After only a few months in her new one-bedroom condominium in Irvine’s booming Great Park community, Kim Pohas started paying attention to real estate prices again. She loved her condo, which she bought in May 2023 for $643,000 within days of touring a model unit and deciding to splurge for upgrades to the floors and kitchen backsplash. But her Zillow alerts were telling her that values in her neighborhood were soaring. On a lark, Pohas listed the condo for sale.
Construction in Great Park allows Irvine to continue to far outpace surrounding communities in homebuilding. In the last five years, the 9,400 homes permitted in Irvine is double the next largest amount of any other Orange County city, according to U.S. Census data. New three-story, three- and four-bedroom townhomes with small balconies and two-car garages cluster on small lots in Great Park's Solis Park section. Freshly painted yellow crosswalks mark the way to a K-8 school.