Homes on acreage in Highland

In most Utah cities acreage is a niche you hunt for. In Highland it is the default, because the city zones large lots by law. Its three residential zones, written as R-1-40, R-1-30, and R-1-20, keep lots at about a half acre to an acre, and only a few planned developments hold smaller lots. The result is a bench that looks and lives like an orchard that grew houses: predominantly half-acre-to-acre detached homes and custom estates, with smaller lots mostly in a few planned developments and the recent Town Center townhomes. So on this page acreage is not an exception to the Highland market. It is the Highland market, and the real question is which large lot, in which setting, with what attached to it.

Because the lot is what you are really buying here, the first thing to verify is the zone the parcel actually sits in, because R-1-40, R-1-30, and R-1-20 live very differently. An acre-class R-1-40 lot gives you room for a shop, deep garden ground, RV and trailer parking, and real distance from the neighbors; a half-acre R-1-20 lot is still generous by Utah Valley standards but is a different project to maintain and to build on. Confirm the exact zone and its real minimum in the city's Development Code before you plan an outbuilding or a build, rather than eyeballing the lot. The estate and acre-class homes run well above the citywide typical value, which the U.S. Census puts at about $928,300 (ACS 2020-2024), and value rides on the lot, the views, and the landscaping as much as on the house itself.

Here is the load-bearing fact in Highland, and it is the one that separates pricing a big lot here from anywhere else: water comes on two systems and two bills. The city delivers culinary (drinking) water from city wells for indoor use, and a completely separate pressurized irrigation, or secondary, system waters the yards, billed as its own seasonal line item. That secondary line is how acre lots stayed cheaply green for decades, because it ran unmetered. That is changing. To meet a state law that requires these meters, the city began installing irrigation meters in the northwest part of the city in summer 2023 and finished them in 2025. Metered billing starts in spring 2027. Translation: on a Highland acre you price the landscape, not just the house, because the cost of keeping that landscape green is set to change.

So the homework on a big lot here is the lot, then the water, then the use. Ask plainly how the secondary irrigation is set up for the address, whether the meter is in yet, and what the carrying cost of the landscape really looks like once billing changes. Then confirm the zone and what it lets you build or keep. If what you want is space and what you can do with it, the same large lots show up as luxury homes at the estate end, as RV-parking homes with side-yard room for the trailer and the boat, and as single-story homes spread out across one level on a big lot. You can also browse every Highland listing, and when a parcel with the right land catches your eye, reach out and I will pull the zone and the water situation before you write a thing.