"At one time, I thought, I don't want to take this incredible parcel and just lay out all these half-acre lots and be done." That was Eden Prairie Mayor Ron Case, talking about the Marshall family farm at 9905 Dell Road, one of the last remaining parcels of undeveloped land in the city. The council had just given initial approval to a new plan for the site in July 2026, and Case was explaining why he'd come around to it.
What he didn't say directly, but what the numbers behind the plan make clear, is that the site's second act ended up smaller and more expensive than its first.
Two Plans, One Farm, Fewer Homes the Second Time
The Marshall family bought this 32-acre parcel along Dell Road in 1954. Four generations later, with the farmhouse still standing and Riley Creek still running through the bluff on the property's south end, it became the subject of two very different development proposals within about eighteen months of each other.
The first plan, called Marshall Gardens, won council approval in January 2025. It called for 100 condo-style units plus 15 single-family homes, with townhomes priced from roughly $850,000 to $1.2 million and single-family homes from $1.1 million to $1.5 million. About 13 acres of bluff land near Riley Creek would go to the city as preserved open space.
That plan fell through before construction started.
The plan that replaced it, approved by the council in July 2026, cuts the unit count by more than half: 50 total homes, split between 28 villas and 22 single-family lots. The villas start at $900,000. The single-family homes start around $1.5 million, with options like a second floor adding another $100,000 or more. The homes are being built by Johnson Reiland Homes and McDonald Construction. The bluff acreage being set aside for the city is about the same, roughly 13 of the 32 acres.
Here's the side-by-side:
| 2025 Plan (Marshall Gardens) | 2026 Plan (approved) | |
|---|---|---|
| Total homes | 115 (15 single-family + 100 condo-style) | 50 (22 single-family + 28 villas) |
| Single-family price floor | $1.1 million | $1.5 million |
| Attached/villa price floor | $850,000 | $900,000 |
| Bluff acreage preserved | ~13 acres | ~13 acres |
Same land, same bluff line, same creek. Fewer homes, and every remaining price point moved up.
Why the Math Worked Out This Way
The obvious assumption is that a smaller plan should be a cheaper one. Fewer units usually means a developer is scaling back ambition, not raising the price of what's left. Here it ran the other direction, and the reason comes down to what's actually buildable on this specific piece of ground.
City Planner Jeremy Barnhart told the Planning Commission that part of the site is undevelopable outright, a steep slope with dense vegetation running down to the bluff line above Riley Creek. The city takes that portion and maintains it as public land. The developer works with roughly 13 acres beyond the bluff line, the same acreage regardless of which version of the plan you're looking at.
When the developable footprint is fixed, a plan with a fourth as many units has to spread its costs, infrastructure, and profit margin across far fewer sales. The lot-width waiver the developer requested for homes on the northern end of the bluff is part of that math too. Concentrating density into fewer, wider lots on the buildable portion of the site is what let the project pencil out with only 50 homes instead of 115.
There was a second factor at work, and it wasn't purely about topography. Eden Prairie's own long-range Guide Plan includes a strategy to encourage small-lot home development for empty nesters looking to downsize, and villa-style product like this is scarce in the city relative to demand. Paul Ryland, one of the builders on the project, described the 28 villas and 22 single-family homes as aimed squarely at empty nesters and older adults. That's not incidental to the pricing. It's the buyer the product was designed for.
The Marshall Farm Isn't the Only One Doing This
If this were an isolated case, it would be a curiosity about one parcel. It isn't isolated. Eden Prairie has approved a string of similar infill projects over the past two years, and they follow the same shape.
- Lotus Villas, another empty-nester project, is priced from just under $1 million to $1.5 million, single story plus basement, with a homeowners association maintaining everything but the interior.
- Enclave at Manor Road, a 17-home project from Brandl Anderson Homes on a former farmstead in northern Eden Prairie, follows the same small-lot, low-maintenance format.
- Every one of these projects, because they're processed as planned unit developments, has to meet the city's sustainability standards adopted January 1, 2024: at least one EV-ready garage stall and roof trusses built to carry solar panels.
None of these are entry-level product. All of them are chasing the same buyer: someone selling a larger house and looking to stay in Eden Prairie without the maintenance.
What a $530,000 Median Actually Means Now
Over the three months ending in May 2026, the median sale price for a home in Eden Prairie ran around $530,000, up roughly 10 percent from the same window a year earlier, with homes typically selling within about three weeks of listing. That number describes the resale market, the roughly 8,000 or so existing single-family homes, townhomes, and condos already standing in the city.
New construction is telling a completely different story. There is effectively no path to a newly built home in Eden Prairie under $900,000 right now, and the single-family floor on the newest project is $1.5 million. If your plan for finding an affordable foothold in Eden Prairie involves waiting for a new subdivision to open with starter-priced inventory, the last several approvals suggest that's not where the builders are aiming, and it's not where the available land supports building.
That gap matters differently depending on which side of the transaction you're on. If you're shopping, the existing resale stock, not new construction, is where the $500,000 to $700,000 range actually lives. If you already own a home in that range and you're thinking about your next move, the empty-nester product now filling every infill parcel in the city was built with you in mind. A homeowner looking to downsize from a larger single-family house into something lower-maintenance now has more genuinely new options in Eden Prairie than at almost any point in the last several years, just not at the price point a first-time buyer would recognize as accessible.
The Neighbor Question Nobody Skips
At the July hearing, a resident living near the Marshall farm raised a concern that comes up at nearly every infill hearing in a built-out suburb: would new construction next door hurt the value of an existing home. The resident specifically pointed to a lot-width waiver granted for homes on the northern bluff, arguing that 18 closely spaced homes could wall off views from the established neighborhood behind them.
Case's response is worth knowing if you're evaluating a home anywhere near one of these infill sites. He noted that only four homes in the existing neighborhood would directly border the new lots, since most of the rest back up to wetlands rather than the new development. He also pointed out that wider lots, the alternative the resident was implicitly asking for, would mean wider homes covering the same amount of frontage, which wouldn't actually solve the concern about a wall of new construction. It's a useful example of how zoning tradeoffs on a bluff or wetland-adjacent parcel rarely have a clean fix. Every configuration trades one kind of proximity for another.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Marshall farm really the last undeveloped land in Eden Prairie? It's described by city officials and local reporting as one of the last remaining large parcels, not the literal final square foot. Smaller infill sites, like the Manor Road farmstead now being developed as Enclave at Manor Road, continue to surface as older properties change hands.
Will Eden Prairie ever see entry-level new construction again? Nothing in the current pipeline points that direction. The land constraints on remaining parcels and the city's own guide plan language favoring empty-nester housing both push toward the same result: smaller lot counts, higher price floors.
Does a nearby luxury infill project help or hurt an existing home's resale value? It depends heavily on adjacency, and officials at the Marshall farm hearing distinguished between homes that directly border new construction and those separated by wetlands or open space. If you're weighing a purchase or a listing near one of these sites, that distinction is worth confirming parcel by parcel rather than assuming either way.
If you're trying to figure out where your own home, or the one you're considering, actually sits relative to these shifts in Eden Prairie's new construction pipeline, that's exactly the kind of question worth a direct conversation rather than a guess. Renee Wilson has spent decades reading exactly this kind of local detail for buyers and sellers across the western suburbs. Request a personal home valuation or schedule a consultation to talk through what it means for your situation.
