Approved, cleared and pre-construction in Nassau County, FL

Hidden Lake

275 approved lots on 207 mainland acres, seven miles inland from the beach everyone thinks this address means

Nassau County rezoned this land for single-family homes in 2023. Recorded school agreements cover 275 units. In August 2026 the whole assembly changed hands for a little over eighteen and a half million dollars, and within about five weeks the trees started coming down. There is still no plat, no street names, no model and no price.

Hidden Lake fast facts

Here is what the public record establishes today and what has not been released. Anything marked not yet released, join the interest list and it goes out the day it drops.

Area

Unincorporated Nassau County, mainland, Fernandina Beach mailing address

Site

Six parcels, about 207 acres on the tax roll

Approved plan

275 single-family dwelling units

Zoning

Residential Single Family 2, rezoned from Open Rural in 2023

Owner of record

Century Communities of Florida LLC, since August 2026

Land sale

$18,733,900, recorded August 7, 2026

Environmental permit

Individual permit issued January 2026, running to 2031

Receiving water

The Nassau River

Recorded plat

None

Street names

Not assigned

Community name at launch

May differ from Hidden Lake

Pricing

Not yet released

Model home

Not yet announced

Get notified when any of the unreleased items above changes.

Details on this page are compiled from public records and are targets, not commitments. Lot counts, plans, timing and pricing have not been released and are subject to change without notice.

Where this actually is

This is the single most important thing on the page, so it goes first. The mailing address says Fernandina Beach. The land is not in Fernandina Beach and it is not on Amelia Island. All six parcels are in unincorporated Nassau County, on the mainland, roughly seven to eight miles west of the island beaches and outside any city limit.

The 32034 ZIP code is enormous. It covers Amelia Island and a wide band of mainland Nassau County behind it, and a great many listings and search results quietly collapse the two into one place. They are not one place. Driving to the sand from here means crossing the Intracoastal, and the county seat business district, the historic downtown and the oceanfront are all on the other side of that water.

What you get in exchange is real. Yulee, the mainland commercial centre with the big-box retail, the hospital campus and the highway interchange, sits about five miles west. Interstate 95 lies about nine miles west at the State Road 200 interchange. Downtown Jacksonville is about nineteen miles south as the crow flies and Jacksonville International Airport is closer still. Mainland Nassau County is where the price difference lives: island land has been expensive for decades, and the mainland is where new subdivisions of this size can still be assembled.

The county ordinance that rezoned the land describes it as being at the terminus of Hendricks Road. The property appraiser lists the parcels against Karen Walk, Catalina Drive and Richard Drive, which are existing rural streets around the edges, not future subdivision streets. No addresses inside the property have been assigned.

The entitlement is finished, the land has changed hands at a real price, and clearing is visible from orbit. There is still no plat, no price and no sales office. Add your name and you will hear when that changes, and be registered as represented before your first visit.

The clearing, and what it does and does not prove

Something is happening on this land right now, and it is worth being precise about what can be seen and what cannot.

Public satellite imagery of the permitted boundary is solidly green through the end of August 2026. Vegetation readings across the whole tract stay where dense pine forest sits all summer. The first measurable change appears in the second week of September, about five weeks after the deed was recorded. By the middle of October a large share of the tract reads as bare or disturbed ground, and the change holds on later passes rather than washing out, which is how you tell real clearing from a hazy picture. Nearby woods and the neighbouring built-out subdivision got greener over the same weeks, so this is not weather and not a seasonal artefact. It is confined to this property.

Here is the honest limit. That imagery is ten metres to the pixel. It is good enough to say that a couple of hundred acres of canopy came off, and not good enough to resolve a road prism, a pond excavation or stockpiles. The most recent high-resolution aerial photography available for this site was flown in January 2026, eleven days after the environmental permit was issued, and it shows intact forest. There is, as of this writing, no detailed picture of what the ground looks like today.

The land is also assessed as timberland, and a pine clearcut and a mass grading operation look very similar from that altitude. We think the sensible reading is that this is the start of site work, because the clearing is inside the permitted boundary, it began weeks after a national homebuilder paid more than eighteen million dollars for entitled residential land, and the environmental permit authorising construction has been in hand since January. Part of that first pass may well be a merchantable timber harvest, which is a completely normal first step. What we will not do is tell you a street grid is in the ground when nobody has photographed it.

The lake, and what surrounds the property

There is a real lake here, which is more than you can say for a lot of communities with water in the name. It sits in the northern part of the tract, and the permitted boundary wraps around it rather than running straight past it. That shape is the reason this parcel assembly looks the way it does on a map, and it is the most likely source of whatever the community ends up being called.

For a buyer, an on-site lake cuts two ways and you should hear both. Water frontage is the premium product in almost every Florida subdivision, and the lots that back to it will be the first to go and the most expensive when they do. At the same time, a natural waterbody and the wetlands around it are regulated. The environmental permit governs what can be built near the water and how stormwater is handled before it leaves the site, which is why the permit file names the Nassau River as the eventual receiving water several miles downstream. Expect buffers, expect preserved areas, and expect that the developable acreage is meaningfully smaller than the 207 acres on the tax roll. Nobody has published how much smaller.

The neighbours are worth understanding too, because they are not alike. On the east and south the property adjoins an older rural subdivision platted in the 1980s, with large lots, long driveways, a mix of site-built and manufactured homes and plenty of tree cover. Two of the six parcels in this assembly are in fact lots out of that older plat, bought up and folded into the project. To the west, across the property line, is a modern built-out community with curving streets and stormwater ponds, the kind of density this project is likely to resemble more than it resembles its eastern neighbours.

That contrast is the thing to walk, if you ever get the chance to walk it. A 275-lot subdivision dropped between a 1980s rural plat and a modern production neighbourhood will feel like the second one, not the first. If what drew you to the area was the acre-lot, long-driveway character of the older streets nearby, this is not going to deliver that, and the lot sizes implied by 275 homes on a tract this size make that arithmetic plain even before a plat exists.

What was approved, and by whom

The approval chain here is unusually complete for a community with no plat, and it is worth walking through because it tells you how far along this is.

In 2023 the Nassau County commission adopted an ordinance rezoning roughly 206 acres from Open Rural to Residential Single Family 2. The application had been filed in 2022 by the land developer. That rezoning is final, effective and recorded, and it is what makes single-family houses possible here at all.

Alongside the rezoning the developer entered the first of three recorded public school concurrency agreements, reserving capacity for 275 single-family homes and committing to pay the school district a proportionate share for the elementary seats the project would consume. A second agreement covered 270 units. A third, executed in February 2026 and recorded that April, added five more and tied the reservation to a subdivision approval rather than a rezoning, which is the step that comes immediately before platting.

In mid-2025 the county commission vacated an unnamed, unimproved sixty-foot right-of-way running off Richard Drive at the developer's request. Clearing an old paper right-of-way off the title is the sort of housekeeping nobody does unless they intend to build.

In January 2026 the water management district issued an individual environmental resource permit for the project, covering the whole roughly 210-acre footprint, discharging eventually to the Nassau River, and running to 2031. The permit sits in its compliance stage, which is where a permit lives once it is issued and construction may proceed under it.

What is still missing is the plat. Until a plat is recorded there are no legal lots, no street names and no addresses, and the lot count, lot widths and layout can all still move.

One thing to be careful about

An owner of record is not an announced builder, and the distinction matters more here than usual because the owner is a name you will recognise.

Century Communities of Florida LLC bought all six parcels on August 7, 2026 for $18,733,900 in a recorded, qualified sale. The seller was Hidden Lake Properties, LLC, a single-purpose entity tied to a Jacksonville land development company that assembled the property over several years and carried it through the rezoning. The water management district permit has not been transferred and is still held by that seller entity, which is normal in the months after a closing and is also a reminder that the paperwork has not caught up with the deed.

Century is a publicly traded national homebuilder that sells homes to individual buyers, and it already operates a different community with a Fernandina Beach address called Concourse Crossing, which is a separate project on a separate site. Hidden Lake does not appear anywhere on Century's website, under that name or any other. Subdiview is not affiliated with Century Communities, is not endorsed by Century Communities, and is naming them here only because they are the owner shown in the county's property records.

Treat the owner on the deed as the party of record and nothing more. Builders buy entitled land and then build it, sell parts of it on, build only a phase, or launch it under a brand name with no relationship to the words in the county file. The name Hidden Lake comes from the permit and the ordinance. It is a working name, and working names very often do not survive to the entrance sign.

Living in mainland Nassau County

Nassau County is the northeastern corner of Florida, wedged between Jacksonville and the Georgia line, and it has been one of the faster-growing counties in the state. The county splits into three worlds: Amelia Island and the City of Fernandina Beach on the coast, the Yulee corridor on the mainland where most of the new rooftops have gone, and a large rural west end. This property sits in the second of those, close to the first.

Schools are run county-wide by the Nassau County School District, which serves roughly 11,900 students across sixteen traditional schools. This side of the county feeds the Yulee schools: Yulee Primary for the earliest grades, Yulee Elementary, Yulee Middle and Yulee High. The recorded concurrency file is candid about the pressure: the district found middle and high capacity available and elementary capacity short, which is precisely why the developer had to write a cheque per house before the county would certify concurrency. Zones get redrawn as subdivisions open, so confirm assignment directly with the district rather than trusting a listing.

On taxes, the county adopted a county-wide rate of 6.7457 mills for the 2025-26 year plus a 2.2087 mill levy on unincorporated property for municipal-type services, with school district and water management levies added on top. The Amelia Island beach renourishment levy, which island owners pay, does not reach the mainland here. Florida's homestead exemption and the Save Our Homes assessment cap apply once a home is owner-occupied and you qualify. Be careful reading the current tax bills on this land: it is still assessed as timberland under an agricultural classification, so the largest parcel shows a market value around $3.48 million against an assessed value around $87,000. That classification disappears as the land develops.

Insurance is the cost line that surprises people moving to this part of the state. Nassau County is coastal, and windstorm exposure drives premiums across the whole county. Being seven or eight miles inland rather than on the island genuinely helps: distance to open water is one of the inputs carriers price on, and mainland locations outside the highest wind zones usually quote better than oceanfront. Newer construction helps too, because a recently built home to current Florida building code tends to earn meaningful wind mitigation credits. None of that makes it cheap. Get a real quote on a specific plan and address before you commit, not a rule of thumb.

On flooding, FEMA's current mapping places this property outside the Special Flood Hazard Area, in an area of minimal flood hazard, which means a standard mortgage lender would not require flood insurance. That is the mapping as it stands today for the tract as a whole. There is a genuine lake on the property and wetlands around it, individual lots will not all read identically once they exist, and maps are revised. Pull the determination for your specific lot.

On work and the daily drive, mainland Nassau County is functionally a northern suburb of Jacksonville with a local economy of its own on top. Plenty of people here commute south into Jacksonville, where the deepest job base, the major hospitals, the international airport and the big-box and speciality retail all are. Closer to home, the Yulee corridor carries most of the county's newer shopping, medical offices and services. The island supports a substantial hospitality and resort workforce, the Port of Fernandina and the industrial plants at the north end of the island are long-standing employers, and the submarine base across the Georgia line is close enough to be a routine commute for some households. We are not going to publish precise drive times, because no address has been assigned here yet and any minute count would be invented precision. Drive the route you care about at the hour you would actually be driving it, and do it on a weekday.

Buying new construction, the smart way

Whoever ends up selling houses here, the same rule applies: the person at the model home desk works for the builder, not for you. They are usually helpful and usually honest, and they still sit on the seller's side of the table. You are allowed, and well advised, to have your own representation, and in almost every case it costs you nothing, because a cooperating commission is budgeted into the deal whether you bring someone or not.

The catch is timing. Most builders require your agent to register you on your very first visit. Tour the model alone, sign the visitor card, and bring an agent in later, and the builder can refuse to recognise them. You lose your representation for that community permanently. Get connected before you tour.

On a first-phase community like this one, the questions that earn their keep are about the things that are not finished. Ask what the builder's contract says about delays and what happens to your deposit and your rate lock if the delivery date slips. Ask whether the homesite you are choosing sits next to a stormwater pond, a lift station or a future phase, and ask to see where the next phase goes. Ask whether a community development district has been established since you read this page, and get the answer in writing. Ask what the HOA will cost and what it covers once the developer turns control over to the owners. Ask whether the lot has been filled and what the compaction report says. And read the addenda, because in a pre-construction contract the addenda are where the real terms live.

Deposits deserve their own paragraph. In Florida, a builder selling a home to be built generally has to hold the portion of your deposit above ten per cent of the purchase price in escrow until closing, unless specific statutory conditions are met that let the builder use it. That rule is real protection, and it is also narrower than most buyers assume, because the first ten per cent is not covered by it. Read the deposit and escrow language, ask who holds the money and in what account, and ask under exactly which circumstances it is refundable. A pre-construction purchase in a first phase is a long contract against an unbuilt house on an unplatted lot, and the people who get hurt are almost always the ones who assumed rather than asked.

One more pre-launch habit worth forming: write down the facts you were told verbally and when you were told them. In a community like this, where the plat is not recorded, the lot count can shift, the street layout can shift, the phase boundaries can shift and the community name itself can change. None of that is sinister, it is simply what happens between entitlement and opening day. But it does mean that the brochure you are shown at a first release is a snapshot, not a promise, and the contract is the only document that binds anyone.

Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any homebuilder, the developer, or Nassau County. No homebuilder has been announced for this community; Century Communities of Florida LLC is identified here because it is the owner shown in the county's published property records, which is a statement of fact about the public record 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. All community details on this page are compiled from public records, are targets rather than commitments, and are subject to change without notice.

Hidden Lake FAQ

Be first in line

Get on the Hidden Lake interest list

275 lots approved, the land sold to a national builder in August 2026, clearing under way since September, and still no plat, no street names and no price. The gap between a tract going quiet and a first release opening is usually where the best homesites and the most flexibility sit.

Joining costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship, and does not obligate you to anything. When you are ready, a real estate professional licensed in Florida will reach out and can register you as represented before your first visit to a sales office.