Hawaii s Fastest Changing Neighborhoods

Things are changing pretty quickly. I did not recognize Kaka'ako when I came home. Skyline! The thing never changed nothing all these years. Everything looks wildly different than it did 5, 10, 15 years ago. Today, we're going to talk about the four neighborhoods in Hawai'i that are changing the fastest and maybe get into kind of what our predictions are for what that may mean in real estate. So first, we have to talk about Kaka'ako. That's probably the easiest to see with our own eyes as far as how rapidly that is changing and how much of a change that brings to the community. When I left O'ahu and, you know, did my thing for over a decade in Maui County, Outer Islands, I did not recognize Kaka'ako when I came home. Every year, it looks more and more different. What are the things that are causing that? Obviously, we have to talk about Ward Village, the biggest development, the 60-acre master plan, 14-building development within Kaka'ako and how that's going to affect not only the island but potentially the market, the influx of people that live or vacation home there and what that's going to mean just for the community and the island in general. All right, so in my younger years, I actually, like, worked in the Kaka'ako Ward Village area at Dave & Buster's. Back then, things were kind of more industrial. You used to see a lot of warehouses. Even the buildings that were in the area were called, like, Ward Warehouse, that sort of thing, and now all of that's getting demolished to bring in luxury mixed-use urban living. What does that mean? It means thousands of luxury units from intro to luxury to ultra-lux, right, if you're on the front row, and then different levels of commercials sprinkled throughout that community as well. I wonder if we have any B-roll to show you. We probably don't, like, of what Ward used to look like. Obviously, you can probably Google it and find, but I wish I could have, like, walked through the streets of Ward Village with you guys. The first Ward Village video we did, and then the latest one, there's already a big difference between what the community looked like between those two videos. I don't think that when they develop more and more, it's going to necessarily broaden the buyer pool for that area and open up maybe more real estate opportunities for people who aren't already able to be in that market. Kaka'ako Ward Village, new development, luxury, kind of, like, high-rise condos. It's not like if they keep building more, the buyer pool is going to increase for who can be in there. It is, you know, a high-premium neighborhood to be in. For a lot of us who don't live there, it may be someplace for us to frequent, someplace for us to visit, what it looks like today versus how it used to look before, the influx of places that we can work at. I have a few, a handful, I have a bunch, actually. I have a bunch of clients who live in Ward Village, who bought in Ward Village both resale and new construction, some who are, you know, still in the process of new construction and haven't gotten their keys yet. For all of them, the reason that they bought into Ward Village is for them, they all see the vision of the long-term opportunity for what it means after everything activates within Ward Village. I have some who bought early into Ward Village before a lot of things were activated, and for them, it was really a 10-year kind of game plan that they had in their head. When you buy early into the community, you are competing with a lot of other units that come to market. You are competing with a lot of other buildings that are going to be built. You're going to be within the construction. You're going to have to wait for the commercial to fill in, but that buyer, his lens was set really far out in the future. He felt it was going to be kind of like a mini Manhattan, meaning, you know, Hawai'i's mini Manhattan, Hawai'i's little bustling city that was going to just really activate, fill in, and then just become like this beautiful, luxurious, you know, neighborhood with a lot of appreciation to potentially come years down the road. All right, and let's talk about a potential con of living in Kaka'ako or Ward Village, the HOA. Like any of these buildings in town, you do have a higher HOA to begin with because you are amenity heavy. You have a smaller association fee for the greater Ward Village, but then whatever building you live in, you also have your maintenance fee and your association dues for that. New constructions in general, high-rises that have all of the amenities that these do, amenity decks, pools, elevators, spas, all of that sort of thing, they do come with high maintenance fees, so that is something to be wary of. All of those items to take care of and an amenity-heavy building can mean future increases, future assessments down the line to take care of those things. I know buyers who are like, give me the thing that has absolutely no amenities because I would like my association dues to be as low as possible for as long as possible. And then I have clients who are like, I don't want to leave my building ever. I want my gym there. I want racquetball. I want tennis. I want everything to be right at my fingertips. I want it to feel like a resort. And you can get that in Ward Village, but the other side of that coin is your association dues are high and association dues, as we all know, usually continue to go up over the years. There aren't a lot of areas on the island that are still being developed, so let's talk about Ho'opili in Ewa Beach slash Kapolei. Again, leave us a comment if you think that Ho'opili is Ewa or Kapolei. And actually, I think it kind of just depends what side you're on. Ho'opili, the D.R. Horton new construction that is sprawling and continuing to sprawl for many more years to come. So we're talking low-rise kind of condo-y sort of buildings like the Kaikea building, true townhomes like Kapolei and Alana, which are being built now. We even got tiny homes in there, Ahakea, check out our video on Ahakea. Tell us what you think about it. And then the larger homes, single-family homes, Ikena, Kanalani. We've got a listing in Kanalani right now. Ask us about that. So this is a part of the island where if you were here 10, 15 years ago, there would have been absolutely nothing there. It would have been red dirt and cane fields. And now you have a huge sprawling master plan community with soccer parks, dog parks, commercial. We have flex units, meaning we have ice cream shops, local Joe's coffee shop, Domino's Pizza, insurance companies, all of those things within the complex, within the community. I think I saw a hotel. I don't know if that's open yet. Derek and I were driving by and we just saw it. There's a hotel, similar to the one that you see by Kamakana Ali'i. All of these residences, and they're just continuing to build. So many new homes. They're building new schools to serve the community so that these kids have somewhere to go to school. Derek and I just did a career day at Kapolei Middle School, and that was a topic of conversation amongst the teachers, the sheer volume of children that are moving into these new communities. So how does new development change a community? It changes the way it looks, you know, in Kaka'ako, the skyline in Ewa Beach and Ho'opili. It changes the schools that are needed. It changes how many kids are in these classes. It may change the class sizes of the schools that are currently serving the community until the other schools are built. Lots of residential sprawl happening in that area. People I know who live in Ho'opili love their community. They're active, they're outdoors. There's enough little commercial things within Ho'opili where they've got places to go. You know, they can do a quick pop over, do some coffee, sit down, talk story with their friends, but they're also super close to places like Kamakana Ali'i. Ho'opili, as far as Ewa Beach goes, is one of the closest transits that you can make to town, right? It's probably the best commute for Ewa Beach because you are popped right onto the freeway as soon as you get out of the community in Ewa Beach. And you do have the public transit right there with rail, with the bus systems and everything that are functioning and running from Ho'opili currently. Ho'opili is really popular because there are a lot of different levels that you can buy into. Well, there are more affordable options to start at, and then you can go all the way up to, you know, the large, more premier homes in, say, Ikena Bluffs, which is one of the nicer, you know, kind of crown jewels of the Ho'opili community when it was built. This is kind of one of the last frontiers on the island of tons of land that is going to be developed, and that's going to be Ho'opili and Ewa Beach. We always want to keep it real with you. So what's the flip side? What's the risk of buying in someplace like Ho'opili? I would say that depending on the kind of unit you have, keep in mind that this, like I mentioned, is a sprawl that's going to be continuing to happen for many years. So on the way out, if you are somebody like a PCSing military family and you buy a townhome that there are like 50 other units like yours, on the way out, you may have competition, not only within your own complex, but within all of the other townhomes within the sprawl of Ho'opili. So that's one thing to consider is competing with both your neighbors and the communities that are built around you, as well as the developer on your way out, because there will very likely, if you sell within the next five to 10 years, be a competing development within Ho'opili that is new and being sold by the developer. Kapolei, let's talk about Kapolei. Leeward Plain, West O'ahu, Ewa Beach and Kapolei. Kapolei is kind of like the sister community of Ewa Beach. They're right next to each other. Difference is zip code. And Kapolei's got a little nugget up the hill. Upper Kapolei, Makakilo. So Kapolei has already been called second city for a lot of years by local people because of the things that have been coming up. That's another community, when I first moved back home from being away for over a decade, I was lost immediately. I went to go surf at White Plains and was like, I'm not gonna use my map. I'm just gonna drive through. I'm local. I'm from here. I grew up here. I know how to get there. And I did not. There were so many new things that had come up between the time that I left home and coming back that it was like unrecognizable to me. I almost could not even get to White Plains because I was like, did not recognize any of the things that I had to drive through to get there. Kapolei, while I would not say is sprawling quite as much as Ho'opili is, there are still little pockets that are being developed. For example, Kalailoa, which is more to the Makai side of Kapolei, more near the ocean. Think Costco, that area that has kind of the major commercial complex that has all of the big things, Kapolei Commons, Costco, Target, movie theaters over there. There's an area called Kalailoa. One of the newest developments there is Ka'ulu by Gentry. We have some clients in there as well. They love the proximity to Kapolei and all of the amenities that Kapolei has to offer. They continue to bring more things in that are meaningful for the community and make it such that you really don't have to go to town if you don't want to. It has everything needed to be a sustainable community. And that area, Kalailoa, where Ka'ulu is, you know, when our clients buy into Ka'ulu, they're currently taking part of or becoming a part of the Ka'ulu community. And so there's no larger overarching master association like there is in, say, Ho'opili, right? If you buy in the small community of Alana townhomes, that's your little community, but then you also are part of the master community of Ho'opili. In Ka'ulu, they have your Ka'ulu association, but they don't yet have a master community. And that is TBD as things develop in the Kalailoa area. Again, we're gonna kind of show you the flip side. Oh, it's so convenient. You got everything there. That is true. You do have pretty much everything you need in Kapolei. But if you are a person who does still need to commute to let's call it Kapiolani in town, if you are a person who's going to work at the state Capitol, if you are a person who knows that you are going to spend a meaningful amount of your time in downtown Honolulu, the commute is still not great. Not everybody is lucky enough to be able to live, work, and play in that area. And if you do need to commute for one of those reasons out into town, it's still kind of a far drive. So for the fourth neighborhood that is changing the fastest on O'ahu, I mean, we tricked you a little bit. It's not really a neighborhood, but we do have to talk about it, guys. It's the rail. Done a couple of videos about the rail. Now you can go check those out. How is the rail going to change O'ahu? How is it gonna change the neighborhoods? What's it gonna do to the market here? What does that mean for us homeowners and future homeowners? I know some of us are like nothing because the thing never changed nothing all these years. We hear you and we get it. We've had a lot of years of being annoyed by it and seeing the construction going on and sitting in extra traffic. And we're only really kind of now starting to, some of us reap the benefits of what it's supposed to be meant for. Getting people off the freeways, getting people to use mass public transit in Hawaii, which is meant to be a really big deal, be a game changer for us. Let's talk about how that's gonna affect communities and how that's gonna affect real estate. My biggest thing that I hear from my clients, they would live in Ewa Beach or they would live in Kapolei, but the drive is just too far. We just talked about it in this video. Kapolei's got everything you need right there, but if you still need to drive to town for work, which a lot of us do, it's just really far still. Rail doesn't quite make it all the way out to town, but when it does, I'm curious to see how many more people actually consider Kapolei, Makakilo, Ewa Beach that just wouldn't before because of the traffic. In the last five years, probably too many to count. The amount of clients that come in and just eliminate Ewa Beach and Kapolei off the bat because of commute. More recently, we have more people who are open to it because, for instance, our PCSing families who are able to now use the rail to get by Pearl Harbor. That's been a game changer for some families. They've been able to use that to commute to work in Pearl Harbor, in and around that area, or near the airport. Slowly but surely, I'm starting to hear more people not only be open to it because rail already gets them to where they need to go, or be open to it because they're seeing more people actually be able to use it, and they're looking forward to when those stations activate further into town. So we already know that the residential sprawl is big in Ewa Beach. We already know that there's Second City, a lot of people who live in Kapolei. I'm curious to see if the rail activating is going to bring more bodies into that area. Now, they're building the homes, right? The sprawl is happening, and I do think that with the continued sprawl of places like Ho'opili, alongside or adjacent to the continued sprawl of the rail into downtown Honolulu, I predict we'll make for an even more vibrant lived-in community on West O'ahu. Those are kind of our top four neighborhoods, or three neighborhoods, and one public transit that we think are changing fastest on O'ahu, or things that are gonna bring the most change to the island. Let us know your predictions, and if you've got questions or challenges for us on what you think really is gonna be more quickly changing, go to coreteamhawaii.com, fill out the contact form, and let us know what questions you have.