Platted and graded. Pricing not posted.

Sunrise Hills, Brooksville: the streets are recorded, the builders are named, and one line on your future tax bill is still blank

Sunrise Hills is a master-planned community on the north side of Cortez Boulevard, State Road 50, about two and a half miles west of the Interstate 75 interchange in unincorporated Hernando County, with a Brooksville mailing address. Three final plats recorded between August and the end of September 2026, covering about 215 acres and cutting 133 homesites, and 130 street addresses were assigned in August 2026. County site-work permitting goes back about eighteen months, and a groundbreaking was reported in mid-October 2026. D.R. Horton, Lennar and DRB Homes are the named builders.

Pricing has not been posted for this community as of October 2026, and no model or sales center is open here. So this is a good moment to work out what the house will cost you to own rather than to buy, because one number on your future tax bill cannot be answered yet and most buyers never think to ask about it. That is the spine of this page.

Where

Cortez Boulevard, unincorporated Hernando County, Brooksville mail

Builders

D.R. Horton, Lennar and DRB Homes

Platted so far

133 homesites across about 215 acres, in three phases

Announced size

About 1,100 acres, more than 4,000 homes, as the developer reports it

Commute

Interstate 75 about two and a half miles east; Tampa about 50 road miles

Utilities

Public county water and sewer, electric cooperative, fiber easement

What is released, and what is not

Details on this page are compiled from public entitlement records and are targets, not commitments. Pricing, floor plans, home counts, and timing have not been released by the builder and are subject to change without notice.

What is actually on the ground, from the records

The recorded plats are the most useful thing about this community right now, because they are specific in a way that marketing is not. The public spine road is Sunrise Hills Boulevard, dedicated to Hernando County, which makes it a county road rather than a private one. Off it, the first recorded phase cuts Early Dawn Lane with 34 homesites, Moonlit Path Road with 30, New Day Road with 27, First Light Road with 20, Favored Road with 16 and Shaded Path Road with 6, plus Streamside Road, which has right-of-way but no lots yet. The two later phases add Fair Wind Loop, Cascade Run Road, Brushy Dale Road, Fiery Sky Road, New Bloom Road and Amber Crest Road, with homesite counts not yet established.

Somebody enjoyed naming those streets: Early Dawn, First Light, Moonlit Path, Fiery Sky, New Day. The whole community is themed on sunrise, which tells you it was planned as one piece. The roads around the edges are Cortez Boulevard on the south frontage, Cracker Crossing on the north and Kettering Road on the east.

On size, be careful with the headline. The developer reports a plan of about 1,100 acres and more than 4,000 homes, and that is an announcement rather than a record: no approval document setting a home cap was retrievable. What is recorded is 133 homesites. The land and every platted lot are held by a single-purpose owner entity affiliated with a Tampa master-plan developer, holding about 493 acres, while a separate family partnership still holds roughly 767 acres of the same older entitlement. So the plan is about 1,100 acres as announced, but the developer does not control all of it today, and a subdivision whose records sit under a holding company is exactly what a casual search never surfaces.

The product mix is not fully released. Most of the first phase is cut at roughly fifty-foot single-family widths, while one street and part of another are cut much narrower, in a pattern that appears to be attached product. The word townhome appears on no plat, and one of the three builders has described single family homes, so the honest statement is that there appear to be two lot widths and the mix is unannounced.

Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by D.R. Horton, Lennar, DRB Homes or the community's developer. Those companies and their community names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here for identification only. All community information is compiled from public records and is subject to change.

How to buy Sunrise Hills without leaving money on the table

The person at the builder's sales desk works for the builder. You can have a Florida agent on your side instead, touring with you, reading the contract line by line, and pushing for every incentive, upgrade and closing-cost credit the builder will give. It costs you nothing: on new construction the builder already budgets your agent's fee whether you bring one or not. The one catch is timing. You usually need your own agent from the very first visit, or the builder will not recognize them and you lose it. Start here and we will set it up.

With three builders here that matters more than usual. Three national builders competing on the same streets, at the same stage, with the same incentive budgets, is the most negotiable situation in new construction, and the comparison only works if somebody not paid by any of them is doing it with you. The first release is also where homesite premiums are set, and a lot backing onto the preserve is worth more than anything on the options sheet. Get pricing as it is released, and have representation in place before you walk into a sales office.

The cost question nobody will answer for you: the district exists, but it has not levied yet

This is the part to read twice. Sunrise Hills has a community development district, established by county ordinance in August 2024 over about 465 acres. If you have not bought in Florida before: such a district is a small unit of local government created to finance and own a community's infrastructure. It issues bonds to pay for roads, drainage and amenities, then recovers the money from homeowners through an assessment billed with your annual property tax bill, not by the association.

This district is real and already working. It holds title to the neighborhood street rights-of-way, about 33 acres of stormwater tracts, a roughly 18 acre oak hammock preserve and passive park fronting Cracker Crossing, and smaller drainage and open-space tracts, and it is registered as a levying authority against every parcel here.

And here is the honest position: on the most recent certified tax roll, the amount it levies is zero. The authority is registered and the dollar line is blank. No bonds have been issued and no assessment roll exists. So the truthful sentence is that a district exists and is in place, has not yet levied an assessment, and that a buyer here should expect one once bonds are issued, in an amount nobody can tell you yet. We will not invent a figure, and be suspicious of anyone who offers you one.

In practice you would be buying before your own carrying cost is set. When the assessment appears it typically comes in two parts: a debt-service portion, a fixed annual amount per homesite running twenty to thirty years and usually prepayable, and an operations and maintenance portion reset yearly that pays for what the district owns, including your street. Both sit on top of property taxes and any dues, and in Florida masters the combined figure is frequently four figures a year.

So ask these in writing before your deposit is at risk. What is the projected total annual district assessment per homesite for this phase, how much is debt service, for how many years, and what would it cost to prepay. What is the operations and maintenance estimate. Is the developer subsidising operations during build-out, and what happens when that ends. An estimate is a fair answer. Finding out at closing is not.

Who maintains what, which is a separate question

Related and nearly as often missed: your street is probably not a county street. The spine road is dedicated to Hernando County and is public; the neighborhood streets are owned and maintained by the district. That changes who you call about a pothole or a drainage problem, and it puts resurfacing your road in the district's budget rather than the county's. Normal in Florida masters, but worth knowing which side of the line your address falls on.

On utilities the news is good, and better than much of eastern Hernando. Water and sewer are public county utilities, so no well and no septic system to maintain. Power comes from an electric cooperative rather than the large investor-owned utility, so rates and outage handling differ and the co-op's rate schedule is worth a look. A fiber provider holds an exclusive technology easement across every homesite frontage, which is how bulk internet is delivered here: usually fast, usually a mandatory monthly charge bundled into dues, so ask what it covers.

On amenities, treat everything as announced rather than built. The plat reserves an amenity tract of about 13 acres on the spine road, still held by the owner entity rather than conveyed to the district, and the developer has announced a lagoon there along with trails. But permitting and funding for it are not established, and the developer's own marketing disclaims site plans, amenities and renderings as conceptual and subject to change. The preserve and the stormwater lakes are recorded and owned. The lagoon is a plan.

Taxes, insurance and the carrying cost

Start with the millage. For the 2025 roll and the 2026 county fiscal year, the countywide levy runs about 6.8 mills and the school levy about 6.3, so roughly 13 mills combined, about thirteen dollars per thousand of taxable value, plus a small water management levy. Because the community is outside the city limits, no municipal millage applies, worth several mills against a comparable in-city address. On a permanent residence, Florida's homestead exemption and its annual assessment cap both apply, and over a decade the cap is usually worth more than the exemption.

Then the fixed charges. On comparable improved homes in this exact area, the 2025 certified non-ad-valorem charges were about 362 dollars for fire and rescue and about 98 dollars for solid waste, roughly 460 dollars a year, identical on every parcel sampled. Add the district assessment once it exists, and dues, which have not been published.

The mechanism to plan for is reassessment. Your home is assessed on what you pay for it, not on the raw-land value on the roll today, so the first full tax year after closing steps up, sometimes sharply, and a builder lender's estimate at contract is frequently optimistic. Ask for it to be rebuilt on your purchase price with the district assessment as a line, even if that line is an estimate.

On insurance we will not guess: no premium figure specific to this location was obtainable from a primary source. What is verifiable is the structure of the risk, and it is unusually favourable for Florida. The homesites in the recorded phases are mapped outside the special flood hazard area, so a federally backed mortgage here would carry no mandatory flood purchase requirement; parts of the wider tract, principally drainage and preserve areas, are mapped inside it, so confirm the specific lot. The site is outside all seven of the county's hurricane evacuation zones, outside the county's mapped windborne-debris zone, and roughly forty miles inland. Inland, out of the evacuation zones and built to current code is close to the best case this state offers. Get a written quote on the actual plan before you commit.

Two honest counterweights. Mapped outside the special flood hazard area is not the same as never taking water: most flood claims ever filed in this postal code were on properties rated outside the mapped area, so price optional flood coverage rather than skip it. And this is karst country: four state-recorded sinkholes sit within a mile and the soil is a deep, well-drained fine sand. That is ordinary here, and the drainage is why these lots map out of the hazard area, but read the geotechnical work, ask about the foundation specification, and confirm what your policy says about sinkhole and catastrophic ground cover collapse coverage.

Brooksville, Interstate 75, and an honest word about the commute

Get the geography right, because it is the most important location fact here and it is easy to get wrong. This is an Interstate 75 community. The interchange at State Road 50 is about two and a half miles east, straight down Cortez Boulevard. The Suncoast Parkway, which is how the western side of this county commutes to Tampa, is about nineteen miles west on the far side of Brooksville, and it is not your route. Downtown Tampa is roughly fifty road miles south, and that run through Pasco and north Hillsborough is one of the most congested commuter stretches in the region at peak: an hour each way on a good day and considerably more on a bad one. If you need to be in Tampa five days a week, know that going in.

What you get in exchange is space and cost. Downtown Brooksville, the county seat, is about ten miles west in a straight line: a genuine small historic downtown with a courthouse square, though not a jobs center. Dade City is a similar distance south. Closer in there is more employment than the setting suggests: a large distribution center sits about a mile southeast on Kettering Road, which means local jobs and truck traffic, and an equestrian venue is about a mile west.

The best thing nearby is the Withlacoochee State Trail, roughly three miles east: a long paved rail-trail running the length of the county, and the most credible outdoor amenity in this part of Florida. Inside the community, the oak hammock preserve and passive park, about 18 acres with its own parking tract, is recorded rather than rendered. Weeki Wachee and the spring-fed coast are about twenty miles west, with the mermaid-show state park, the river and some of the best kayaking in the state, though that coastal edge is low-lying and carries flood and evacuation exposure this site does not.

The honest tradeoff is noise and position. Cortez Boulevard is the county's main east-west arterial, four-lane divided along the south frontage, and the developer has described future shopping, dining and office space on that same south edge. Expect arterial traffic and noise there, prefer a homesite further north, and go stand on the land at rush hour before choosing a lot.

How this compares with the other places you are probably looking

Compiled from county records and mapping as of October 2026. These compare locations, not communities.

Buying into a community this early

Contracting at this stage is a different transaction from buying a finished house, and the differences are all in the builder's paperwork. Expect the builder's own contract rather than a standard state form, staged deposits, a completion window rather than a date, a right to substitute materials, and warranty terms far more negotiable before signature than after. Ask what happens to your deposit if the schedule slips, where it is held, and who the warrantor is in each category.

There is a specific risk worth naming: you may be asked to commit before your homesite is finished, before the amenity is permitted, and before the district assessment is set. That is a lot of unknowns to sign against, and it argues for disclosures in writing, keeping the financing contingency intact, and not letting an incentive deadline rush a decision this size. Ask how the builder handles rate locks too: on a build that may take most of a year, the lock terms can be worth more than the closing-cost credit.

Who this suits, and who it does not

It suits a buyer who wants new construction, public utilities and a new master plan at eastern Hernando pricing, and who works locally, works from home, or accepts the Interstate 75 run a few days a week. It suits anyone whose insurance has been the problem in Florida, because inland and out of the evacuation zones is close to the best structural position this state offers.

It does not suit a buyer who needs the Gulf nearby, a short Tampa commute, or amenities on day one, because what exists today is streets, drainage and a preserve. Nor anyone who needs certainty on monthly cost now, because pricing has not been posted, dues are unpublished and the assessment is not set.

Common questions about Sunrise Hills