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The McCormick Ranch Guide<\/h2>\n\nThe decision that made the place<\/h3>\n\n
Before it was anything else, the Indian Bend Wash was a low, brushy floodplain that locals called the slough. Heavy summer rain turned it into a temporary river that split the young city in two and made streets impassable. The Army Corps of Engineers proposed the standard mid-century answer — a vast concrete channel, essentially the Los Angeles River routed through central Scottsdale.<\/p>\n\n
A resident named Bill Walton argued for something else in a newspaper editorial, was appointed to chair a task force on it, and the city went with his idea instead: a greenbelt of parks that would hold the water when it came and be a park the rest of the time. Voters approved a parkland bond in 1964, and the thing was built in pieces through the 1970s. Today it runs eleven miles, from Shea Boulevard south to Tempe Town Lake, and it is studied as one of the more successful pieces of urban design in the country. The golf courses and playing fields along it are not decorated floodplain. They are<\/em> the floodplain. They are meant to flood.<\/p>\n\n McCormick Ranch was developed in the early 1970s — the same years the greenbelt was going in — and it was built to that idea rather than beside it. The community holds seven lakes across roughly 130 acres of water, two Desmond Muirhead golf courses in the Palm and the Pine, and more than twenty-five miles of internal paths that tie straight into the city greenbelt. Because a floodway needs underpasses, the greenbelt has more than two dozen grade-separated crossings, which is the unglamorous engineering reason you can ride for miles here without ever waiting at a light.<\/p>\n\n The lakes are genuinely used rather than admired from a distance: the property owners association issues boating and fishing permits, and residents paddle and small-sail on the larger ones. And unlike most communities of this quality in Scottsdale, there is somewhere to walk to. The Hayden and Via de Ventura corridor carries the coffee, the patios, and the everyday errands, and much of the neighborhood reaches it on foot or by bike. In a valley built around cars and gates, that is the rarer thing.<\/p>\n\n The single most confusing thing about shopping here is that “McCormick Ranch” is an umbrella over roughly sixty-eight named subdivisions, several of which carry a second name in parentheses. Under that one heading sits attached condominium product, townhomes, patio homes, conventional single-family on generous lots, and true lakefront — and they do not trade alike, or price alike, or appeal to the same buyer. A search that returns all of it at once is nearly useless without someone to sort it. Roughly five square miles, about fourteen thousand residents, Scottsdale Unified schools, and no guard gate anywhere in it.<\/p>\n\n The market here has changed character in the last few years, and it is the same story unfolding in Arcadia<\/a>. Buyers came looking for original ranch homes on unusually generous lots — and increasingly they are not remodeling them. They are taking them down and building new. The lot, the mature trees, the path access, and the water are worth more than the house standing on it, and the new construction that results trades at a multiple of what the neighborhood traded at a decade ago.<\/p>\n\n That is the direct dividend of the 1961 decision. Refusing the concrete channel produced a central-Scottsdale neighborhood with water, shade, and walkability that cannot be replicated on raw desert land, and fifty years later that scarcity is what the land is being priced on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a neighborhood where original homes are being taken down, the first question about any older property is the one most sellers never get asked: are you selling a house<\/em>, or are you selling a lot<\/em>? Those are two different products, with two different buyers, and they price nowhere near each other. Marketed as a lot when the right end-user would have paid more for the home, a seller leaves money behind. Marketed as a home when the land is the real asset, the listing sits while the market waits for a number that reflects what the parcel is actually worth. Getting that call right is worth more than anything else that happens during the sale.<\/p>\n\n Marta has sold across McCormick Ranch — in Palm Cove, Sands McCormick, El Paseo, and Meridian among others, including two homes she has taken to market twice for returning clients — which in a community of sixty-eight subdivisions and half a dozen product types is the experience that matters. Today the interesting work here is at the top of the resale market, where that house-or-lot question decides the outcome. If you own an original home on a good lot in the Ranch, that’s worth a conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\nPaths, water, and somewhere to walk to<\/h3>\n\n
One name, many neighborhoods<\/h3>\n\n
What is happening now<\/h3>\n\n
Selling in McCormick Ranch<\/h3>\n\n