Community Relations Are Rewarding! Takeaways From the Grow Community Meeting
Developing a residential real estate project is a huge endeavor. With so many tasks, contractors, and workflows to coordinate, it’s easy to overlook the community in which you’re building. However, engaging neighbors in a timely manner makes a significant difference when it comes to the success of residential projects.
At Green Canopy NODE, we consider ourselves neighbors in the communities we work, especially given our mission to build homes, relationships, and businesses that help regenerate communities and environments. After all, we become part of their homes’ surroundings and impact their day-to-day lives. “Part of the protocol in our own development projects is to have a community meeting to notify neighborhoods even before we start city permits. We typically do this prior to land acquisition as neighbors’ input is a key component of our feasibility due diligence,” explains Justin Hooks, VP of Construction at Green Canopy NODE.
Recently, our team hosted a meeting with Grow Community on Bainbridge Island, with the goal of continuing dialogue about the construction of the project’s final phase. “It was great to see so many neighbors turn out. They had a variety of concerns about the new construction and how it would affect their day-to-day life at Grow. The Green Canopy NODE team, Jeff Bouma – the landscape architect —, and I, answered a range of questions from what the homes will look like, how parking is being managed to how the landscaping would blend in with what is there now,” shares Jonathan Davis, Architect at Davis Studio Architecture + Design and Grow Community resident.
Community relations are rewarding – we want to share our takeaways to develop strong relationships and ensure the success of your project.
Be proactive about communicating – Don’t let neighbors wake up one day with unexpected construction sounds and dust. This will harm the project’s ability to organically become part of the community and your company’s reputation for future business – real estate is significantly about relationships!
Listen – Neighbors’ concerns vary from construction timelines and working hours to path accessibility. Most of these questions can be addressed by supplying an FAQ with project information. Neighbors can also flag things you should be planning for but overlooked.
All petitions are worth considering – Some requests may not be possible to deliver, given the project’s budget and timeline, but in others, you may find opportunities. For example, neighbors asked how we could contribute to the care and expansion of community areas. Our team found an alternative: instead of discarding the construction waste from leveling the project’s land, we will repurpose this soil to improve the center park, a community hallmark where residents enjoy summer concerts and other activities. This was an opportunity to implement a circular economy approach that benefits neighbors and aligns with our sustainability goals.
Leave the door open – A great deal of maintaining relationships is an ongoing effort to manage expectations and communicate throughout the project. As construction moves forward, neighbors will have new questions. Be mindful to establish how these can be shared with the team, for example through resident portals, emails, or future community meetings.
In essence, our greatest takeaway from this experience is that investing time and effort in developing community relations is a great way to create excitement about construction, learn from one another by active listening and build trust. During the Grow Community meeting, “neighbors had some tough questions” shared Green Canopy NODE’s Marketing Manager Emily Butterfield, “but the team addressed them, and it was clear that they appreciated and valued that we took the time and effort to ‘show up’,” she adds.
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