As of early July 2026, a 3,700-square-foot house on Butternut Drive in Evans Farm, built in 2026, was listed at $999,999. A few streets over, Epcon Communities has been accepting reservations this summer for single-level ranch homes in the same community starting around $489,900. Same name on the listing. Same school district. Same 43035 ZIP code. A gap of roughly half a million dollars between them.
If you've been searching "Evans Farm homes for sale" and treating the results as one market, you've been comparing things that were never meant to be compared. Evans Farm isn't a neighborhood in the way Bryn Mawr or Olentangy Meadows is a neighborhood. It's a 1,200-plus acre master plan carved up among at least four separate builders, each running its own product line, its own price band, and in some cases its own fee structure, all sold under one umbrella name because that's how the marketing works.
A master plan built by committee, not by one builder
Evans Farm is planned to eventually include around 2,182 single-family lots plus hundreds of apartment and mixed-use units, spread across land that was originally farmland at the edge of Lewis Center. That scale is the first thing that gets lost when a portal search flattens everything into one neighborhood filter. A development this size was never going to be built by a single company, and it wasn't. It was divided among builders who each got a piece of the map and built to their own spec.
3 Pillar Homes built the earliest houses in Evans Farm and remains the closest thing to the original vision: custom two-story homes, including oversized lots in a section called The Reserve that borders Alum Creek State Park, with prices in the community's Evans Farm Central section starting in the mid-to-high $500,000s. Epcon Communities arrived later with The Courtyards, a low-maintenance ranch product with a clubhouse, pool, fitness center, and pickleball courts, priced from roughly $489,900 to $689,900. Romanelli & Hughes builds in the mid-$300,000s. Pulte Homes has inventory listed as coming soon starting at $484,990. Four builders, four price floors, four different products, one shared name on the sign.
What that actually looks like on paper
| Builder / Section | Home type | Starting price | Notable detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 Pillar Homes (Evans Farm Central / The Reserve) | Custom two-story, oversized lots near Alum Creek State Park | Mid-to-high $500,000s | Built the first homes in the development |
| Epcon Communities (The Courtyards) | Single-level ranch, garden courtyards | Roughly $489,900–$689,900 | Clubhouse, pool, fitness center, pickleball courts |
| Romanelli & Hughes | Single-family | Mid-$300,000s | Entry point for the community |
| Pulte Homes | Single-family, 2,267–2,853 sq ft | From $484,990 | Coming soon inventory |
None of these builders are competing on the same floor plan. A buyer touring 3 Pillar's oversized lots by the state park and a buyer touring Epcon's courtyard ranch homes are shopping for different things that happen to share a mailing address.
The fee question that doesn't have one answer
Here's where it gets more interesting than a simple price spread. Ask three different sources whether The Courtyards at Evans Farm has an HOA fee and you'll get three different answers. Portal aggregators list it flatly: no homeowner association fees. But Epcon's own site runs a referral program that pays two years of "Homeowner Association dues" to buyers who refer a friend, and a separate promotion crediting $1,000 "toward the HOA association dues" for service members. You cannot pay dues that don't exist.
If a portal listing tells you a community has no HOA fee, that's a field to verify with the builder directly, not a fact to build a budget around.
This isn't a knock on any single builder. It's what happens when a large master plan gets built out over years by companies with different back-office systems feeding data to the same third-party sites. The lesson for a buyer comparing Evans Farm listings is to ask each builder's sales office for the actual dues amount and what it covers, in writing, before you assume a number that a portal happened to display as blank.
The dollar difference compounds past the sticker price
The price gap between Epcon's starting point and the Butternut Drive comp isn't just a bigger mortgage. Delaware County carries the highest median property taxes in Ohio, with an effective rate of roughly 1.48 percent of assessed value. Run that rate across the roughly $510,000 spread between a $489,900 starting home and a $999,999 comp, and you're looking at something like $7,500 more a year in property taxes alone, before factoring in whatever HOA structure applies to either one.
What doesn't change no matter which builder you choose is the location math. Lewis Center is unincorporated, sitting inside Orange Township, which means residents pay no municipal income tax the way they would in an incorporated Columbus suburb. That's true whether you buy the $489,900 ranch or the $999,999 custom home. It's one of the only line items in this whole comparison that holds steady across every builder in Evans Farm.
The wider search has the same problem, one size up
This isn't unique to Evans Farm. Zoom out to "Lewis Center" as a whole and the same flattening happens. Zillow's home value index put the average Lewis Center home at $510,001 as of March 2026, down slightly over the past year. Movoto reported a median sold price of $539,999 in April 2026. Two local brokerage feeds pulling July 5, 2026 data landed at a $525,000 median list price on one side and $589,000 on the other, with average price per square foot ranging from $204 to $233 depending on which slice of inventory each feed counted. None of these numbers are wrong. They're measuring different subsets of the same town, the same way "Evans Farm" measures four different builder programs under one name.
The practical takeaway is the same at both scales: a single median or a single community name is a starting point for a search, not a number you can plan a budget around.
What to actually search for instead
If you're comparing homes in Evans Farm, or in Lewis Center more broadly, the fix is simple but easy to skip when you're scrolling listings on your phone:
- Ask which builder built the specific home, not just which community it's in.
- Ask for the subdivision or section name inside Evans Farm, since that narrows the comp set to homes that are actually similar.
- Get the HOA dues amount and what it covers directly from the builder or the seller's agent, in writing, rather than trusting a blank or "no fee" field on a portal.
- Run the property tax math on the specific price point you're considering, not the county median, since Delaware County's rate varies by tax district.
None of this takes more than a few extra questions. It's the difference between comparing homes and comparing a marketing umbrella.
FAQ
Is every home in Evans Farm new construction? Most of the community is being built out in phases by its four active builders, but resale activity exists too, particularly in the earliest 3 Pillar-built sections. A resale in an established section and a quick move-in home from a builder currently selling nearby lots can carry very different pricing even within the same subdivision.
Does buying in Evans Farm guarantee Olentangy schools? Evans Farm sits within the Olentangy Local School District, which serves Lewis Center broadly. Specific school assignments can still vary by exact address and should be confirmed for any property you're seriously considering rather than assumed from the community name alone.
Why would the same community have builders at $350,000 and builders near $700,000? Large master-planned communities are often sold off in parcels to multiple builders over the life of the project, each targeting a different buyer and price point to round out the development's overall mix. That's standard practice for a project this size. It just means the community name tells you almost nothing about what you'll pay until you know which parcel and which builder you're looking at.
If you're trying to figure out which corner of Evans Farm, or which corner of Lewis Center, actually fits your budget and your list of must-haves, that's the exact kind of comparison MORE Ohio Team spends its days untangling. Work With Us and we'll walk the builder-by-builder differences with you before you set foot in a model home.
