The Wall Street Journal unveils a terrific new high-end concept in the niche residential gated communities marketplace.
WSJ informs its readers that a select group of residents at Brays Island Plantation, a 5,500-acre gated community in coastal South Carolina, are pampered with massages, acupuncture therapy and custom diet plans.
Gated enclaves that cater to horses—and the home buyers who love them—are laying on equine-friendly amenities like never before, with state-of-the-art stables, jumping and dressage rings, polo fields and miles of maintained trails. Residents can saddle up borrowed horses for catered ride-and-dine evenings, ford rivers on rugged trail rides—and even ride to hounds in simulated fox hunts.
Although equestrian facilities are costly to maintain—and rarely turn a profit for developers—horses are powerful marketing tools who earn their keep in home sales, advertising a bucolic, outdoorsy lifestyle to top-tier buyers who may never have sat in a saddle.
Equestrian communities are a niche market that appeal to 11% of all new home shoppers, according to Mollie Carmichael, a principal at John Burns Real Estate Consulting. “There’s a character to the equestrian lifestyle that is unquestionably great—teaching your kids to ride, teaching them about nature,” she said.
There’s a wait list for stalls at Brays Island Plantation, a sporting community with golf, clay-shooting and quail-hunting, where available homes are listed between $725,000 and $3.5 million.