Revana Lakes

This is the fact that explains everything else about this project, and it is the one no sales brochure is ever going to open with. The site sits inside both the five-year and the ten-year wellfield protection travel-time zones around the wellfield operated by the city's member-owned water utility. Rain that falls on this land reaches the drinking water supply within those timeframes. Those zones are not decoration. They are the reason the land carried a very low-density designation for decades, on the order of one home per ten acres.

Understanding that tells you what the 2024 denial and the 2026 approval were actually arguing about. The rezoning changed the land use designation. It did not change the hydrology. The water still moves the way it moved, and the site still sits in the recharge area for the utility that will be supplying the homes built on it. That is not a reason to avoid the community. Plenty of Florida development sits in sensitive recharge areas and is engineered to cope. It is a reason to ask precisely how.

There is a second layer worth knowing. Stormwater from this site is routed through a worked-out limestone mine pit on the property, then into a canal and ultimately into the river, and that drainage path was examined closely during the approval. A mine pit is a large hole in permeable rock in a recharge zone, which is a useful stormwater asset and a thing you want engineered carefully. Ask how the pit is being integrated, what it does in a design storm, and who is responsible for it long term.

The soils add a third. Parts of the site carry soils classified as hydric, which means they are the kind of soils that hold water, and some of the site is still mapped in the city's own plan under a resource protection designation. None of this contradicts the flood mapping further down this page, which is genuinely favourable. It simply means the favourable flood rating and the wet-ground reality are answering different questions.

So make these the written questions. Ask which wellfield and stormwater protections are binding conditions of the approval rather than statements of intent, who monitors compliance and how often, what happens to the mine pit, and whether any part of your lot sits in a protection or preservation area that limits what you can build or plant. Get the approved master concept plan and the conditions document, not the rendering.

The first correction is that this is not a residential-only community, whatever a listing may tell you. The zoning adopted here is a mixed-use plan development, and the approval carries roughly 80,000 square feet of retail plus about 20,000 square feet of office space alongside the homes. If you are picturing a gated enclave of houses and nothing else, picture something closer to a small neighbourhood centre with houses around it.

The sequencing condition on that commercial space is genuinely unusual and worth your attention. A substantial share of the retail square footage must be permitted before roughly the seventy-fifth home is built. For a buyer that cuts both ways. It is real protection against the familiar Florida pattern where the promised shops never materialise. It also means the earliest residents will be living beside commercial construction rather than moving in after it is done. Ask which phase your lot is in relative to that trigger.

On the home count, the honest framing is the uncomfortable one. 299 is the approved cap, and it is voluntary rather than a ceiling the land use imposes. Under the old designation this land supported only a handful of homes. Under the designation adopted in 2026 it would support materially more than 299, and a state affordable-housing statute has separately been noted as potentially permitting a higher count again. The cap is binding until it is amended, and amendments happen.

What has not been released is almost everything a buyer actually wants. There is no published product mix, no lot sizes, no floor plans, no price range and no phasing schedule. The developer describes custom homes, and an earlier version of this application contemplated a mix that included attached product, and we could not resolve which the approved plan reflects. So treat any price or product claim you encounter for this community today as unsourced. The reported target for first residents is 2028, which is a target rather than a commitment and is subject to change.

Bonita Springs has a hard-earned flooding reputation, so we expected bad news and queried all 25 parcels individually rather than dropping a single pin in the middle. Every one of them comes back the same way: the minimal-hazard category, mapped outside the special flood hazard area. On evacuation the site also sits outside the highest-priority category. For a site in this city that is a genuinely good result, and it is the direct consequence of being several miles inland and east of the interstate rather than down near the river mouth and the beach.

Three things stop that from being an all-clear, and you should hear all three. The flood map governing this area is roughly eighteen years old. Soils on parts of the site are classified as hydric, which is to say they hold water. And in this ZIP, better than one in eight of every federal flood claim ever filed was on a property rated in that same minimal-hazard category. Being mapped outside the hazard area lowers your cost and your odds. It does not mean water cannot reach your house.

That last figure is the practical one. Flood insurance is inexpensive precisely when you are rated outside the hazard area, and this is the situation where buying it anyway is the obvious trade. Lenders will not require it here. Get a quote regardless, and compare it against what one in eight of your neighbours' claims history suggests. Ask the builder for the finished floor elevation relative to the crown of the street as well, because on flat inland Florida ground that number does more work than the zone letter.

On the storm record, keep the two framings separate, because they answer different questions. For this inland ZIP the heaviest single month on record is September 2022, at about 37 per cent of all claims ever filed there, while the 2022 calendar year as a whole accounts for about 37 per cent. For 2017 the figures are about 26 per cent for the month and about 28 per cent for the year. For the current year, no claims had been recorded through the most recent data freeze. Note that figures published for the coastal ZIPs in this city are much heavier, and they do not describe this site.