The Housing Chronicles Blog: The GE-branded community

Saturday, January 19, 2008

The GE-branded community

Watch out Martha Stewart and Disney: on the heels of deals by KBHome to co-opt some well-known brands to some great success (an idea I thought was long overdue and was suggesting in the late 1990s), GE's "Ecoimagination" division has partnered with a Houston land developer for an entire master-planned community. From the local Business Journal:

Land Tejas Cos., developer of Houston's Canyon Gate Communities, and General Electric

have finalized an agreement to build Houston's first master-planned community to incorporate GE's ecomagination program.

The new program will be launched in spring 2008 at the Land Tejas community of Discovery at Spring Trails. Its aim is to create a living environment that is more cost-effective than traditionally built communities.

In addition to mandating builder cooperation community-wide, Houston-based Land Tejas will apply efficiency and conservation principles to the design of the community and to the energy and water technologies used throughout its common areas.

Although the Playa Vista community near L.A.'s Marina Del Rey also incorporated many of these same ideas, instead of partnering with one big player like GE it did so with numerous companies with different types of expertise. It'll be interesting to see leveraging the well-known and storied GE name will help sales or spike prices.

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