Coastal San Diego development with the Swell Group: award-winning design in the places people want to work, live and play.
Scott co-founded Swell Property in Encinitas, the start of the Swell Group, and has spent most of the last decade developing coastal San Diego real estate. He does everything from buying and selling houses, with a particular specialty in redevelopment: from one home site to fifty or more, working through every aspect of development, entitlement and engineering to get a dream property approved. The Swell Fund is the family office that holds the work.
The projects share a point of view. Award-winning architects, off-market acquisitions, and a bias toward the neighborhoods that have led the region in appreciation. A sampling is below, with the deck that tells the longer story.
The ones Scott led, from acquisition through design and entitlement.
Composer District, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Encinitas
An older house on a single lot in the Composer District. The plan: split the lot in two and design a new home for each, built around courtyards, water and folded roofs. The smallest of the three projects and the one Scott likes best.
The homes were never built. The property sold with the plans in place, at a significant gain, before construction started.
Encinitas
Three acres on Andrew Avenue, most recently a commercial greenhouse. Earlier proposals for the site had tried to maximize density. Scott's team took a different line with the City of Encinitas: twelve lots, one architect-designed home on each, from about 1,500 to 4,300 square feet, with lot sizes and design variety ahead of economies of scale.
Scott ran the entitlement: survey, civil, geotechnical and hydrology engineering, the historic-structure assessment, the demolition permits, and the Planning Commission hearing, through to a fully entitled project.
Encinitas
The largest project Scott has run. Five acres between Santa Fe Drive and Munevar Street, a church and preschool site in the coastal zone, taken through the City of Encinitas to approval for fifty-one homes: thirty-five detached, sixteen attached, five of them affordable.
The site could have carried more under state density bonus law. The approved plan stops nine homes above base density, parks fifty-five spaces beyond what the code requires, triples the tree count and redesigns the southwest corner around existing trees and bio-retention. Scott led the owner side across architecture, civil, landscape, geotechnical, traffic and environmental work and land-use counsel, through to the Planning Commission.
Projects led by Scott's partner at the Swell Group, where Scott worked the business side. His own specialty is development.
Thirty-two pages on the approach, the team, the development process and a sampling of projects.
Open the deck (PDF)
