Irvine Homes for Sale

Irvine is the planned city of Orange County, and the plan is the point. Rather than one continuous grid, it is a set of villages, each with its own association, parks, pools and shopping center: Woodbridge, built around its two man-made lakes and the lagoons that come with them; Northwood and Westpark on the flats; Turtle Rock and University Park in the hills above UC Irvine; and the Great Park neighborhoods rising on the old El Toro air base to the northeast. If you are searching for Irvine homes for sale, the first question is almost always which village — and the answer shapes everything else.

The villages are stitched together by an unusually complete network of greenbelts and off-street trails, so a bike ride from Woodbridge to the University or from Northwood to the Jeffrey Open Space Trail rarely touches a major road. Between them run the wide parkways — Culver, Jeffrey, Alton, Barranca — and beyond those, the freeways: the 405 and 5 meet at the El Toro Y, and the 133, 261 and 241 toll roads run north to the canyons and the 91.

UC Irvine anchors the south of the city with the University Center and the Irvine Spectrum sits at the 5/405 interchange with its shopping, dining and offices. Much of the county's employment base — technology, medical, finance — sits in the Irvine Business Complex near John Wayne Airport and the Spectrum, which is why so many of our Irvine clients are moving for a job, not away from one.

Irvine is served by the Irvine Unified School District, and the district's boundaries follow the villages closely enough that a street address usually settles the school question on its own. The city keeps its parks, medians and association landscaping to a standard that is obvious the moment you cross the line from a neighboring city — which is exactly what people are buying when they buy here.