Selling now near Davenport, FL
Astonia
1,413 homes on about 327 acres, unincorporated Polk County
The district here borrowed five separate times over four years, and the rate environment moved in between. Two households owing almost exactly the same bond principal will repay amounts about $9,480 apart, and the home the district itself counts as three-quarters of a house carries the highest annual district bill in the community. Both come straight from the adopted budget, and both are below.
- Area
- Polk County, FL
- Homes
- 1,413
- Bond issues
- Five
- District bill
- $1,864 to $2,205
At a glance
Astonia fast facts
Every figure here comes from the district's adopted budgets and audited statements, the county's certified rate sheets, and federal and state mapping queried directly. Where two official sources disagree, we say so rather than picking one quietly.
- Area
- Unincorporated Polk County, near Davenport
- Jurisdiction
- County, not the city, despite the address
- Size
- About 327 acres, 1,413 homes
- Stage
- Phases 1 to 5 done, Phase 6 building
- Bond issues
- Five, one per phase group
- Cheapest district bill
- About $1,864 on a 40-foot lot
- Priciest district bill
- About $2,205, on the smallest home
- Earlier phases repay
- About 1.6 times the principal
- Last phase repays
- About 2.05 times the principal
- Operations assessment
- Fell about 5 percent, now flat
- County flat charges
- About $739, up 56 percent in two years
- County insurance average
- $2,771 with wind, $1,619 without
- Homeowner association dues
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
- Current pricing and lots left
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
Figures come from the community development district's adopted budget and its audited financial statements, its published amortisation schedules, board minutes and adopted resolutions, the county property appraiser's certified rate and assessment sheets, county and state mapping, the state geological survey's subsidence database and the state insurance regulator, all as of September 2026. Association dues, impact fee district assignment and bond redemption terms were not obtainable and none is published here. All details are subject to change without notice.
The county's online "amount due" is not your tax bill.
On the parcels we sampled, the figure the county's mapping shows as due is ad valorem tax and nothing else. It excludes the fire assessment, the solid waste assessment and the entire district levy, understating the real annual bill by roughly $2,600 to $3,000. Separately, the county's parcel mapping carries a millage rate that matches none of its own three most recent published rate sheets. We use the property appraiser's certified sheet and flag the disagreement rather than hiding it.
Where it is
Unincorporated Polk County with a Davenport mailing address, in the corridor that has absorbed more new-home volume than anywhere else in Florida. Five of six phases are finished, so you can drive the finished streets rather than a rendering. Do the commute you would actually make, on a weekday.
How to buy in Astonia 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 recognise them and you lose it. Start here and we will set it up.
Set up a tourWhat a local would tell you
Same principal, $9,480 apart in what you repay, and the smallest home pays the most
A community development district borrows money to build the roads, drainage and pipes, then charges the homes it serves to repay it. Most buyers in Florida know that much. What almost nobody is told is that a district does not borrow once. This one borrowed five separate times over four years, each phase group pledged only to its own issue, and the interest rate environment moved hard in between.
The earlier issues priced between about two and a half and four per cent. The last one, in early 2024, priced between about four and a half and five point seven. The final phase absorbed the entire rate move.
Here is what that does to two households. A 50-foot single-family lot in the fourth phase carries about $20,973 of principal and repays about $33,592 over the life, roughly 1.6 times what was borrowed. A townhome in the sixth phase carries about $21,042 of principal and repays about $43,072, roughly 2.05 times.
The principal differs by sixty-nine dollars. The total repayment differs by about $9,480. On that last bond issue the interest still to be paid is actually larger than the principal still outstanding, which is what a five-point-something coupon over thirty years does.
Now the part that inverts everything. The district assesses that sixth-phase townhome at three-quarters of a residential unit. It formally counts it as three-quarters of a house. And yet its combined operations and debt assessment, about $2,205 a year, is the highest in the community , about $341 more than the 40-foot single-family homes in the first three phases, and about $323 more than the identical three-quarter-unit townhome product one phase earlier. Size does not predict the bill here. Timing does.
Even inside a single plat the spread is real. In the fourth phase a 50-foot lot pays about $2,187 and a 40-foot lot about $1,907, roughly $280 a year apart on the same street grid. Anyone comparing two homes here without first asking which phase and which product type each one sits in is comparing the wrong things.
One genuinely good piece of news, and it runs against everything else we have published about Florida districts. The operations assessment here went down, not up, by about five per cent, and the adopted budget for the coming year prints a zero increase on every single row. That is traceable to real reductions in water, sewer, electricity and lake maintenance. What is rising fast instead is the county's own flat charges, which is a different problem and is below.
So ask five things in writing before you contract: which phase and assessment area the specific home sits in, and the adopted operations and debt assessment for that product type; the bond principal allocated to that lot and the payoff figure; the homeowners association's recorded documents and dues, which we could not obtain; the current flood determination for that lot; and the fire and solid waste assessments for the coming roll, because they are moving faster than anything else.
Get the payoff figure for the specific lot
Paying the bond out costs 1.6 times the principal in the older phases and about 2.05 times in the newest one. Paying it off is a single number the district will give you.
The record
Reserves released back to the developer, a board still elected by the acre, and county charges up 56 per cent in two years
Start with something in the audited statements that a buyer would never think to look for. Each bond issue came with a reserve fund, a cushion held for the bondholders. The audit says, for three of the five issues, that on satisfaction of certain conditions part of that reserve is released to the developer for construction costs paid on behalf of the district, and that this occurred during the year. For the newest issue it says it did not.
The effect is visible on the balance sheet. Measured against a year's debt service, three of the reserves sit at about half, the newest sits at a full year, and one has fallen to about a tenth of a year's debt service. Roughly a quarter of a million dollars left that cushion for developer construction costs. None of this is improper, all of it is disclosed in a document the district publishes, and exactly none of it appears anywhere a buyer would look.
Second, on who runs the place. The district's own minutes record that as of the spring it had 1,290 registered voters, and note that the count is announced annually in connection with the transition to resident control. The district was established at the start of 2020, so it is more than six years old. Yet a resolution adopted in August calls a landowners' election for a seat this November, one vote per acre, fractions rounded up, held at a hotel rather than a polling place. All five supervisors list the developer's address, and the entity still holding 138 lots in the final phase mails to that same address, with each lot rounding up to a vote.
We report that as a tension rather than an accusation, and we want to be precise about why. Resident-elector seats are run by the county's elections office and would not appear in a landowners' meeting resolution, so their absence there proves nothing, and we did not check the ballot. What we can give you is the date the district was formed, the voter count it announced, and the kind of election it called. Ask the district which seats are on the general-election ballot and when.
Third, the number that is actually moving. The county's flat per-dwelling charges, which sit on the tax bill but are not property tax, went from $475 to $618 to about $739 across three rolls. The fire rescue assessment alone rose about 39.9 per cent in the most recent year. None of it varies with your home's value and none of it is reduced by the homestead exemption, so it falls identically on a townhome and on the largest house in the community. Worked through on a sixth-phase townhome at $300,000 of taxable value with no homestead, the annual total comes to about $6,823, of which about $2,944, roughly 43 per cent, is not property tax.
On prepayment, the audit is clear that assessments may be prepaid in part as well as in full, and two of the five issues carry dedicated prepayment trust accounts, so people are doing it. What we could not get are the bond indentures themselves, which means we cannot tell you the redemption price, any premium, or the exact window. Get those from the district before you decide whether paying it off is worth it, because on the newest phase the arithmetic is unusually favourable to prepaying.
Two more limits worth naming. We obtained no recorded declaration and no dues figure for a homeowners association, and most communities of this type in this county carry one on top of the district. That is the largest single gap in the carrying-cost picture on this page and we will not estimate it. And while the county's adopted impact fee schedule is public, running to roughly $21,000 to $22,000 per single-family dwelling with the educational component alone about $14,338, we could not verify which transportation district this community falls in, so we publish no total.
What to ask for that is not published: the association's recorded declaration, current budget and any capital contribution at closing; the bond indenture and redemption terms for your phase; the payoff figure for the specific lot; the coming year's fire and solid waste assessments; and a sample tax bill for a closed comparable in your phase showing every line.
The area
Thirteen homes were mapped into a flood zone after their plat recorded, and the county's own map does not show it
We tested every one of the community's roughly 1,469 parcels against the federal flood layer rather than sampling, and the answer is overwhelmingly reassuring with one sharp exception. 1,454 parcels return an area of minimal flood hazard. Fourteen return a special flood hazard area with a mapped base flood elevation, and one more returns a flood zone with no elevation determined. Thirteen of the fourteen are built, sold, individually owned homes on two streets in the fourth phase; the last is a district stormwater tract.
The mechanism is the part that matters, and it is not what you would guess. That flood polygon carries a letter of map change citation rather than the base study. In other words the printed county flood panel, effective at the end of 2016, did not put those lots in a special flood hazard area. A later revision did. The plat for that phase recorded in late 2021, between the base panel and two revisions that became effective in 2023. So homes were platted, built and sold, and the flood mapping under them changed afterwards.
It gets one degree stranger. The county's own published flood layer returns no feature at three of those addresses, while correctly returning a flood zone at a control point elsewhere in the county. The county map and the federal map disagree about those homes, and the federal one is what a lender uses.
We are not publishing the addresses. Thirteen identifiable families own those homes and it would be indefensible to put their street numbers on a marketing page. What we will tell you is the thing that actually protects you: pull a current flood determination for the specific lot before you go firm, and do not accept a community-level answer. On a resale here, ask specifically whether a determination has been re-run since 2023.
On hurricanes, the honest answer is about the county rather than the community. The statewide evacuation layer contains forty-three counties and this one is not among them. A query for it returns nothing at all: and our controls in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Brevard return zones correctly. So there is no surge evacuation zone here because inland counties of this kind are not zoned for surge, not because this particular community was assessed and cleared. That is a real advantage of being this far inland, stated accurately.
On sinkholes, which is the hazard that actually matters in this landform, we are going to give you the limits rather than a comfortable answer. The state's subsidence database records no reported incident inside this community's sections. The nearest six sit between roughly two and five and a half miles away, and every one is flagged in the state's own data as unverified. That database says plainly that reported incidents are not confirmed sinkholes, and that broken pipes, compressible layers and poorly compacted fill mimic them. No authoritative source assigns a sinkhole risk rating to this location, and because reporting is voluntary, absence of a report is not absence of risk. A geotechnical review on the specific lot is the only thing that answers it.
We also confirmed a negative that gets asserted loosely in this county: this community is not inside the Green Swamp area of critical state concern. The county's overlay returns no feature here and returns the designation correctly at two control points in the northwest of the county, roughly twenty miles away.
On insurance, the state regulator puts the average county homeowners premium at about $2,771 including wind and about $1,619 excluding it, measured in late 2025, against about $2,730 and $1,757 six months earlier. So the with-wind figure rose about one and a half per cent while the without-wind figure fell nearly eight. For scale the same table puts Orange at about $3,585 and Hillsborough at about $3,514, so this county runs roughly $750 to $800 a year cheaper than the metros on either side of it. That gap is one of the real reasons this corridor is absorbing the volume it is.
On schools, the county's public tool is interactive only, but we were able to query the mapping services its own zone map is built on and validate them against a control. They return Loughman Oaks Elementary, Shelly S. Boone Middle and Ridge Community High. Two capacity figures from the same data are worth your attention: the middle school carries about 1,272 permanent student stations plus 153 portable ones against an enrolment of about 1,405, which is roughly 110 per cent of permanent capacity with one seat in nine in a portable, and the high school has about 2,770 students residing in its zone against a capacity of about 2,824, or 98 per cent. The caveats are real: those layers carry older vintage labels, the high school layer is labelled recommended rather than final, and new high school boundaries took effect this school year. Run the specific address through the district's own tool, because we would not bet a school assignment on a map service alone.
One last thing the tax roll shows that nobody advertises. Homestead take-up runs about 65 and 64 per cent in the two original single-family phases and about 19 per cent in the two townhome phases. Homestead status lags a closing by up to a year, so that overstates the investor share in the newest phases by an unknown amount. But the gap is large enough to name, because a non-homesteaded owner has no exemption and no assessment cap, so their bill tracks full market value year to year while a homesteaded neighbour's is capped.
What you need to know
Buying new construction with someone on your side
Representation is free and the timing is the catch, as above. It is worth more than usual here for one reason that is specific to this community: the single largest variable in what you will pay every year is which phase the home is in, and nothing on a spec sheet tells you that. The difference between the best and worst district bill here is about $341 a year forever, and the difference in lifetime bond repayment is about $9,480.
The second reason is that this is a late-stage community. Five phases of six are finished, so the remaining inventory is what is left rather than what was best, and you can walk finished streets and talk to people who already live here. Both cut in your favour if someone is helping you use them.
On builders, we have to be careful and we would rather be careful than impressive. Several builders sell in this community. Only one is verifiable from a primary record : a national builder's corporate entity appears as the record owner of eight parcels in the final phase's plat. The others appear only in marketing, so we are not naming them. Ask which builder holds the contract on the specific home and which entity will be the seller and the warrantor.
Two things we will not claim. We obtained no recorded declaration for a homeowners association here, so nothing on this page describes what your covenants require or what any association dues are, and there is very likely one on top of the district. And we did not search Florida regulatory enforcement records or civil dockets for any builder, so read the absence of any such note as unchecked, not clean. If that matters to you, ask and we will have it pulled properly rather than repeat a rumour.
The rest is the same everywhere and it is not complicated: hire your own independent inspector at pre-drywall, again at final walkthrough, and once more before the one-year warranty expires. Read the limited warranty booklet before you sign rather than after. And read what the purchase agreement says about completion timing, price changes before closing, and dispute resolution.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Ryan Homes, any homebuilder, any developer of Astonia, the City of Davenport, or Polk 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 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
Astonia FAQ
What is Astonia?
It is a community of 1,413 homes, 1,013 single-family and 400 townhomes, on about 327 acres in unincorporated Polk County with a Davenport mailing address, north and south of the corridor west of the highway. It grew in three steps, from about 160 acres at the outset to about 267 and then to about 327. Phases one through five are complete and built out; the sixth and final phase is under construction, and on the most recent tax roll only sixteen of its parcels carried a building value while 138 were still held by the developer's lot-holding entity. So this is a community you can walk before you buy, which is a real advantage, with one phase left to sell.
Why do two homes here pay such different district bills?
Because the district borrowed five separate times over four years, each phase group pledged only to its own bond issue, and the interest rate environment moved sharply in between. The earlier issues priced between about 2.5 and 4 per cent. The last one, in early 2024, priced between about 4.5 and 5.7. The consequence is the single most useful thing on this page. A 50-foot single-family lot in phase four carries about $20,973 of principal and repays about $33,592 over the life, roughly 1.6 times what was borrowed. A townhome in phase six carries about $21,042 of principal, sixty-nine dollars more, and repays about $43,072, roughly 2.05 times. That is a difference of about $9,480 in total repayment on essentially the same debt. On the last bond issue the interest still to be paid is actually larger than the principal still outstanding.
Which product has the highest district bill?
The smallest one, which is the opposite of what anyone expects. The district assesses the phase six townhome at 0.75 of a residential unit for operations, meaning it formally counts it as three-quarters of a house. Yet its combined operations and debt assessment comes to about $2,205 a year, which is the highest total in the community. It is about $341 more than the 40-foot single-family homes in the first three phases and about $323 more than the identical three-quarter-unit townhome product one phase earlier. Even within a single phase the spread is real: a 50-foot lot and a 40-foot lot on the same plat are about $280 a year apart. Ask which phase and which product type a specific home sits in before you compare any two prices, because the district bill does not track size.
Is the district assessment going up?
No, and this genuinely surprised us. Across every community we have written about, the district assessment climbs. Here the operations component fell about 4.87 per cent from the prior year, from about $830 to about $789 on single-family and from about $622 to about $592 on townhomes, and the adopted budget for the coming year prints a zero increase on every row. The savings are real and traceable to the field lines: water and sewer budgeted down from about $72,000 to $40,000, electricity from about $16,000 to $8,000, lake maintenance from $30,000 to $25,000, partly offset by streetlights rising from $48,000 to about $65,000 and a new reserve study. The debt component is flat too. What is rising instead is the county's own flat charges, which is the next answer.
Is the unincorporated address cheaper?
On the tax rate yes, and on the total bill no, and you should see both. Unincorporated Polk County totals about 12.93 mills against about 19.36 for the nearby city, an advantage of about 6.43 mills or roughly $1,929 a year on $300,000 of taxable value. That is the headline everyone quotes. Then add what the city home does not pay: a district assessment of about $1,864 to $2,205, plus the county's flat fire assessment of about $393 and solid waste of about $346, and the arithmetic reverses. A 50-foot home here totals about $6,751 against about $5,807 for a hypothetical in-city home with no district, so roughly $944 more. On seven of the eight product types here the all-in bill is higher despite the lower rate. Only the 40-foot lots in the earliest phases come out ahead, and only narrowly.
What are the county's flat charges doing?
Rising much faster than anything else on the bill, and they are the part no rate comparison captures. The fire rescue assessment went from $268 to $281 to $393 per dwelling across three rolls, a 39.9 per cent increase in the most recent year alone. Solid waste went from about $207 to $337 to $346. Combined, the county's flat per-dwelling charges rose from $475 to about $739 in two years, up about 55.6 per cent. None of it varies with the assessed value of your home and none of it is reduced by the homestead exemption, so it lands identically on a modest townhome and a large house. On a worked example, a phase six townhome at $300,000 taxable with no homestead pays about $6,823 all in, and about $2,944 of that, roughly 43 per cent, is charges that are not property tax at all.
Before you walk into a sales office
Get your inside track on Astonia
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: which phase and assessment area a specific home sits in and what it costs, the bond payoff figure for that lot, the association's dues and recorded documents, the current flood determination, and what the builder will actually give on incentives at your price point.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.