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As soon as next summer, planning a new home in Lawrence might look less like a complicated city review process and more like ordering something off a menu.

That’s because the city will be trying out a new program that connects builders and property owners with ready-to-use construction plans for single-family homes, duplexes and other dwellings that have already gone through the necessary city reviews.

It’s called a “pre-approved patterns pilot project,” and city commissioners will be hearing more about it at their meeting on Tuesday. This is something that was recommended in the city’s most recent housing study, and staff is saying it could make it easier, faster and cheaper for developers to build smaller-scale housing projects and do infill development in existing neighborhoods.

“Pre-approved plans can reduce repetitive plan review for City staff while providing builders and property owners with ready-to-use designs and greater predictability in the development process,” city staff wrote in a memo to the commission ahead of Tuesday’s meeting.

We’ve written a little about pre-approved housing plans before, because of their recommendation in the housing study. That report found that Lawrence had a severe shortage of housing of all types and needed more than 6,300 new units of housing over the next 10 years. And it said that expedited approval processes for housing could be part of the solution.

While a program like this would be new to Lawrence, it’s not unprecedented in the Kansas City metro area. Overland Park and Kansas City, Missouri, both recently created their own portfolios of pre-approved designs.

In KCMO, they include a duplex, two two-story homes, an accessory dwelling unit above a garage and three one-story homes. And it appears they can shave more than a month off of the development time for a project.

KCMO’s housing liaison, Rachel O’Neal, told us this summer that projects using the pre-approved designs can usually get their building permit applications processed within five to seven business days. They don’t have to go through the normal review process, which she said can be unpredictable but might take around six weeks for a typical project.

For its pilot, Lawrence is contracting with a company called Pattern Zones that specializes in developing these types of programs with local governments. The pilot is expected to cost about $52,000, and the goal is to launch it by June 2027.

When it launches, the city expects it will have six or seven construction plans for developers to choose from in a variety of styles: single-family homes; duplexes and other multifamily housing; and accessory dwelling units that sit on the same lot as another home. It will use an online platform to identify which plans are doable on which individual properties. The city will monitor how the program is working for three years, and then will decide whether to continue it and possibly expand it.

Based on Kansas City’s experience, it might take a while for developers to feel out how the program works. Staff for KCMO said that developers had some requests for tweaks to the designs, and that many wanted to see how the program worked before committing to a big project with it.

But Lawrence city staff hopes that it will eventually improve new housing production, which is something that Lawrence has struggled with recently.

As we’ve reported, Lawrence’s single-family home starts recently hit a historic low. In 2025, although the city issued permits for 389 new apartment units, builders started just 36 new single-family homes.

Last week, the Lawrence Board of Realtors released its home sales report for August, and of the 89 homes sold in Lawrence that month, only two were new construction, about the same as last year. It’s probably fair to say these weren’t affordable homes: Their average sale price was $604,000, which is 31% higher than the same time last year.

The 89 total sales were an 11% decrease from the prior year; 100 homes were sold in Lawrence in August 2025. But there were also more active listings on the market than in the previous year. At the end of August 2026, there were 199 listings, up from 145 in August 2025.

In a news release, Board of Realtors President Erin Maigaard said the inventory was at 2.7 months of supply, moving closer to the 4 to 6 months that are considered a sign of a balanced housing market. But even though homebuyers had more to choose from, that didn’t translate into more sales, she said.

“Despite the increased inventory, sales remained sluggish,” Maigaard said. “While buyers are seeing more available options, rising interest rates have impacted what they can afford.”

On average, homes were selling for a bit less than in August 2025. The Realtors’ stats show that the median sale price was $325,000 in August 2026, down from $326,250 in August 2025. But a year before that, in August 2024, the median was more than $25,000 lower, at $299,900.