On October 10, 2025, the Edinburg Economic Development Corporation and Los Lagos Development LLC broke ground on a 16-acre site on South Raúl Longoria Road, right next to UTRGV's Robert and Janet Vackar Stadium. The project has a name that sounds more like a resort than a construction site: Guerlain Plaza & Guerlain Luxury Apartments. Two retail plazas. Two apartment towers. Nearly a year later, it's under construction, and it's the clearest signal available right now about where this particular pocket of Edinburg is headed.
If you've been comparing Los Lagos against other Rio Grande Valley neighborhoods using median list price alone, you're missing the part of the story that actually moves that price over time. Los Lagos isn't a finished product being sold at a stable number. It's a community still being built by the same company that built it in the first place, and that company just started its next phase right on the doorstep.
The Same Builder, A Different Chapter
Los Lagos Development LLC didn't just build the subdivisions inside Los Lagos. It built the whole area's residential base. Company president Eduardo López has said the firm has developed 140 acres in the Los Lagos Golf Course area since arriving in the Valley in 2014, with more than 650 homes built in that span. Guerlain Plaza & Guerlain Luxury Apartments isn't an outside developer parachuting in to capitalize on someone else's rooftops. It's the same builder returning to add the commercial and multifamily layer that a purely residential subdivision doesn't generate on its own.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. When an unrelated developer shows up next to an established neighborhood, residents are often reacting to a plan they had no visibility into. When the original builder comes back for a second phase, it's closer to the plan playing out as designed. López described the new project as, in his words, the natural evolution of the vision the company started with. Whether that reads as reassuring or as a reason to ask more questions depends on what you're looking for in a neighborhood, but either way, it's a different kind of growth than a speculative outside build.
What's Actually Going Up
The 16 acres split into four 4-acre lots, two for retail and two for apartments:
- Guerlain Commercial Plaza (two lots): Phase one alone brings roughly 26,000 square feet of retail space, with glass-and-steel storefronts, expanded parking, and space specifically built out for restaurants. At full buildout, the commercial side is expected to reach 46 total spaces.
- Guerlain Luxury Apartments (two lots): Two residential towers, 92 units each, for a total of 184 apartments ranging from 913 to 1,251 square feet across one-, two-, and three-bedroom layouts. Planned amenities include a pool, recreation areas, and views of the golf course.
Construction started with the first commercial plaza and the first residential tower. The second tower and the remaining retail lot follow in a later phase, with no published completion date as of this writing.
For a buyer weighing Los Lagos, this is the part worth sitting with. You're not just buying proximity to a golf course anymore. You're buying proximity to a retail corridor that doesn't exist yet and roughly 184 new rental units that will be occupied by people who didn't choose the neighborhood the same way a homeowner does. Both of those things can raise a neighborhood's day-to-day convenience. Both can also change its character in ways a median price from six months ago won't show you.
Two Price Tags, One Project
Here's a detail that's easy to miss if you only read the headline number: the Edinburg EDC's own announcement puts the commercial phase of this project at $22.6 million. The Rio Grande Valley Business Journal, reporting on the same groundbreaking, cited a $50 million figure for the full mixed-use build, commercial and multifamily combined.
Both numbers are accurate. They're just measuring different things. The EDC's figure reflects the piece of the project tied to its economic development partnership, the commercial plazas. The larger figure captures the whole build, including the two apartment towers. If you only saw one of those numbers in a press release or a social post, you'd walk away with a different sense of scale than someone who saw the other.
That's a useful habit to carry into any neighborhood research, not just this one. Development announcements are often written around the number that serves the announcement, not the number that best describes what's actually going to exist on the ground. Read past the headline figure to what's actually being built, in what phases, before you decide what it means for your own plans.
Not Exactly a Blank Slate
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Los Lagos already has a functioning recreational anchor in its 18-hole, par-72 golf course, which stretches over 7,188 yards from the Black Tees and has been recognized in the Monitor's Reader's Choice Awards as one of the better golf courses in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The clubhouse side of things got a refresh too, with a renovated Putter's Grill and golf pro shop. The neighborhood itself is organized into seven residential subdivisions, and Phase VII is currently open for presale, which tells you something on its own: the housing side of Los Lagos hasn't finished building either.
So a buyer looking at Los Lagos today is looking at a neighborhood with two active construction fronts at once. New homes are still being sold in Phase VII on the residential side. New retail and apartments are under construction on the commercial side a short distance away, near HEB Park and the Edinburg Scenic Wetlands and World Birding Center. That's a very different situation from a subdivision that sold out its last phase years ago and has settled into a fixed identity.
What This Actually Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods
If you're cross-shopping Los Lagos against another Edinburg or McAllen-area community, the question worth asking isn't "what's the median price right now." It's "who's still building here, and what are they building next." A neighborhood with an active, invested original developer adding retail and rental density on the perimeter is telling you something different than a neighborhood where the builder finished and left years ago. It may mean more convenience within walking distance over time. It may also mean more traffic, more density, and a longer runway before the area settles into whatever its final shape will be.
Neither of those is automatically the better answer. It depends on what you want from a home purchase: a neighborhood that's already fully formed, or one that's still being shaped by a builder with an eleven-year track record in the immediate area. Comparing those two situations by price alone treats them as the same kind of purchase, and they're not.
A Few Questions Buyers Tend to Ask
Will the new apartments and retail affect single-family home values in Los Lagos? That's not something anyone can state as settled fact this early in construction. What's known is that the project adds walkable retail and roughly 184 rental units near an existing golf-course community, which is a meaningfully different mix of housing types than the subdivisions had on their own. How that nets out for resale value is a conversation worth having neighborhood by neighborhood, not a number to assume.
When will the retail space actually open? No completion date has been published beyond the October 2025 groundbreaking for the first phase. Projects like this typically move in stages, with the first commercial plaza and first residential tower coming online before the second phase of each.
Is Los Lagos still selling new construction? Yes. Phase VII of the residential subdivisions is currently in presale, separate from the Guerlain commercial project.
If you're trying to figure out whether Los Lagos fits what you're actually looking for in the Rio Grande Valley, or how it stacks up against other communities in Edinburg, McAllen, or Mission, that's exactly the kind of comparison worth talking through with someone who tracks these projects as they happen rather than after the fact. Isaiah Ramos can walk you through what's currently available in Los Lagos and how it compares to the other neighborhoods on your list. Let's Connect.
