Two communities share a name, sit less than a mile apart, and could not be more different in how they get their water. One spent three years trucking it in by the tank load after a city cut its supply. The other has been drawing from its own private aquifer since the first model home opened. For a long stretch, if you were reading headlines instead of property lines, you would have sworn they were the same place.
That confusion had real consequences for the golf community at the center of Verde River, and it is worth untangling now that the underlying crisis has an actual ending date.
The Line at 172nd Street
The Rio Verde Foothills, the community that made national news over water, is an unincorporated area west of 172nd Street running to the Scottsdale city line. It is not part of the three master-planned communities collectively known as the Verdes: Rio Verde, Tonto Verde, and Trilogy at Verde River, home to the Verde River Golf & Social Club. The Foothills relied on the City of Scottsdale hauling water through a standpipe for decades, a practice the city ended on January 1, 2023 as part of its drought management plan.
Verde River never used that system. According to Tonto Verde's own account of its water rights, the three golf communities draw from underground aquifers through a private utility district, with enough capacity by prior estimates to serve Tonto Verde, Rio Verde, and Trilogy for decades. Different source, different provider, different set of risks. The overlap was the name on the map, not the pipe in the ground.
The Letter With 739 Signatures
That overlap almost cost Trilogy residents money. In 2023, as EPCOR worked toward a permanent fix for the Foothills, the utility floated a consolidation plan that would have spread the cost of a new standpipe across a wider footprint, including Trilogy at Verde River, Fountain Hills, and New River. Trilogy residents responded with a letter bearing 739 signatures, filed with the Arizona Corporation Commission, opposing any standpipe construction inside their existing water district and citing concerns over tanker truck traffic and rate increases tied to someone else's infrastructure bill.
The reputational side of the problem got its own response. The Rio Verde Community Association said it was working to correct the record after a run of stories that mixed up the Foothills crisis with the Rio Verde Community, and Troon, which manages Rio Verde Country Club, distributed a correction through its press network aimed at outlets that had gotten it wrong. Residents were asked to flag any story that confused the two areas to the association's leadership. That is not the posture of a community with a real water shortage. It is the posture of a community trying to keep a shortage that belongs to its neighbor from showing up on its own closing statements.
What Changed on January 1
The Foothills crisis now has a resolution, and it stayed contained to the Foothills. EPCOR opened a permanent water filling station on January 1, 2026, built on a one-mile pipeline just southeast of the unincorporated community, off 176th Street. PCL Construction completed the project on an accelerated timeline to hit that date. Shawn Bradford, EPCOR's senior vice president of regulated US water, called it a promise made and kept. Access runs through a customer account and PIN system, and eligibility is limited to properties inside the designated Rio Verde Foothills standpipe service area, the same boundary that has always excluded the Verde communities.
The timeline matters for anyone trying to size up how settled this actually is:
- January 1, 2023: Scottsdale ends standpipe water service to the Foothills.
- October 2023: Scottsdale begins supplying water through a temporary agreement with the Rio Verde Foothills Standpipe District while EPCOR builds permanent infrastructure.
- December 31, 2025: That temporary agreement, and the standpipe district itself, expires.
- January 1, 2026: EPCOR's permanent filling station opens, and hauling continues under a formal, regulated system rather than an emergency one.
Longtime Foothills water hauler John Hornewer, who has run his business there since 1999, put the stakes plainly to a Phoenix television reporter the day the station opened, saying water should not be a luxury and is a basic necessity. Damon Bruns of Dynamite Water LLC was the first hauler to use the new system that morning. None of this activity touches Trilogy, Tonto Verde, or Rio Verde's own supply. It resolves a three-year story next door, on infrastructure the golf communities never depended on and, after that 2023 fight, never had to help fund.
Reading the Listings Now
None of this means Verde River's market has been static while the Foothills sorted out its water. As of September 21, 2026, Trilogy at Verde River had 42 active listings, a median list price of $917,788, an average of $487.87 per square foot, and an average of 82 days on market. Those numbers sit well above the community's original pricing, which started from the low $300,000s when Shea Homes broke ground in 2015, and reflect a mature resale market inside a private, non-equity club built around an 18-hole course originally designed by Ken Kavanaugh and later reworked with input from 1996 British Open champion Tom Lehman.
An 82-day average days on market is not a market moving in a hurry. It is a market where buyers are doing their homework, and for years, part of that homework included sorting out whether the community had a water problem it never actually had. With the Foothills story now closed and documented in an EPCOR press release rather than an open-ended news cycle, that particular piece of due diligence gets a lot faster to complete. Whether that shows up as shorter time on market or firmer pricing over the next few quarters is the kind of shift worth watching rather than predicting.
Questions Worth Asking If You're Comparing Verde River to Everything Else
Does Trilogy at Verde River use hauled water like the Foothills did? No. The community's water comes from the same private, aquifer-fed utility district that has served Rio Verde, Tonto Verde, and Trilogy since before the Foothills crisis began.
Did the January 2026 fix change anything about Verde River's own water rates or supply? Not based on anything EPCOR or the Rio Verde Foothills Standpipe District has published. The new standpipe's service area is defined as the Foothills, the same boundary that excluded Trilogy from the 2023 consolidation proposal residents fought.
Is this worth asking a seller or an agent about directly? Yes, particularly if you are comparing Verde River against communities in unincorporated parts of Maricopa County, where water provider and water rights can vary block by block. Asking who the utility provider is, and confirming it in writing, is a normal and useful step regardless of which neighborhood you are considering.
If you are weighing Verde River against other golf and second-home communities in the Scottsdale area, the Verde River neighborhood guide is a good starting point for what the community offers beyond the headlines it never should have made. From there, a conversation with someone who tracks this market closely is the fastest way to separate what actually applies to your search from what just happened to share a name with it. RETSY works with buyers across Rio Verde, Scottsdale, and Paradise Valley every day, and we're glad to walk through what a specific listing's water situation actually looks like before you write an offer.
