long – bigger than most houses, and large enough to give you an excellent feel for how a house will sit on the site and how it will feel to live there. Preparing all the house sites in advance not only takes the uncertainty out of what your home site will be like, it also eliminates the danger that your future neighbors will put their house right in your view.

Gravel Drives

As part of improving our home sites, we carefully grade and gravel the driveways, installing culverts and other erosion-control measures as needed. This not only saves you the time and cost of building your own driveway, it also protects the roads from the disruption that occurs as individual owners cut into those roads to install their driveways. And by doing all the driveways ourselves, we can make sure that each of them meets our high standards for width, grade, smoothness and surfacing.

Cleared Views

All of our lots have lovely views, and many of them offer truly spectacular long-range vistas. At Silvercrest, you don’t have to imagine what these views will look like once the trees have been cleared because we’ve already done that for you. Once again, this saves you the time and cost to have this clearing done yourself. More importantly, it takes the risk out of buying a home site at Silvercrest, because you know exactly what you are getting before you make the decision to purchase. It also spares you those awkward conversations with your neighbors when you discover that some of the trees that are blocking your view happen to lie on their property!

Groomed Lots

In addition to providing level house pads, gravel drives, and cleared views, we put the finishing touch on each lot by carefully removing dead trees, clearing underbrush, and hauling off down wood. This might seem like a small advantage until you discover how much it costs to have two to three acres groomed by hand. And it assures you of a home site you can be proud of from the moment you buy it.

Pre-Engineered Septic Fields

As you may already know, one of the unique aspects of living in a mountain community is not having a city sewer system to connect to. Instead, each home owner is required to install a septic system to dispose of waste water in a sanitary, environmentally friendly manner. People who sell lots are required by law to show proof that each lot can support a septic systems, but that’s not much of a guarantee. For example, what will you do if the septic system has to go in the only level area that could provide a house site? Or the septic area might lie above the house site, requiring you to go to the added expense of adding a pump to the system. At Silvercrest, we take all the uncertainty out by having all the septic systems pre-engineered, complete with flags in the ground to indicate where each of the pipes should be installed. And the systems are pre-approved by the Department of Health for construction, which means you don’t have to go through the process of upgrading an initial permit to get approval to start building your home – a process which currently takes three to four months.

Underground Power

Like all quality developments, Silvercrest provides underground power to each home site. This is now a common feature of new developments, but it’s still one you should insist on – there’s no point in buying a fabulous view site, only to have it obscured by telephone poles and lines. You might also look at the locations of the transformer boxes, as you will be responsible for running power from the assigned box to your house site. Because we lay out all of the house pads and driveways in advance, we are able to situate all the transformers as close as possible to the house sites, avoiding long runs and steep slopes to save you money when it comes time to build.

Community Water

If underground power is common, community water is extremely rare. Which means that with most developments, you have a major concern ahead of you: When it comes time to drill a well, will you hit water? If so, how deep will you have to go? Well drillers in the area are currently about $11.00 a foot per well, so a 500-foot well will cost at least $6,000 just for the hole, with finished job – including the pump and pressure tank – running as much as $10,000. At Silvercrest, we have taken all of this cost and uncertainty out of the picture by drilling a series of shared wells, each of which will serve five to six homes. We’ll even install the piping to bring the water right to your site; all you have to do is connect up. There is no connection fee for this service; all you pay is your pro rata portion of the cost of running the pump – typically less than $5 a month.

Wide Roads

Our efforts to provide you with a beautiful community don’t stop at the edges of your property. Before you even see your future home site, you’ll notice the quality of our roads. All the roads in Silvercrest are gentle, smooth, and wide. The standard for our roads is 20 feet in width with a 16-foot driving surface, allowing two cars to pass without having to pull over on the edge. Compare this to the 8- to 10-foot roads found in most developments, which require careful and sometimes nerve-wracking negotiation whenever two cars meet, and you’ll see the Silvercrest advantage at work. The extra width of our roads is not only more convenient, it also provides you with an extra measure of safety and security when driving in a mountain community.

Paved Roads

The roads in Silvercrest are groomed and graveled to a high standard, and all will be paved as soon as they are ready. As you may know, paving roads too soon often leads to problems because cement trucks and other home-construction vehicles compact the roads, damaging the surface and making it difficult to repair. For this reason, most communities pave their roads a couple of years after they open. The usual practice is to assess the current generation of owners for the cost of that paving, producing an additional financial burden that few buyers anticipate. At Silvercrest, all the roads will be paved at the developer’s expense, with no additional charge to the new owners.

Road-Side Fencing

An additional touch that is unique to Silvercrest is the installation of road-side fencing throughout the community. Although our roads are wide enough to reassure even the most cautious driver, there is an extra level of security in having a nice, solid fence on the outsides of the curves. We will also be installing fencing, complete with reflectors, in any location where it might be difficult to see the road at night. All of our fencing is made out of solid oak, which we milled on site from oak trees we felled in opening up the land. The fencing you see today is just a sampling of what we’ll be putting in as soon as the power and water lines have been installed under the roads.

Parks and Ponds

Last, but most definitely not least, are the parks at Silvercrest. Rather than try to squeeze in as many home sites as possible, we reserved three areas totaling more than 2.6 acres as private parks to serve the community. The first park lies at the entrance, and is slated to include a pond with a waterfall, together with a shelter for viewing the water and just relaxing on a warm day. The second park, which lies at the upper edge of the meadow where the open land turns to forest, will contain a cascade of three spring-fed ponds joined by stone waterfalls. The third park, located right on the summit, offers stunning views to the west, south, and southeast. In addition to providing a spectacular setting for picnics and get-togethers, this park ensures that everyone in the Silvercrest community – and not just the owners of the most expensive lots – will have the opportunity to enjoy the best views on the mountain.

Hard Costs and Savings

By providing you with prepared home sites rather than raw land, we save you anywhere from $15,000 to $35,000, as shown in the following table. There is quite a range in these figures because they depend on many factors, such as how difficult your land is to clear, or whether you decide to drill your own well rather than tap the shared well provided. When you start to build your home, these are costs that would otherwise come right out of your pocket, so you should deduct them from the price of our lots when comparing them to those of other developments. And even if you never build at Silvercrest, all of these extras will increase the value of your lot for resale.