Living in Solente

Solente climbs the red rock hills on the north edge of Washington City, north of I-15 Exit 12 and about a mile east of the Green Spring course. It broke ground in late 2023 on 570 acres of former Utah Trust Lands. GWC Capital and Blue Diamond Capital, the same partnership behind Desert Color, are building it as a gated, master-planned community. When fully built, the plan calls for roughly 2,200 residences: custom estate homes, townhomes, condominiums, resort villas, and casitas (small, separate units).

It feels different from the flatter subdivisions down in Washington Fields. You sit up on the hillside against the sheer sandstone of the Red Cliffs, with the Millcreek and Dino Cliffs trailheads on the boundary. The Green Springs services are a couple of minutes downhill, and the freeway is a short run from the gate. Mornings bring the light off the cliffs, and the drive to anything you need stays short.

I read Solente as a phased, custom community, because that is what it is right now. Phase one is estate lots, and most early buyers are choosing a parcel and a builder, not a finished house. A raw lot, a home under construction, and a finished custom estate do not price or inspect the same way. Knowing which of the three you are looking at is the most useful thing you can do before you fall for any one listing up here.

Solente is a mix of homes and lots at different stages, and that is the part most online searches get wrong. Right now you are mostly looking at estate lots in the early phases. A handful of homes are under construction, and a small number of custom estates are finished. The full master plan adds townhomes, condominiums, resort villas, and casitas over time, but very few of those exist yet. Lump the stages together and the numbers lie to you. A bare lot and a finished custom estate are two different kinds of homes wearing the same community name.

So I look at each kind on its own. On the Washington County MLS, early estate lots have generally sold from the low $400,000s up past $1 million, depending on size, position, and view. Lots run from roughly a half acre to two-thirds of an acre and larger. Finished custom homes here are true luxury homes, and recorded sales have reached well into the multimillions on the largest estates. Everything is custom and new, so there is no single price to quote and only a few recent sales to compare against.

The slope is the quiet detail behind all of it. Lots step up the hillside for views toward the valley and the cliffs, and that is why the community is being built custom, not from a plan book. It is also why I look hard at each parcel's slope, access, and how it drains water before I get excited about the view.

If you are buying, decide first whether you want a lot to build on or a finished home. The process and the timeline are completely different. If you are selling, do the same before you pick the recent sales to compare against. Check everything against the live listings. With so few sales here, the right two or three sales of similar homes matter more than any community average.

Solente is part of the Washington County School District, on the Pine View side of the district. The Green Springs area is generally served by Sandstone Elementary (grades K-5) at 850 North 2450 East. Next comes Pine View Intermediate (grades 6-7). After that come Pine View Middle (grades 8-9) at 2145 East 130 North and Pine View High (grades 10-12) at 2850 East 750 North.

School boundaries can shift as homes go up in this end of Washington, and Solente is brand new. Check the current assignment for any specific lot directly with the district, rather than guessing from a map. For outside school data, GreatSchools and Niche both publish numbers you can weigh yourself. Utah Tech University in St. George is about twenty minutes southwest.

No other Washington community can say this: the cliffs on Solente's doorstep hold real dinosaur tracks. The Dino Cliffs Trail runs along the base of the red walls just outside the boundary. A couple hundred yards from the trailhead is a track site. Paleontologists re-examined the rock there in 2012 and identified prints from the early Jurassic. Three track types have been catalogued in the Red Cliffs area: Grallator, Eubrontes, and Kayentapus. They were pressed into stone long before anyone thought to gate a subdivision here.

That is not a marketing line; it is the geology of the place. Solente is carved into the same sandstone that makes the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve a protected landscape. That is why the cliffs behind the community will stay red and open instead of built over. It also means the reserve, the tortoise habitat, and the track site are permanent neighbors. The trailheads the developer is upgrading are the doorways to all of it.

I treat the reserve boundary as a real feature of buying up here, not a footnote. The view is protected and the trail access is real, and so is the responsibility that comes with building against a conservation area. The buyers who do well at Solente ask about the cliff line, the slope, and the drainage on purpose.