When the board of directors for Sun City Vistoso, a 2,500-home active-adult community in Oro Valley, decided to change its name to attract younger residents, it wanted to be thorough.
It established a committee that spent 18 months doing research.
The group held focus groups and study sessions.
It sent surveys to Sun City residents.
And it met with Oro Valley officials, real estate agents and marketing executives from PulteGroup, Inc. - the company that acquired Sun City developer Del Webb in 2001.
"Some people felt that the name 'Sun City' was associated with being old," said Jon Olson, the committee's chairman. "One person said it reeked of blue hair and polyester."
In the end the group proposed and the board approved a new name that sounds a lot like the old one: "Sun City Oro Valley."
People are also reading…
Strength of brand
The decision left some residents puzzling why the effort was made at all.
"Sun City Vistoso was a lovely name," said Micheal Burk, a resident since 2002.
"The word vistoso (meaning 'beautiful' or 'scenic' in Spanish) speaks volumes as to our location. It also aligned us with the community of Vistoso, which is a well-known and respected community within Oro Valley and the Tucson metro area."
The committee had plenty of names to choose from. Residents suggested more than 140, including Javelina Hollow, Tortilla Hills, Oro Buttes and Crown Ridge Vistoso.
But the strength of the Sun City brand, which is used by PulteGroup for developments across the country, ultimately steered the decision.
"Sun City is a well-known name with a strong heritage," said Barbara Ross, another committee member. "We wanted to dovetail with some of the programs and marketing initiatives that were being used by Pulte."
Committee chairman Olson said members asked themselves: "Did we have the community resources to go against that market? We felt we didn't.
"In the long run, the community is not equipped financially to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on its own for a new-name marketing campaign."
Olson said the committee recommended dropping "Vistoso" and instead using "Oro Valley" because of Pulte's use of geographic names in many of its Sun City developments.
"More people know Oro Valley than they know Sun City Vistoso," Olson said. "It puts us in a stronger position in the active-adult community."
Legally, Sun City is still Sun City Vistoso Community Association Inc. Sun City Oro Valley is a "doing business as" designation, which cuts down on cost and complications during the name-change process, Olson said.
Mixed reactions
The rollout will be gradual.
The administration office at Sun City already uses the new title when answering the phone, but the name still hasn't changed on the website.
Ross said most of the big changes, such as sign replacement, will occur when seasonal residents on the marketing committee, including her, return for the winter.
Signage work is already included in the community's annual budget and comes from the homeowner association's capital fund.
"We are not going to tear all the signs down and put up new ones tomorrow," she said.
The reaction to the name change has been mixed.
From a real estate perspective, agent Bob Cahoon believes the move will have little effect on home sales, though he said retaining Sun City in the name was smart.
Cahoon and his wife, Jackie, have lived in Sun City since 1987 and sold homes there since 1991. Many of their customers move there from other Sun City developments.
"People are still attracted to the Sun City name," he said. "The Sun City part is the part that helps people identify this area as quality."
Ralph Hemminger moved to Sun City in 1994, back when it was called Del Webb Sun City Tucson.
The retired real estate agent and former U.S. Postal Service postmaster saw little merit in the name change. "People find out about this place through referrals from friends and so forth," he said. "If you told someone in Chicago about Oro Valley, they wouldn't know if it was near the Grand Canyon or on the west end of the state."
"It is not an obnoxious name," he added. "But the name we had wasn't bad either."
Did you know?
To live at Sun City Oro Valley, at least one person in a household must be 55 or older, except in a limited number of homes where the minimum age is 45.
No one younger than 19 can live there permanently.
Source: Sun City Oro Valley Community Association
Contact reporter Gerald M. Gay at ggay@azstarnet.com or 807-8430.
