Selling now in Crawfordville, FL
Palmetto Subdivision
About 142 lots in unincorporated Crawfordville
The county's own linked flood tool holds 25,659 parcels and not one of these, which we proved with a control rather than assumed. The building department publishes three design wind speed lines and two of them are the same line, word for word. The whole carrying cost is below.
- Area
- Crawfordville, FL
- Platted lots
- About 142
- Standing homes
- 103
- Flat charges
- About $491
At a glance
Palmetto fast facts
Every figure below is read from the certified roll, the county's adopted budgets, the regional water management district's own layers or the federal claim files. Where a number is not published we say so rather than filling the gap.
- Area
- Crawfordville, Wakulla County, unincorporated
- Size
- About 142 lots across two phases
- Standing homes
- 103, built in the last four years
- Builder-held
- Four of the 103, so nearly built out
- Municipality
- None, and the nearest is about ten miles
- Verified non-school rate
- About 7.92 mills
- County rate direction
- Held flat, then proposed down
- Flat annual charges
- About $491 proposed, fire and waste
- District charges
- None, no district of any kind
- Homesteaded here
- About 76 percent of the 103
- Published flood data on these lots
- None, the county layer omits them
- Published school zones
- None at any current vintage
- Association dues
- Ask before you contract
- Current pricing and homes left
- Ask before you contract
Not published yet
Not published yet
Location: see Palmetto on the map. Figures carry the dates shown and are subject to change.
What this actually costs
A county with no city to compare against, and the one levy we refuse to publish
Start with what is different about this county, because it changes the shape of the whole question. There is no city here. The county seat is unincorporated, the two incorporated towns are both roughly ten miles away in opposite directions, and one of them recorded no new houses at all in four years. Every one of the 103 parcels returns unincorporated on all three measurement methods and on the roll's own taxing code. The usual Florida exercise of comparing the in-city bill against the county bill has no meaning at this address.
What we can verify precisely, we will. The county levies 7.9000 mills and the regional water management district levies 0.0207, so the verified non-school rate is 7.9207 mills. On the median homesteaded parcel here that is about $2,099 a year. The county held that 7.9000 flat for two years running and has a 7.7000 rate on the table for the year ahead, which would be a real cut. Knowing that split is how you buy here without leaving money on the table. Get pricing on what is left.
Now the number we will not publish, and why that is the useful answer. We could not confirm the school levy from a primary document this year. The county appraiser's per-parcel notice host would not serve, and the state calculation sheet did not surface the district row. The statutory structure, required local effort plus the discretionary and capital caps, puts the district total somewhere in the 5.2 to 5.9 band, worth roughly $1,500 to $1,700 here. A widely repeated third-party figure asserts about 14.22 mills total for this county, which implies about a third of a mill of non-school tax that no parcel at this address pays. Treat that total as unverified and ask for the actual notice.
The flat charges are the part that moves without appearing on any rate table. Solid waste has been $204 per dwelling and is proposed at $214. Fire is proposed at $277. Together about $491, and both are one hundred percent operating with no debt component anywhere. That last point matters more than it sounds: an assessment with no bonds behind it never burns off. It is not a construction charge that ends in twenty years, it is a permanent operating line.
Here is the reporting gap on those charges. Both adopted budgets publish the fire fund in dollars, about $5.44 million of expenditure one year and about $3.94 million of assessment revenue the next, and neither publishes the per-unit rate a homeowner is actually charged. The fire rate enters public view for the first time as a proposed figure for the year ahead. If you want to know what you will pay, the proposed number is the only published one, and it is proposed rather than adopted.
One more thing about who the solid waste charge covers. It applies to unincorporated property and to one of the two towns, and excludes the other entirely, so it is not county-wide, not unincorporated-only, and not aligned to any municipal line you can look up. It applies here cleanly, but do not assume the same answer at a second address in this county.
And a note on the exemption, since this is a young subdivision where it matters more than usual. The homestead saving at the median is about $909 a year, but the median badly understates the spread: 22 of the 78 homesteaded parcels here carry more than $50,000 of accumulated assessment differential, in houses that are at most four years old. That is portability, buyers moving a long-held cap in from an older house. If you are coming from a Florida home you have owned for years, ask your closing agent to run the portability numbers before you assume this address costs what the roll says.
So ask four things in writing before you contract: the actual school millage on a current notice for a house on this street, since we would not publish an unverified one; the adopted fire and solid waste rates for the year ahead rather than the proposed ones; whether there is an association here, what it charges and whether the common ground has been conveyed to it; and the sealed plan's design wind speed, which no public map in this county will tell you.
What almost nobody checks
The county's own flood tool holds 25,659 parcels and none of these
In most Florida communities the flood question turns on a measurement rule. Count a lot as exposed if any part of it touches a mapped hazard area and you get one number; count only the centre of the lot and you get another; count majority of lot area and you get a third. We have seen that spread swing more than twelvefold in a single subdivision. So the first thing worth knowing is which rule the data supports.
This county's regional water management district does something better than almost anyone. It stores flood exposure on each parcel as an explicit percentage of the lot's area, so a record reads as something like ninety-eight percent one zone and two percent another. That one field answers all three questions at once, without any geometry work, for every parcel in the layer. It is the single most useful flood field we have found in Florida.
And it does not contain this subdivision. We queried three of these parcels by exact identifier, from both phases, and got zero records back. We queried a nearby community outside this subdivision and got zero. Then we queried a control parcel in an older neighbourhood a few miles away and got a clean record back, and asked the layer for its total row count and got 25,659. The layer works. These parcels are simply not in it. That is not a flood finding, it is a data finding, and it means the honest answer to what share of these lots are in a special flood hazard area is that the county's own regulatory tool does not say.
The underlying map is also old. Of the 29 printed flood map panels covering this county, 27 carry an effective date from 2014 and only two have been revised since, neither of them covering this side of the county. So the operative map here predates the four named storms that have hit this coast in the last decade. There is no letter of map amendment or revision reflected in the panel set for this area, for the same reason the parcels are absent: the record does not reach them.
County-wide the hazard geometry is close to an even split, and about a fifth of this county's 1,553 federal flood insurance claims have a loss year in the last decade. That is a coastal county with a real and recent record, which is why the silence on these specific parcels is worth naming rather than glossing.
Now the wind side, which is stranger. There is no design wind speed layer for this county at any level of government. The building department publishes the three lines as a narrative driving route, beginning at the south end of a named highway and proceeding north to a named road, turn by turn. That is the whole publication. A buyer cannot look up their address and get a number.
And two of the three lines are one line. The description for the ordinary-house category and the description for the highest risk category are identical text, word for word, from the same starting county line to the same ending county line. A detached one or two family house is the ordinary category, so the line governing this house is the same geometry the code labels as the highest one. Whether that is a drafting error or a deliberate merge, no public document says. Get the number from the sealed plans.
The practical version: a lender's flood determination for this address will produce an answer, because determination vendors read the federal map directly rather than the county's parcel layer. That answer may well be clean. It is worth understanding that the county's own published parcel-level flood product has nothing to say about your lot either way, and that the map underneath it is twelve years old here.
Get the school millage in writing
It is the one line on the bill we would not publish without a primary source.
The record
A three-year-old subdivision carrying $355,625 of accumulated assessment differential
The build history is unusually compressed. Of the 103 houses standing, 66 were finished in one year, 26 in the next and 11 in the one after that. Both phases went up essentially at once and the pace has fallen off sharply, which is what four remaining builder-held lots out of 103 tells you. Three of those four are in the developer's name and one is in the builder's. This is a community at the end of its run, not the start of one.
The ownership pattern is about as local as Florida gets. Of 103 owners, 92 have a mailing address in this town and 101 are in state. Six parcels are held by any kind of entity, and half of those six are the builder and developer themselves. About 76 percent carry homestead. No institutional single-family rental operator appears anywhere in the subdivision, and the screen we ran for them has a demonstrated failure mode described below, so read that zero as a checked zero rather than an assumed one.
Here is the assessment finding, and it is the sort of thing that changes what you offer. This subdivision is at most four years old and already carries $355,625 of accumulated assessment differential across its homesteaded parcels. The median gap is a modest $4,328, but 22 of the 78 homesteaded parcels exceed $50,000 each. New construction cannot generate that on its own. What it means is that a substantial minority of these buyers ported a long-held cap in from a previous Florida home, and the tax line on their bill bears no relationship to what a new buyer would pay for the same house.
Which produces the inverted comparison. Among houses of identical vintage on the same streets, the median non-homesteaded taxable value exceeds the median homesteaded one by about $51,195, or $341,218 against $290,023. If you compare tax bills across this subdivision to work out what a house costs to own, you are mostly measuring who moved from where. Compare list prices and current assessed values instead, and run your own numbers on a fresh basis.
A caution about ownership screens generally, because this roll demonstrates the failure clearly. The roll truncates owner names at 33 characters, which we can prove because one trust name is cut mid-word, and the developer is stored with no entity suffix at all. So a screen looking for corporate suffixes misses three of the four builder-held parcels here. Any claim about who owns what in a Florida subdivision that rests on a name search should be treated as a floor rather than an answer.
One more thing that will mislead you about who the builder is. The builder's mailing city on the roll is a coastal town about a hundred miles west, and the developer's is the state capital. Neither is a national homebuilder; none of the ten largest appear on any of these 103 parcels, or on any of the 1,314 new houses built county-wide in four years. This is regional building, which is worth knowing when you ask about warranty administration and who answers the phone in year two.
What to ask for that is not published: the school millage on a current notice; the adopted fire and solid waste rates for the year ahead; whether an association exists, its dues, its budget and whether the common ground has been conveyed; the sealed plan's design wind speed and opening protection; and, if you are moving within Florida, a portability calculation before you set your offer.
The area
Nearly three thousand storm registrations and not one inspection above thirty thousand dollars
This county has been declared a federal disaster area 42 times since the early 1970s. It has not carried an individual assistance designation since 2005. The 2023 hurricane, the 2022 one, the 2018 one and one of the 2024 storms were all public assistance only for this county, which pays local government rather than households. That single administrative fact explains a lot of otherwise confusing storm data here.
It is why one of the biggest recent storms produced nothing at this address. The 2023 hurricane produced exactly zero federal assistance registrations in this postcode, not because nothing happened but because the programme was not opened here. Meanwhile the 2024 hurricane produced about 1,084 registrations, the 2018 storm about 930 and a 2016 one about 119, for a running total of about 2,978 across all events.
Now the part that matters for what you actually buy. Of the 1,084 registrations after the 2024 storm, about 55 showed any inspected damage to the house at all, and not one was inspected above $30,000. The same test in the small coastal community south of here returns zero above $30,000 too. Run the identical query against the 2024 landfall zone a couple of counties east and it returns 110 above $30,000. The query works; the zeros here are real.
The pattern that describes is a genuinely useful one. Households here register in large numbers and are found, on inspection, to have small losses. That is broad shallow wind damage, tree fall, fence and shingle work, power outage and debris, rather than catastrophic structural loss. It is real and it is expensive in aggregate, and it is not the same risk as being on the water.
On flood insurance the county-level record is substantial and recent. There are 1,553 federal flood insurance claims in this county across the whole history of the programme, and about 316 of them, roughly a fifth, have a loss year since 2015. This is a coastal county with real flooding in it. What we cannot do is attribute any of that to these lots, for the reason set out above: the parcel-level layer that would let anyone do so omits this subdivision entirely.
On schools, there is nothing published to tell you. The school district publishes no attendance boundary layer, the county's own planning mapping publishes zoning and comprehensive plan layers and no school layer, and the only national attendance boundary product has a final vintage of the 2015-16 school year. That is a decade old and predates every house in this subdivision by six years. We therefore assert no school assignment on this page. Structurally the high school question is moot, because this county operates one public high school for the whole county, but the elementary and middle assignment is a district-office answer and you should get it in writing.
Geography, briefly, since it is the reason people move here. This is the unincorporated county seat about half an hour south of the state capital, with the national forest to the north and the Gulf marshes to the south. Lots run around a third of an acre rather than the fifth you would get closer in, and the median house on this roll is a little over 2,400 square feet.
What you need to know
Buying new construction with someone on your side
Representation costs you nothing and the timing is the catch: in most builder sales offices your agent has to be with you or named at your first visit for the registration to stand. Sort that out before you walk in, not after.
It is worth having here for a specific reason. The two numbers that decide your carrying cost at this address are a school millage we could not verify and two flat charges that exist only as proposed figures, and none of the three appears on a document a buyer can pull. Those are things somebody can get in writing from the county and the district rather than inferred from published data, and they are worth more than any tour.
Because only four lots remain in builder or developer hands, most of what trades here now is resale. That changes the exercise: you are negotiating against individual sellers whose own tax lines, as set out above, may be nothing like yours will be. An agent who understands the portability arithmetic in this county is worth having on that specific point.
On ownership, the screen most people run comes back clean and is clean here, with a caveat. No institutional single-family rental operator holds a parcel in this subdivision, and only six of 103 parcels are held by any entity at all, half of those the builder and developer. The caveat is that the roll truncates owner names and stores the developer without an entity suffix, so a suffix screen misses three of the four builder parcels. We could not complete a multi-county control this session, so read the institutional zero as verified within the subdivision and unverified as a regional claim. We did not search Florida regulatory enforcement records or civil dockets for any builder, developer, contractor or land-holding entity, so read the absence of any such note as unchecked, not clean.
The rest is the same everywhere: hire your own independent inspector at pre-drywall where you can, again at final walkthrough, and once more before the one-year warranty expires. On a resale here, that becomes an ordinary inspection plus a hard look at whether the original builder warranty is still running and whether it transferred. Given that no public map in this county publishes a design wind speed, ask for the sealed plan value and the opening protection, and ask your insurer what the mitigation credit is worth. Read the limited warranty booklet before you sign.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Southern Coastal Homes, any homebuilder, any developer of Palmetto, or Wakulla County. The builder is identified here because it is a builder of this community, which is a statement of fact and not a representation of any relationship. Community names and marks are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification only. Subdiview is operated by a real estate broker licensed in Illinois. We are not your agent, we do not represent you, and we perform no real estate brokerage services in this state. No one at Subdiview is licensed in this state. If you join an interest list, your information is referred to a real estate professional licensed in the state where the property is located, who will contact you directly. We are compensated by that professional's brokerage, not by you. Pricing, plans, inventory, district, tax, flood and approval details on this page carry the dates shown, are as published, proposed or reported rather than committed, and are subject to change without notice.
Questions and answers
Palmetto FAQ
What is Palmetto Subdivision?
It is a two-phase community of roughly 142 platted lots on the north side of Crawfordville, the unincorporated county seat of Wakulla County, about half an hour south of Tallahassee. There are 103 houses standing, every one of them built in the last four years, and only four lots remain in the builder's or developer's name. The median house here is about 2,407 square feet on a lot of roughly a third of an acre, and the median assessed value on the certified roll is about $339,149.
Is this in a city?
No, and there is no version of it that is. Wakulla County contains exactly two incorporated towns, and neither is anywhere near here: Crawfordville is the county seat and has no municipal government at all. We measured it three ways, any overlap, centre of the lot and majority of lot area, and all 103 parcels return unincorporated on every method, which the roll's own taxing authority code confirms on 103 of 103. Across the whole county, four years of new houses produced 1,298 unincorporated parcels, 16 in one town and exactly none in the other.
What does it cost to own here each year?
We can verify part of it precisely and we will not guess at the rest. The county levies 7.9000 mills and the regional water management district levies 0.0207, so the verified non-school rate is 7.9207 mills, about $2,099 a year on the median homesteaded parcel. Add the flat charges, proposed at about $277 for fire and about $214 for solid waste, so about $491. The school levy is the one number we could not confirm from a primary document this year; the statutory structure puts it somewhere in the 5.2 to 5.9 band, which at this value is roughly $1,500 to $1,700. That lands the median homesteaded bill in the low four thousands, and it is the school line you should ask to see in writing.
Is it in a flood zone?
We cannot tell you, and the honest reason is more useful than a guess. The regional water management district publishes an unusually good parcel layer for this county: it stores flood exposure as an explicit percentage of each lot's area, which is exactly the field that settles the any-overlap versus centre versus majority argument. That layer holds 25,659 parcels. It contains none of these. We queried three of these parcels by exact identifier and got nothing back, then ran a control parcel elsewhere in the county and got a clean result, so the zero is real rather than a broken query. The county's flood map is also twelve years old across almost every panel here.
What is the storm history?
Broad and shallow. This postcode has filed about 2,978 federal assistance registrations across every declared event since the 1970s, including about 1,084 after the 2024 hurricane and about 930 after the 2018 one. Of those 1,084, only about 55 showed any inspected damage to the house at all, and not one was inspected above $30,000. The same query run against the 2024 landfall zone a county or two east returns 110 above $30,000, so the zeros here are real. Note also that the county has not carried an individual assistance designation since 2005, which is why the 2023 hurricane produced no registrations here at all.
What design wind speed is this house built to?
Nobody publishes it as a map. There is no wind speed layer at any level of government for this county. The building department publishes the three lines as a narrative driving route instead, turn by turn along named roads. Two of the three published line descriptions, the one for ordinary houses and the one for the highest risk category, are the same text word for word, so what reads as three contour lines is really two. Ask the builder in writing what design wind speed and opening protection the plans were sealed to, and ask your insurer what the mitigation credit is worth.
Before you walk into a sales office
Get your inside track on Palmetto
We will connect you with a real estate professional licensed in Florida who represents you rather than the seller, who can register you before your first visit, and who will get you the answers this page could not: the school millage on a current notice, the adopted fire and solid waste rates for the year ahead, whether an association exists and what it charges, the conveyance status of the common ground, the sealed plan's design wind speed, and what the builder or a resale seller will actually give at your price point.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.