Platted and permitted. Pricing not released.

Plum Tree, DeLand: fifteen townhomes a short walk from downtown, and the one document that decides your monthly cost

Plum Tree is a small recorded townhome community on Golden Plum Street in DeLand, on an infill block in the old grid between West Rich Avenue, North Orange Avenue and West Indiana Avenue, next to Bill Dreggors Park. Fifteen townhomes in four attached buildings. The final plat recorded in September 2025, the state and city site work permits are issued, the addresses were assigned a year ago, and as of mid-October 2026 the fifteen individual building permits were sitting ready to issue. Nothing has been sold to anybody and no price has been published.

This is a genuinely different kind of listing from the thousand-home master-planned communities that dominate Florida new construction, and the things that matter here are different too. The location is excellent and easy to verify in five minutes on foot. The structure of the community is the part that deserves real attention, and it is covered below, because fifteen households here own an entire small road and utility network between them.

What is actually built here, from the records

The recorded plat creates fifteen fee-simple lots, each exactly 23 feet wide by 40 feet deep, which is 920 square feet of land per home. They sit in four attached buildings of four, four, three and four units on a single private street. The city's permit records describe two-storey townhomes of about 1,478 square feet with three bedrooms, a bathroom for every bedroom, and a garage. The city classifies the project as a townhome master, and the plat puts a further eight common tracts around the homes.

Be clear about what those dimensions mean, because it is the single most important thing to picture. A 23-foot-wide lot with no side yard is a true attached townhome: you share both walls unless you are an end unit, your private outdoor space is small and at the rear, and everything else on the block is held in common. In exchange you are getting new construction on a walkable block in a town centre, which in DeLand is close to unobtainable otherwise, because the old grid is already built out with houses from the 1920s onwards.

One more practical point. The developer owns exactly fifteen parcels in the whole county, and the plat is a single phase on a block bounded by existing streets. There is no phase two here and there never will be. For a buyer that is unusually good news: no multi-year construction next door, no shifting master plan, no amenity promised in a later phase that may not arrive. What you see on the plat is the finished community.

How to buy Plum Tree 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.

On a fifteen-unit community the leverage is different from a big builder community, and in some ways better. There is no corporate incentive sheet and no national pricing committee; there is a developer with fifteen units to sell and real interest in the first few going quickly. Unit position matters enormously here, since end units and the units facing the park are materially different homes, and there is no second phase to wait for if you miss the one you wanted. Get pricing as soon as it exists and have somebody experienced reading the association documents alongside you.

The thing to understand before anything else: fifteen households own the infrastructure

Here is the fact that does not appear in any marketing and that should shape your decision. The recorded plat and the city's site improvement permit put the following into common tracts owned by the homeowners association rather than the city: the private street the homes front onto, a dry retention pond with a 210-foot retaining wall, and the water, reclaimed water, sewer, sidewalk and stormwater systems serving the community. The city permit for that work, valued at roughly 646,000 dollars, codes it as private infrastructure. There are also five tree-protection tracts carrying a perpetual easement to the city.

Private infrastructure means the association, and therefore the fifteen owners, is responsible for maintaining, repairing and eventually replacing all of it. A city does not come and resurface a private street or reline a private sewer. Spread across a five-hundred-home community that liability is trivial per household. Spread across fifteen, it is not. A retaining wall, a pond structure and a street each have replacement horizons measured in decades and costs measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there are fifteen doors to divide that between.

This is emphatically not a reason to avoid Plum Tree. Plenty of excellent small communities work exactly this way, and the trade for it is the location and the privacy of a private street. It is a reason to make two documents non-negotiable before your deposit is at risk: the association budget and the reserve study or reserve schedule. What you want to see is that reserves are funded against a real replacement schedule for the street, the wall, the pond and the utility lines, rather than dues set attractively low for the first few years with the replacement cost left for a future special assessment. Ask who controls the association during build-out, when control transfers to the owners, and whether the developer is subsidising the budget in the interim, because dues very often step up when that subsidy ends. The dues figure itself is not published yet, and we are not going to invent one for you.

What the approvals say, and where the project paused

The approval chain here is unusually complete for a pre-launch community, which is the upside of a small infill plat. The final plat is recorded and verified at the clerk, in Plat Book 67 beginning at page 72. The water management district issued its environmental resource permit for the stormwater system in February 2025, under the project name Plum Tree Townhomes. The City of DeLand issued the site improvement permit in July 2025. Four master building permits were issued between December 2025 and January 2026.

Then it went quiet for about seven months, and in the interest of telling you the truth rather than a story, that pause is visible in the record: a notice of commencement filed in January 2026 was terminated five days later. The project restarted in August 2026, when the fifteen individual unit permits were applied for and four fresh notices of commencement were recorded. As of mid-October 2026 those unit permits read ready to issue rather than issued, and no certificate of occupancy record exists for any home.

The practical reading is that construction here is starting now rather than finishing, and that this project has already demonstrated it can stall. That is useful in both directions. It means the first buyers are genuinely first, which is the whole point of being on a list like this one. It also means you should ask for a construction schedule with dates in writing, ask what happens to your deposit if the schedule slips again, and treat every date you are given as a target rather than a commitment, because that is all any of them are.

DeLand, and why the location is the asset

DeLand is the county seat of Volusia County and it is one of the genuinely pleasant small downtowns in Florida, which is not a large category. Its main street has been restored rather than replaced, with independent shops, restaurants and a historic theatre in a walkable few blocks, and it has won national main street recognition for that work. Stetson University, a private liberal arts university founded in the 1880s, sits immediately north of the centre and gives the town a year-round student and faculty population, a steady stream of concerts and lectures, and an architectural character that most of central Florida does not have.

This site is in the old grid, roughly three-quarters of a mile from the downtown core and about the same from the Stetson campus, which is a walk rather than a drive for anyone reasonably mobile. Bill Dreggors Park is adjacent. The St Johns River and its spring runs are a short drive west, Blue Spring State Park with its winter manatees is south, and the beaches at Daytona and New Smyrna are roughly half an hour east. Orlando is reachable down the Interstate 4 corridor, far enough that nobody should buy here imagining a short commute, close enough that it works for a few days a week. DeLand also has an Amtrak station, and a commuter-rail extension up the corridor to DeLand has been in planning for years, so check its current status yourself rather than relying on any page, including this one.

The honest counterweight is that west Volusia is not a high-wage job market and the town is quiet by design. If you want nightlife, major-league sport or a large employment base on your doorstep, this is not the place. If you want a walkable historic town centre, a university, cheap access to springs and river and beach, and a new home that needs nothing doing to it, that combination is hard to find anywhere else at this scale in Florida.

Taxes, insurance and the carrying cost

The total millage applying to this location is about 18.2 mills as of the 2026 tax year, which is roughly 1.8 percent of taxable value. Buyers from outside the county are often surprised by one component of that: west Volusia carries a hospital district levy that funds indigent care, and it appears on the bill as its own line. There is no community development district here and no non-ad-valorem assessment on the land at present, which we checked on the parcel's own current tax notice rather than inferring from a tax classification code.

The mechanism to plan for is reassessment. Your townhome will be assessed on what you pay for it, not on the raw-land value showing on the roll today, so the first full tax year after closing steps up, sometimes sharply, and a builder's lender estimate at contract is frequently optimistic. If the home will be your permanent residence, Florida's homestead exemption applies, with the exemption amount set by state law and constitution rather than by the county, and the annual assessment cap that comes with homestead is worth more over a decade than the exemption itself.

On insurance, new construction to current Florida code in an inland location mapped outside the special flood hazard area is close to the best case this state offers, and it should price far better than older stock nearer the coast. The complication in a townhome is the split: the association typically insures the building shell while you insure the interior, your contents and your liability, and exactly where that line falls is written into the declaration. On a fifteen-unit association the master policy deductible is also worth asking about, because a deductible shared fifteen ways is a bigger number per owner than one shared five hundred ways. Get a written quote on the actual unit and read what the association's policy covers before you are committed.

Schools are Volusia County Schools. We are not naming individual schools, because attendance assignments change and third-party school labels attached to new-construction listings are frequently the nearest school rather than the assigned one. Confirm assignment with the district for the year a child would enrol.

What we could not determine

Three things, stated plainly rather than papered over. The association dues and budget are not public, as above. We could not obtain site imagery newer than the county's 2024 flight, so this page makes no claim about what is physically standing on the ground today, and the conclusion that nothing has been sold rests on the permit and conveyance records rather than on a photograph. And while everything in the record points to ordinary for-sale townhomes sold to individual buyers, no lot here has conveyed to anyone yet, so that is a strong reading of the documents rather than a fact proven by a deed. If it matters to you that your neighbours will be owner-occupiers, ask for the leasing restrictions in the declaration in writing before your deposit is at risk.

Buying before it is built, on a contract like this one

Contracting on a home that is not standing yet is a different transaction from buying a finished house, and on a small developer project the differences are sharper, not softer. The agreement will be the developer's own form rather than a standard state contract, and on a project of this size it may be a short form that leaves a great deal unsaid, which is its own kind of risk. Expect deposits in stages, a completion window rather than a date, the right to substitute materials, and warranty and dispute terms that are far more negotiable before signature than after.

Ask specifically what happens to your deposit if the schedule slips, because this project has already paused once for seven months, and ask where your deposit is held and whether it is escrowed with a third party. Ask who the warrantor is and for how long in each category, and whether there is a third-party warranty administrator behind the developer or only the developer itself. On a fifteen-unit project built by a contractor affiliated with the developer, the practical answer to "who do I call in year three" deserves to be in writing rather than assumed. Ask for the licensed contractor's licence number and look it up yourself: it takes two minutes on the state licensing site and it is the cheapest due diligence available to you.

Have your own inspection too. Buyers of new construction routinely skip it on the assumption that the city inspection covers them, and it does not: municipal inspections check code compliance, not workmanship or finish. A private inspection before closing, and ideally one before the drywall goes up, is the standard advice for a reason, and a buyer's agent who knows the market will have someone to recommend.

Who this suits, and who it does not

It is worth being direct about fit, because fifteen homes is a narrow enough offering that it will be right for some people and wrong for most. It suits a buyer who wants to live in or near a real town centre without taking on a hundred-year-old house: downtown DeLand and Stetson are both a walk away, the house is new, and nothing needs renovating, rewiring or re-roofing for a long time. It suits someone downsizing who wants low exterior maintenance, and it suits a Stetson-connected buyer or a parent wanting a foothold near campus. It also suits anyone who would rather own in a fifteen-door community with no amenity complex and correspondingly modest dues than in a large master-planned development with a club, a gate and a bigger monthly bill.

It does not suit a buyer who wants a yard, a pool, a garage for more than the cars that fit in it, or any separation from the neighbours. A 23-foot-wide attached lot is close living and no amount of marketing changes that. It does not suit anyone who needs amenities, since there is no clubhouse, pool or fitness centre here and there will not be. And it does not suit a buyer who needs certainty on timing or on monthly cost today, because the construction schedule has already moved once and the association dues have not been published at all.

One further consideration for anyone thinking about this as an investment rather than a home. The small size of the association cuts both ways: a single owner who stops paying is nearly seven percent of the budget, and leasing restrictions in the declaration may limit what you can do with the unit. Both are answerable from the recorded declaration, and both belong in your analysis before you commit rather than after.

What this page becomes once homes are listed

At the moment there is nothing here to shop, so this page is a record of what is platted and permitted and a way to be told when that changes. The moment homes in this community reach the market, this page switches over to live inventory for Plum Tree automatically, and the people on the list above hear first. With fifteen units and no second phase, the difference between hearing in the first week and hearing in the second month is likely to be the difference between choosing your unit and taking what is left.

Common questions about Plum Tree