Prices start at $318,890 for the three-bedroom main house and built-in suite with an option of one or two bedrooms. The smallest home in the development -- a 1,404-square-foot (130- square-meter), one-story house -- starts at $241,070.
Dan Alvarez, owner of a risk-management company in Rancho Cucamonga, California, said he was attracted to the option of buying the house with a separate unit for his three college-aged children.
No Dorms
"If I were to move into a place like this, it eliminates having to rent another place if you're funding college," he said during a tour of the model home. "You wouldn't have to pay for their college dorms."
For Alvarez, 60, the drawbacks are the location -- more than an hour's drive from his daughter's college in Orange County -- and the weak local real estate market.
The San Bernardino-Riverside County region had the fifth- highest foreclosure rate among metropolitan areas with a population over 200,000 in the quarter ended Sept. 30, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a real estate information service in Irvine, California. Home starts are likely to fall to less than 1,000 in San Bernardino County this year, compared with 10,416 in 2005, according to Houston-based MetroStudy, which tracks housing construction.
Mary and Marty Nachman, retirees from Apple Valley, California, said the two-unit Lennar home may be preferable to the house they bought in 2007 in one of Pulte's Del Webb senior communities, where their children can stay for only two months a year because they're under age 55.
Moving Back Home
"With this economy, the way things are right now, there are a lot of young adult children who need to move back home for a while," said Mary Nachman, 68, a retired juvenile court officer and mother of five. "We already know people in our community who've had kids move back in, but they're doing it against the rules and doing it covertly. If they get turned in, their kids will have to leave."
While duplexes, granny flats and guest houses have a long history, the two-homes-in-one models are new for mass-market builders, said Jeff Roos, president of Lennar's Western region. Lennar, the third-largest U.S. builder by revenue, unveiled its first Next Gen homes in September in the Phoenix area and expects to offer them in as many as 40 communities by the end of this year, Roos said.