What Will East of Africa Do to Westerville Home Prices?

Westerville is putting more than $30 million into the ground east of Africa Road. Roads, sidewalks, utilities, stormwater ponds and green space, on 88 acres the city bought in 2023, so that five shovel-ready parcels can be sold to corporate office, flex and advanced manufacturing users. The city is acting as master developer, the same role it has played at Westar Place since the 1990s.

This one is past the rumor stage. The city broke ground on March 12, 2025, and its own schedule had the heavy work substantially done by the end of 2025, with landscaping and final improvements by the third quarter of 2026.

People who live near Africa Road, own along the Polaris corridor, or are deciding whether to buy on this side of Westerville keep asking me the same two things. What is going in, and what does it do to my house? Below is what the city has published, what the 2026 sales around the site show, and what I watch for next.

What is the East of Africa Road project?

In February 2023, Westerville City Council approved an $8.4 million investment for the Westerville Industry and Commerce Corporation (WICC) to buy two tracts totaling 88 acres that sit south of Polaris Parkway and east of Africa Road, per ABC6's report on the purchase. The historic Sharp House, which ABC6 notes was once part of the Underground Railroad, sits on the property, and the city has talked about repurposing it as an amenity.

The land is a deliberate extension of Westar. The city's history of the district, Westar: 25 Years in the Making, describes annexing 941 acres in southern Delaware County in the mid-1990s, landing its first corporate citizen, Liebert Global, in 1999, and growing to over 10,000 jobs in Westar today. Vertiv's global headquarters, DHL Supply Chain's North American headquarters and The Marzetti Company's headquarters are all there. Westar Place is close to built out, and East of Africa is where the next round of employers is supposed to land.

Council adopted the zoning and development standards in December 2024 after a round of resident feedback that fall, according to WCMH's coverage of the groundbreaking. I've written a separate piece on how Westar Place and East of Africa compare as business districts if you want the side-by-side.

Where is the $30 million going, and when is it done?

The city is not putting up the buildings. Private users do that. The public money buys the infrastructure that makes private development possible, and the city's own pages are specific about what that means.

Milestone	Date	Source
Council approves $8.4M land investment, WICC buys 88 acres	2023, February (closing expected April 2023)	ABC6, Feb. 9, 2023
Public open house on utilities, roadways, stormwater, greenway and park design	2024, September 9	1808Delaware
Council adopts zoning and development standards	2024, December	WCMH, March 2025
Groundbreaking	2025, March 12	WCMH, March 2025
Infrastructure substantially finished	Q4 2025 (city target)	City of Westerville shovel-ready sites page
Landscaping and final improvements complete	Q3 2026 (city target)	City of Westerville shovel-ready sites page
Utilities in place at each site	By Q3 2026	CBRE listing

Source note: dates as published by each source; the Q4 2025 and Q3 2026 entries are the city's targets, not confirmed completion dates.

The city's shovel-ready sites page says it "invested over $30 million dollars in infrastructure in 2025" and that "five shovel-ready parcels will be available for development" when the work is done. Its January 2026 recap, Westerville: Ready for 2026, lists the work as roads, sidewalks, utilities and green spaces. WCMH reported two miles of new roads, park-like retention ponds, an east-west greenway that keeps most of the existing trees, and more than 700 new trees planted in the public areas.

Stormwater is handled with regional ponds rather than a pond on every lot, and sites are served by Westerville's municipal electric, fiber and water. The marketing from CBRE lists the new subareas at roughly 6 to 17 acres each, aimed at office, flex and technology users, and the city's zoning on the Africa Road parcel calls for corporate office or flex/industrial use for advanced manufacturing and life sciences.

What are homes near Africa Road selling for in 2026?

I pull every single family closing around a project like this before I tell anyone what it means for their house. This is the 2026 picture, measured in straight-line miles from Africa Road at the west edge of the site.

Distance from the site	2026 sales	Median sale price	Median $/sq ft	Median days on market	Sold at or above list	Active listings (Oct. 6)
Under 1 mile	25	$555,000	$245	3	60%	6
1 to 2 miles	155	$480,000	$212	4	70%	20
2 to 3 miles	303	$485,000	$209	5	66%	46
All within 3 miles	483	$485,000	$211	4	67%	72
All Westerville mailing addresses	743	$475,000	$212	5	65%	111

Source: Columbus REALTORS MLS, single family residences closed January 1 to September 21, 2026, deduplicated by listing number, sales under $40,000 or 400 sq ft excluded. Distance measured from 40.1399, -82.9388 (Africa Road at the site, OpenStreetMap). Active listings are status Active only, single family, from the site's IDX feed on October 6, 2026.

A few things jump out of that table.

The site is closer to Uptown than most people picture. Uptown Westerville at State and Main sits about a mile south of the measuring point, so the under-1-mile ring catches some older Uptown-area streets along with newer pockets such as Berkshire Commons, Walnut Bend and Overlook. That is part of why the inner ring shows the highest price per square foot ($245) on homes with a median year built of 1990.

Supply is thin across the whole radius. 483 sales over about 8.7 months works out to roughly 56 closings a month inside 3 miles, against 72 active listings on October 6. That is about 1.3 months of supply. Homes are not sitting, construction or not.

Most of this area is in Westerville City Schools. Of the 483 sales within 3 miles, 354 were in Westerville City Schools, 91 in Olentangy, 33 in Worthington and 5 in Columbus City Schools. If the district matters to you, check the parcel, not the ZIP. My post on a Westerville address versus Westerville City Schools explains why those two things are not the same.

Will the construction hurt nearby home values in the short term?

Residents raised two concerns early, traffic and wildlife. WCMH quoted a neighbor who expected his commute to get longer with more roads and more traffic, and Africa Road itself closed for 21 days starting April 7, 2025. The city's answer on wildlife was the greenway and the tree plantings described above.

What the 2026 numbers say is that buyers kept paying while the work was underway. The 25 homes within a mile sold in a median of 3 days, and 60 percent closed at or above list price. Forty-four percent of them closed under their original list price, which is close to the 42 percent rate for Westerville as a whole, so pricing still had to be right.

Where I do see friction is at the individual address. A house that backs directly to a staging area or a new road cut can show worse during the work, even when the street around it is selling fine. That is a pricing and timing problem for one seller, not a value problem for the corridor. If your home is one of those, you want to know it before you list, not after a slow first weekend.

What signals should homeowners near Africa Road watch?

The infrastructure is the setup. The payoff is a named user.

Westar's own history shows the pattern. It took a first corporate citizen in 1999 to start the run that the city now counts at over 10,000 jobs. The city's January 2026 update described East of Africa's progress but did not name a tenant for the new parcels. When a corporate office, life sciences or advanced manufacturing company commits to one of those sites, that is the confirmation that the plan is working, and it is the kind of news that changes how buyers who work in Westar weigh a short commute.

I also keep an eye on a few other things.

• Lease or sale announcements on the Westar Park subareas or the remaining Westar Place parcels, from the city or CBRE.
• What happens with the Sharp House, since the city has floated dining and entertainment ideas for it.
• Whether the inner ring keeps its price-per-square-foot premium once the construction fencing is gone.
• Traffic patterns on Africa Road and Polaris Parkway once the new roads open. The same pressure shows up on the Polaris Parkway connector road, and the Aldi-anchored Zumstein South project about a mile west adds to it.

None of this guarantees a number for any one house. Office demand can be slow, and the city's schedule runs final improvements into the third quarter of 2026. But the public money is spent, the roads are in the ground, and the employment base next door is already there.

What should you do if you own or are buying near Africa Road?

If you own near Africa Road or Westar, the useful question is not whether the corridor goes up. It is where your specific address sits: inside the mile ring or outside it, Westerville City Schools or Olentangy, backing to the work or a few streets off it. Those details moved prices more in 2026 than the project did.

If you are buying, the thin supply means you are unlikely to get a construction discount on a well-priced home. Where you can find room is on the handful of houses that back directly to the new roads, and only if you are comfortable with the view once the trees fill in.

If you want to see where your address falls in the table above, I'll pull the comp history for your street and walk you through how your location has tracked while the corridor builds out. Reach me at 937-239-2919 or book a time at calendly.com/adam-geuy.

Adam Geuy, Realtor - Blacktree Realty | ABR, PSA, SRS | License #2020007964

I work this side of Westerville regularly, and what happens on Africa Road over the next few years will matter more to values out here than anything happening Uptown.