Overview
About Altair
Altair is one of the villages the City of Irvine publishes in its own boundary layer, where it covers about 266 acres. The city's Great Park Development Districts layer draws the same ground a second time as District 7 and labels it Altair, and the two polygons match each other exactly, so the footprint here rests on two independent city records rather than one. Ninety-nine point seven percent of it falls inside Planning Area 51, the Great Park planning area, which is why an Altair address is routinely filed under Great Park by anything that sorts by planning area or zip code. The City records the gated community at 840 residential units, 693 of them single-family detached and 147 detached condominiums, with two private neighborhood parks, and its address point layer places 847 addresses inside the boundary, 842 of them flagged residential, across 39 named streets. The association of record is the Altair Irvine Master Association, listed under Seabreeze Management Company on the city's homeowners association list revised 15 June 2026 and mapped as master 51.2 across about 203 acres. The city records no sub-association beneath it, so the documents that govern a home here are the master's rather than a second tier stacked on top.
The builders put the amenities in two places, The Club and The Terrace, with parks in between. The Club is a 7,100 square foot residents-only clubhouse holding multiple event rooms, a reception area, an office, a club room and locker rooms, wrapped in covered outdoor space with barbecues and fireplaces alongside tennis courts and bocce ball courts. Between The Club and The Terrace residents have three pools, three spas and a tot lot, and interior trails connect the ten neighborhoods to each other and on to parks and regional trails. As the builders published them, the ten neighborhoods ran from about 2,533 square feet in Solstice to about 6,613 square feet in Lumiere, with three to seven bedrooms. Irvine Unified's published attendance area for Portola High School covers northeastern Irvine east of Sand Canyon Avenue and names the Great Park neighborhoods, and Altair sits inside it; for the earlier grades the district names no school for Altair, and the builders' own site pointed buyers to Beacon Park School.
View available homes in AltairHistory
How Altair was built
Lennar and Toll Brothers built Altair together, which is unusual, and they opened it on 30 September 2017 as ten neighborhoods holding about 840 homes. Lennar took Aurora, Celestial, Eclipse, Lumiere, Solstice and Starlight; Toll Brothers took Alara, Estrella, Meridian and Solano. William Hezmalhalch Architects drew Starlight, Celestial and Eclipse for Lennar, going for contemporary exteriors with enough traditional detail to keep them familiar, and a lot of the plans were laid out for two households under one roof. The guard gate was the selling point, since almost nothing else in Irvine has one. C2 Collaborative pushed the guardhouse and gates back from the street so arriving felt less like clearing a checkpoint, and planted ancient olives at the entry. The Club, at 7,100 square feet, and The Terrace between them give the community three pools and three spas, with tennis and bocce courts alongside.
The name is a star. Altair is the brightest star in Aquila the Eagle and the twelfth brightest in the night sky, about 16.7 light years away, and the name comes from the Arabic for the flying eagle. It also spins fast enough to be visibly squashed at the poles, once every nine hours or so. Whoever named the streets ran with it. The City's street list for the community reads Aquila, Bellatrix, Cetus, Dorado, Pulsar, Redshift, Interstellar, Lunar, Mare and Crater, with Einstein, Hawking and Sagan among them. The other half of the streets are birds: Egret, Gull, Pelican, Owl, Kite, Swift, Thrush, Hornbill and Swan. That is tidier than it first looks, because Aquila is Latin for eagle, and Altair's two companions in the Summer Triangle sit in Lyra and in Cygnus, the swan.
By the Numbers
Altair by the numbers
Lifestyle
The Altair lifestyle
Schools
Schools serving Altair
Altair is inside the Irvine Unified School District, and the two ends of the assignment rest on very different evidence. Portola High School's published attendance area covers northeastern Irvine east of Sand Canyon Avenue and names the Great Park neighborhoods on the district map effective 2026-27. Altair lies east of Sand Canyon, wholly inside the city's Great Park development district 7, so the high school assignment is well supported even though the district map does not print the word Altair. For kindergarten through grade 8 the district names no school for this village: its School Boundaries and Assignments page does not mention Altair, and its list of named developments runs from Cadence Park through Solis without including it. The builders' own community site pointed buyers to Beacon Park School and carried their own warning that school assignments are subject to change. Treat Beacon Park as a builder statement and confirm the assignment for a specific address with Irvine Unified before it drives a purchase decision.
9-12 · 2,693 students
K-8 · 1,065 students
FAQs
Common questions about Altair
What do homes sell for in Altair?
No median is published for Altair, because there is no defensible one to publish. Altair has no CRMLS area of its own and the export files it under Great Park. The only Altair-specific sample is the free-text subdivision field, which tags 19 listings, five of them closed sales, and one of those five is filed under the wrong MLS area entirely. Five closings is half this site's floor of ten before a median goes on a page. Price a home here from the closings on its own ten tracts and from the neighborhood it sits in, and treat any Great Park figure as the wider area's rather than this village's.
Is Altair part of Great Park?
It depends which record you mean, and the difference costs money. Geographically it is inside: 99.75 percent of the Altair boundary falls within the city's Orange County Great Park village polygon and 99.74 percent falls inside Planning Area 51. Administratively it is separate. The city draws Altair as its own village, labels the same ground District 7 Altair in its Great Park Development Districts layer, and records a different master association, Altair Irvine rather than Great Park Neighborhoods, whose mapped polygons do not touch the Altair boundary anywhere. So an Altair address is billed by a different association, governed by different documents and should not be priced off Great Park's medians, even though almost every automated source will file it under Great Park.
Who built Altair and when did it open?
Lennar and Toll Brothers built it together as one master plan of ten neighborhoods. They announced the guard-gated entrance in April 2017, held a sneak peek at 50 Aquila Drive on 17 June 2017, and opened to the public on Saturday 30 September 2017 with 27 finished model homes. Lennar built Aurora, Celestial, Eclipse, Lumiere, Solstice and Starlight. Toll Brothers built Alara, Estrella, Meridian and Solano. Build years on the listings tagged Altair run from 2017 to 2020, so the housing stock is narrow in age and a buyer here is comparing homes of one generation rather than across decades.
Which schools serve Altair?
Portola High School, which enrolls 2,693 students in grades 9 to 12 and reports a 94.6 percent graduation rate with 98 AP courses offered. Its Irvine Unified assignment area covers northeastern Irvine east of Sand Canyon Avenue and names the Great Park neighborhoods, and Altair sits inside that area. For the K-8 years the district's own boundaries page does not name Altair at all. The builders' own community site pointed buyers to Beacon Park School, a K-8 campus of 1,065 students reporting 79 percent meeting or exceeding standard in English and 72 percent in math. That is a builder statement carrying the builders' own caveat that assignments change, so confirm a specific address with Irvine Unified before it drives a decision.
How big is Altair, and how often does something come up for sale?
About 266 acres, taken from the City of Irvine's own village boundary polygon and confirmed by a second city layer that draws the identical footprint. Inside it the city's address point layer holds 847 addresses, 842 of them flagged residential, across 39 named streets. That is small by Irvine standards, and it explains the thing buyers notice first: at any given moment only a handful of Altair homes are on the market. Waiting well matters more here than choosing well, and being ready to move when the right plan comes up matters more than either.