Selling now near Glen St. Mary, FL
Shoals Park Unit 4
23 acreage lots in unincorporated Baker County
The county publishes a six-authority millage total of 17.5328 that not one of its 13,031 parcels pays. The town nearest this subdivision levies no municipal tax at all, and the flat county charge attaches only once the house is finished, so every builder-held lot here pays nothing. The whole carrying cost is below.
- Area
- Baker County, FL
- Platted lots
- 23
- Standing homes
- 16
- Tax rate
- 13.6516 mills
At a glance
Shoals Park fast facts
Every figure below is read from the certified roll, the county's own published rate tables, its parcel and flood layers, the state corporate registry or the federal claim files. Where a number is not published we say so rather than filling the gap.
- Area
- Glen St. Mary, Baker County, unincorporated
- Size
- 23 lots on about 68 acres
- Standing homes
- 16, with one more under construction
- Builder-held
- Six lots, still selling
- Lot sizes
- Fourteen at one acre, eight at six to seven
- Tax rate here
- 13.6516 mills
- The county's published total
- 17.5328, paid by nobody
- Non-ad-valorem
- One charge, about $162 a year
- District charges
- None anywhere in the county
- In a flood zone
- None of the 23, by any of three methods
- Published school zones
- None, and grades six to twelve are countywide
- Homesteaded here
- Every standing home on the roll
- Association dues
- Ask before you contract
- Current pricing and lots left
- Ask before you contract
Not published yet
Not published yet
Location: see Shoals Park on the map. Figures carry the dates shown and are subject to change.
What this actually costs
A published county tax total that no parcel in the county pays
Start with the number a buyer will find first, because it is wrong for everybody. The county publishes six authorities that sum to 17.5328 mills. Zero of its 13,031 parcels pay that figure. Two of the six are water management districts that cannot both apply, one covering about 12,670 parcels and the other about 361, and the city millage in the list reaches only about 3,037. The highest total anyone actually pays in this county is 17.2516, and that is a city house. Every lot here pays 13.6516.
So the real bill is simple, which is unusual in Florida. Roughly $4,210 a year on the median house with homestead: about $4,048 of tax and a single flat charge of about $162.05 for county residential collection. No community development district, no water control district, no street lighting assessment, no separately itemised fire charge, nowhere in this county. That is a genuinely clean roll, and it is worth understanding why before you compare it to the communities an hour east.
Now the town comparison, which inverts twice. The incorporated town nearest this subdivision levies no municipal millage at all. A house inside its limits pays exactly the same 13.6516 as this one, and the state's own code table even labels that district as unincorporated. The county seat nine miles east is the one that costs money: about $869.85 a year more on the same house, roughly 20.7 per cent, and that is after the city house escapes the $162.05 collection charge entirely, which about 2,057 of its 2,061 homes do. Knowing which of those two lines you are on is how you buy here without leaving money on the table. Get pricing on what is left.
The break-even is worth carrying in your head if you shop lots as well as houses. The city's 3.6000 mills exactly equals that $162.05 flat charge at about $45,014 of taxable value. Above it the city is dearer, below it the city is cheaper. No finished house in this county is below the break-even, so for a home the assessment saving never wins. For a bare acre it does, which is the same inversion we have found in three other Florida counties this year.
Here is the mechanical detail behind that flat charge, and it is the one most people miss. It attaches to the dwelling unit, not the land. All nine lots the builder was holding paid exactly zero, including one assessed at $115,020, while every finished house paid $162.05. So a carrying-cost estimate built from what the builder currently pays on the lot next door will understate your first full year by that charge and by the entire improvement value.
There is also a reduced tier and it is not what it looks like. The reduced charge is $121.54, which is exactly 75 per cent of $162.05 for identical service, and four lots in this subdivision moved between the two tiers between roll years with no change of owner and no change of use. The county publishes no rate schedule for any of this: the tiers are reconstructable only by reading the roll. Ask which tier your address is in and why, in writing.
Finally the exemption, because the round number is wrong. The $50,000 homestead saves about $549.31 a year here, not the $682.58 the headline rate implies. The shortfall is $133.27, and it is exactly $25,000 at the 5.3250-mill school levy, which the second half of the exemption cannot touch. School is 39 per cent of the total rate in this district, so that gap is larger here than in most of Florida.
So ask four things in writing before you contract: which collection tier the address falls in and what triggers a move between them; whether any association exists here at all, what it charges and whether common ground was ever conveyed; the school assignment confirmed with the district, since for two of the three levels the answer is the whole county; and a complete November bill for a finished house on this street rather than a builder's vacant-lot bill.
What almost nobody checks
The town next door has no federal flood number, and the county's two flood layers disagree by 342 parcels
Take the flood answer for this subdivision first, because it is clean. Zero of the 23 lots are in a mapped high-hazard area, whether you count any overlap, the centre of the lot, or majority of lot area. All three methods agree. We checked it is a real zero rather than a broken query two ways: the county layer that flags exposed parcels returns about 1,586 of them county-wide and none here, and an envelope that is a strict superset of every lot returns only two polygons, neither of them high hazard.
Then the caveat that sits right on the property line. The shaded 500-year band is a creek corridor of about 83 acres running roughly three miles east to west, and its southern edge intersects the north side of this subdivision's envelope. Neither of the county's two parcel-level flood products flags a single lot here as being in it. So the band touches the block and the parcel data reports the block as clean. That is not a contradiction so much as a resolution problem, and it is the sort of thing worth asking a surveyor about on a specific lot rather than accepting from a county map.
The county's flood publishing has a straightforward internal disagreement. One county layer flags 1,586 parcels as exposed. Another flags 1,244. The gap is 342 parcels, about 27.5 per cent. Both are official, both are current, and a buyer who checks one and not the other gets a materially different answer for about one parcel in forty county-wide.
Underneath all of it the map is old. The effective flood map for this county dates from 2008, so it is eighteen years old, and the county's community rating class confers a zero per cent discount despite carrying a rating effective date. We could not retrieve the letter of map amendment or revision record for this area because the federal map service refuses automated reading, so treat that as not retrievable rather than as a clean zero.
And here is the finding that surprised us most. The incorporated town nearest this subdivision has no federal flood insurance community identifier at all. The status book lists the county and the city nine miles east, and nothing for the town. That is in a county whose postcode covering this area has filed 40 paid federal flood claims. What it means practically is that a buyer inside that town's limits, which is not this subdivision, may find flood insurance harder to place than the map alone would suggest. Worth knowing if you shop a second address a few miles south.
One more number on where losses actually happen. Of the 95 paid federal flood claims in this county, about 20, or 21.1 per cent, were rated outside the high-hazard area entirely. Roughly one paid claim in five came from a property that was never required to carry the cover. This subdivision is one of those properties by every measurement we can run, which is an argument for pricing flood cover rather than skipping it, not against.
On wind there is nothing published. The county's mapping organisation publishes 143 separate feature services, covering parcels, zoning, roads, voting precincts, evacuation zones, fire districts, trails and sandbag sites, and not one of them carries a design wind speed, a wind-borne debris region or an exposure category. We assert no design wind speed on this page. Get the number from the sealed plans.
The practical version: the flood answer for these lots is as clean as Florida gets and every method agrees on it. What is not clean is the county's publishing around it, and the fact that a fifth of this county's paid claims came from outside the mandated zone. Price the cover, ask about pad elevation against the crown of the road, and treat the 500-year corridor along the north side as a question for a surveyor on your specific lot.
Six lots left with a local builder
On a roll where the builder's lots pay no assessment and yours will.
The record
The builder is spelled three ways on one roll, and five deeds stamp one price across a hundred parcels
Prices here have gone one direction, which is worth stating plainly because it is rare in the rural counties we have covered this year. Builder sales in this subdivision ran from about $398,300 and $425,000 in one year to $694,000, $495,000 and $709,000 in the two years since. Owner resales in between have landed around $682,000, $679,000 and $435,000. The spread reflects lot size more than timing: fourteen of the 23 lots are one acre and eight are six to seven acres, so two houses in this subdivision are not comparable without knowing which lot they sit on.
The land itself moved very differently by size, which is the clearest signal on the roll. Across two roll years the one-acre lots rose 0.2 per cent and the six-and-a-half-acre lots rose 26.8 per cent, with homesteaded houses up 4.4 to 6.5 per cent. That is more than a hundredfold spread in appreciation inside 68 acres. If acreage is what you are buying, the assessment record says the market agrees with you.
Now the roll hygiene, because it decides whether any of the usual checks work here. The builder's name appears three different ways on the same roll, three lots under each spelling, so an exact-name search returns three of the nine lots it held, or 33 per cent. The largest single owner in the whole county holds 89 parcels under six different spellings of one name. A rental company holds 14 under three. Any statement about who owns what in this county that comes from a name search is a floor, not an answer.
The same problem hides the biggest builder in the county behind a brand screen. The most active homebuilder here, with 47 lot purchases and 56 home sales, files under an initialism that contains none of the letters of its consumer-facing brand. A buyer screening for that national brand across this county gets zero results and concludes it is not here. It is here, and it built the largest recent subdivision in the county seat. This subdivision is not one of its projects.
Sales data has its own trap. Five blanket deeds in this county stamp a single price across 27, 26, 21, 18 and 10 parcels at once, and about 41 of the 580 recorded sales in one roll year are really two instruments. Any median price series built from the roll's sale field is measuring paperwork. The figures in this section come from individual builder-to-buyer conveyances only.
One data curiosity worth naming because it distorts county totals. The non-ad-valorem field on this roll is stored as text rather than a number, and six records read as $18,700 with no decimal point, which between them account for about 8 per cent of the county's entire non-ad-valorem column. None of them is in this subdivision. It does mean that a county-level average of what Floridians pay in assessments, computed from this file, is off by a material margin.
What to ask for that is not published: the collection tier for the specific address and what moves a parcel between tiers; whether an association exists, its dues and its budget; the elementary assignment confirmed with the district office, since no boundary geometry is published anywhere; the sealed plan's design wind speed; and a complete November bill for a finished house here rather than a builder's vacant-lot bill.
The area
Five thousand storm registrations, a mean inspected loss under fifteen hundred dollars
This is an inland county about half an hour west of Jacksonville on the interstate, and its storm record reads accordingly. The county has filed about 5,077 federal assistance registrations across all declared events, of which about 2,880, or 56.7 per cent of everything ever, came from the 2017 hurricane alone. The 2024 hurricanes produced about 979 and about 241. The postcode covering this subdivision accounts for about 1,459 of the county total.
The inspected damage behind those registrations is small. Sampling the 2017 event, the mean federally verified loss to the house among inspected registrations was about $1,454.81 and the median about $499.50, with fewer than three per cent flagged as flood damage at all. The mean payment to households that received anything was about $1,189.59. That is a wind, tree and outage profile, not a structural loss profile, and it is what being fifty miles from open water buys you.
On schools, the answer here is unusual and it simplifies your search considerably. The county runs one middle school and one high school, and both are countywide. For grades six through twelve the attendance boundary is the county line. Pre-kindergarten is countywide too. Only the three elementary schools are zoned, and their zone lines exist nowhere as published geometry.
That elementary gap is complete. The county's 143 published mapping services include none for school attendance boundaries, and the only national product has a final vintage of the 2015-16 school year, which predates the district's current three-school elementary configuration. So the elementary assignment for an address here is a district-office answer and nothing else. We assert no school assignment on this page; confirm yours with the district before you contract.
On who owns the housing stock, the answer is about as unconcentrated as Florida gets. Across about 5,047 improved single-family parcels county-wide, corporate owners of any kind hold about 3.5 per cent and out-of-state mailing addresses account for about 1.7 per cent. Every branded institutional rental operator we screened for returns zero except one national iBuyer with a single parcel. The largest corporate holder of finished houses in the county holds 14.
Those zeros are checked rather than assumed. The same screen positively identifies two corporate buyers that are genuinely active here, so the query works and the institutional zeros are real. What we could not complete this session was the multi-county control, because the statewide parcel service refused every request. So read the institutional zero as verified inside this county and unverified as a claim about the western Jacksonville commuter shed as a whole.
Every standing house in this subdivision carries homestead. Thirteen of thirteen improved parcels on the certified roll are homesteaded, with no rentals, no institutional owners and no non-homestead resident-occupied houses. For a 23-lot acreage subdivision half an hour from a major employment market, that is an owner-occupancy rate you rarely see, and it is the single best thing on this page about what living here is actually like.
What you need to know
Buying new construction with someone on your side
Representation costs you nothing and the timing is the catch: your agent generally has to be with you or named at your first visit for the registration to stand. Sort it out before you walk in, not after.
With a small local builder the reason to have someone is different from the reason at a national. There is no corporate contract addendum library, no standard incentive sheet and no regional sales manager. What there is instead is a builder four and a half miles up the road with six lots left, which is a very different negotiation. The terms are more negotiable and the paperwork is thinner, and both of those cut in both directions.
Practically, that means somebody should be reading the contract for what is missing rather than what is in it. Ask specifically about the warranty: who administers it, whether it is a third-party policy or the builder's own promise, what happens to it if the corporation is dissolved, and whether it transfers on resale. On a single-county corporation those questions matter more than they would elsewhere.
Two things on this roll are worth an agent's time specifically. Every builder-held lot here pays zero non-ad-valorem while every finished house pays about $162.05, and four lots in this subdivision changed collection tier between roll years with no change of owner or use. Neither is discoverable from a listing. Both change your first full year's bill, and both are answerable by a phone call somebody else can make. 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, again at final walkthrough, and once more before the one-year warranty expires. Since this county publishes no wind data at all, ask the builder in writing what design wind speed and opening protection the plans are sealed to, and ask your insurer what the mitigation credit is worth. Given that a fifth of this county's paid flood claims came from outside the mandated zone, price flood cover rather than skipping it. On acreage lots, ask about the well and septic, the drainfield location and whether the soil evaluation is on file. Read the limited warranty booklet before you sign.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by B.A.R. Construction, any homebuilder, any developer of Shoals Park, or Baker 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
Shoals Park FAQ
What is Shoals Park Unit 4?
It is a 23-lot acreage subdivision on about 68 acres in unincorporated Baker County, roughly five miles north of the town of Glen St. Mary and about half an hour west of Jacksonville on the interstate. Fourteen lots are an acre, one is a little over two, and eight run from six to just over seven acres. Sixteen houses are standing, one lot conveyed recently with no structure on the roll yet, and six lots remain with the builder. The builder is a local corporation whose registered office is about four and a half road miles from the subdivision.
What does it cost to own here each year?
On the median house, at about $336,778 of just value with homestead granted, roughly $4,210 all in: about $4,048 of property tax at 13.6516 mills, plus a single flat charge of about $162.05 for county residential collection. There is no community development district, no water control district, no street lighting assessment and no separately itemised fire charge anywhere in this county. Without homestead the same house runs about $4,760.
The county publishes a total millage. Is that what I would pay?
No, and this is the sharpest finding on the page. The county lists six authorities that sum to 17.5328 mills. Not one of the county's 13,031 parcels pays that. Two of the six are water management districts that are mutually exclusive, one covering about 12,670 parcels and the other about 361, and the city millage in the list reaches only about 3,037 parcels. The highest figure anyone in this county actually pays is 17.2516, and that is a city parcel. Every lot in this subdivision pays 13.6516.
Is it cheaper here than in town?
For a house, yes, by a wide margin. The city about nine miles east costs about $869.85 a year more on the same $336,778 homesteaded house, or about 20.7 per cent, and that is after the city house escapes the $162.05 county collection charge entirely. The break-even taxable value where the city's 3.6000 mills exactly equals that flat charge is about $45,014. Any finished house is far above that, so the assessment saving never wins for a home. It does win for a bare lot. Worth knowing too that the incorporated town nearest this subdivision levies no municipal millage at all, so a house inside its limits pays exactly the same 13.6516 as this one.
Is it in a flood zone?
No, and all three measurement methods agree. Counting any overlap, the centre of the lot, or majority of lot area, zero of the 23 parcels touch a mapped high-hazard area. We proved it is a real zero rather than a broken query: the county layer that flags exposed parcels returns about 1,586 of them county-wide and none here, and a bounding envelope that is a strict superset of every lot returns only two polygons, neither of them a high-hazard zone. The caveat is next.
So what is the flood caveat?
Three things. First, the shaded 500-year band, an eighty-odd acre creek corridor running east to west, touches the north side of the subdivision's envelope, and neither of the county's parcel-level flood products flags a single lot here as being in it. Second, the effective flood map for this county is eighteen years old and the county's own two flood parcel layers disagree with each other by 342 parcels, about 27.5 per cent. Third, about 21 per cent of this county's 95 paid federal flood claims were rated outside the high-hazard area entirely. Flood cover outside a mandated zone is usually inexpensive here and worth pricing rather than assuming away.
Before you walk into a sales office
Get your inside track on Shoals Park
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 collection tier the address falls in, whether an association exists and what it charges, the elementary assignment confirmed with the district, the sealed plan's design wind speed, the well and septic documentation on an acreage lot, and what this builder will actually give on the six lots it has left.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.