A buyer touring a Charles Cudd villa in Avienda Village this summer would have seen the same rendering that has hung in Chanhassen sales offices for years: a main street lined with cafes, a plaza with string lights, neighbors walking to a gourmet grocer instead of driving. The sales agent points at it while describing the carefree lifestyle, lawn care included, snow plowing handled, association dues covering the parts of homeownership nobody misses.
What that buyer might not have heard is that six weeks earlier, the Chanhassen City Council spent a work session raising concerns about the exact same project, and specifically about the gap between that rendering and what's actually getting built next door.
The Story City Hall Keeps Telling Itself
Avienda has been in front of the Chanhassen City Council in some form since 2017. The most recent chapter has followed a pattern worth knowing before you sign a purchase agreement anywhere near it.
- January 26, 2026: The council learned two things at once. Construction had started on 412 luxury apartment units from Doran Companies, and the developer had signed a lease with a grocer for a 65,000-square-foot store that would include a wine and spirits section and four fuel pumps. Council members responded with what the city's own recap described as broad concern about a shift away from the original vision of a high-end, walkable destination.
- March 30, 2026: A revised sketch plan came back with a more traditional layout, organized around a stormwater pond rather than the pedestrian plaza from earlier renderings.
- June 22, 2026: The council reviewed another updated sketch plan and, according to the meeting record, still had concerns. The developer and council agreed a formal "visioning session" was needed just to get everyone aligned again.
- July 8, 2026: That visioning session happened. No formal action, general discussion only, with the council telling the developer the plan was headed the right direction but needed more refinement.
- August 13 and 20, 2026: An open house at City Hall, followed by the announcement that the grocery anchor would be Coborn's Market & Table, the same newer concept Coborn's currently runs in Plymouth.
- September 15, 2026: The Planning Commission is scheduled to hold a public hearing on amendments to the Avienda Planned Unit Development.
- October 2026: The City Council is expected to take up the same amendments.
That is not a project quietly finishing construction. It's a project still negotiating, at the government level, what it is allowed to be.
What "Lifestyle Center" Was Supposed to Mean
Landform, the Minneapolis firm that has handled planning and civil engineering for the site since the beginning, still describes Avienda on its own project page as a world-class mixed-use center built around "800 units of housing alongside 350,000 square feet of retail and 150,000 square feet of office space," with sidewalks, trails, and a main street meant to connect everything.
That is the version buyers were sold when Charles Cudd started reserving lots in Avienda Village, with villa packages ranging from the upper $800,000s to $1.7 million depending on the plan. It's also the version behind the pricing at the 412-unit Doran Companies apartment building, an 11-acre development built around a two-acre central courtyard with what the builder calls a wellness-driven design.
Paying a premium for that kind of unit only makes sense if the walkable retail and dining component actually shows up next door. As of this September, it hasn't been approved yet.
What's Actually Getting Built Right Now
Strip away the renderings and here's what has a shovel in the ground or a signed lease as of this month. The Doran apartments are under construction. The Charles Cudd villas are selling and, in some cases, already occupied. The retail anchor is Coborn's Market & Table, a grocery format, not a boutique or restaurant row, and it's coming with a wine and spirits section and four fuel pumps.
None of that makes Coborn's a bad neighbor. A well-run grocery anchor is a genuine convenience, and a gas station with competitive pricing is the kind of thing residents use every week without thinking about it. But a 65,000-square-foot grocery store with pumps out front is a fundamentally different piece of infrastructure than the walkable plaza with restaurants and gathering space that appeared in the original pitch, and it's a different traffic pattern too. That's precisely the distinction the council itself has been pressing the developer on since January.
Why the Gap Matters More Than the Price Tag
Here's the part that actually affects a buyer's decision. Chanhassen's citywide numbers, drawn from the county's preliminary 2026 valuation work the council reviewed in June, show a median home value near $524,400 and an average around $598,000, with residential property values up 4.3% and total property values across the city up roughly $400 million over the previous year. That's a healthy, broad-based number.
It's also close to useless if you're trying to price a specific new-construction unit near Avienda against an established Chanhassen neighborhood, because the two are being valued on different logic entirely.
Foxwood, the wooded, executive-lot community near the Fox Woods Nature Preserve and Bandimere Park, prices on lot size, tree cover, and proximity to Lake Riley, with single-family listings recently spanning roughly $895,000 to $1.225 million. None of that pricing depends on whether a PUD amendment clears a public hearing next month. The homes along Lake Riley itself, where some communities offer private beach access and a lottery system for a handful of shared boat slips, are pricing on water access that already exists and isn't waiting on anyone's approval.
New construction inside Avienda is pricing partly on an amenity story that is still being negotiated in a City Hall training room. If the retail plan that emerges from the September and October review looks more like a grocery-anchored strip with a gas station than the walkable main street in the original renderings, the villas and apartments built around that promise are worth exactly what they deliver as freestanding new construction, and no more, regardless of what the sales materials implied when the lots were reserved.
That's not a reason to avoid buying there. It's a reason to price it as new construction on its own merits rather than as new construction plus an unbuilt lifestyle amenity.
What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods This Fall
If you're weighing a unit inside Avienda against something in an established Chanhassen subdivision, a few questions are worth asking before you write an offer.
- Ask the builder or listing agent directly what retail is contractually leased versus conceptual. As of this writing, Coborn's Market & Table is the one named, signed tenant. Everything else in the marketing materials is still a rendering.
- Ask when the September 15 Planning Commission hearing and the anticipated October council vote are expected to resolve, and what happens to your unit's setting if the retail footprint shrinks further or gets pushed later than currently planned.
- If walkability to dining and shopping is the reason you're drawn to Avienda specifically, treat that as a future amenity, not a current one, and price your offer accordingly.
- If you're instead drawn to an established neighborhood like Foxwood or a Lake Riley community, you're buying fundamentals that already exist. That's a different kind of certainty, and it shows up in how those homes have traded regardless of what's happening at the corner of Powers and Lyman.
Neither path is wrong. But conflating them, treating an unbuilt lifestyle center as if it were already a settled fact, is the mistake that costs buyers the most when it's time to sell.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Avienda a finished development? No. The residential portions, including the Charles Cudd villas and the Doran Companies apartment building, are under construction or occupied, while the retail and dining portion still lacks a fully approved site plan as of September 2026.
Does the retail uncertainty affect resale value for someone who already bought in Avienda? It's too early to say with certainty, since the retail plan hasn't cleared its final approvals. What's clear is that any resale pitch built around "walkable retail nearby" should be weighed against what has actually been approved and built at the time of the sale, not what appeared in early renderings.
Should I rule out new construction near Avienda? Not necessarily. A Coborn's Market & Table is a real, useful amenity, and the apartments and villas are solid product on their own terms. The point is to value them as what they currently are, with the retail component treated as a possible future upside rather than a delivered feature.
Chanhassen's broader market, established neighborhoods and new construction alike, still has plenty going for it. But a project this size, moving through this many rounds of council review, is exactly the kind of local detail that a citywide median can't tell you and that a five-minute look at a listing sheet won't either.
If you're trying to figure out what a specific Chanhassen address is actually worth given everything happening around it, Steve Pemberton has spent decades pricing this kind of nuance into offers on both sides of the table. What's My Home Worth?
