The Ranch at Rolling Hills, Green Cove Springs, Florida

At a glance

Homesites

About 29

Homesite size

Nearly one acre

Site size

About 40 acres

County

Clay County, unincorporated

Mailing city and ZIP

Green Cove Springs 32043

Area

Lake Asbury

Master plan

Rolling Hills

Zoning

Planned unit development

Builder

Pulte Homes

New street

Twisted Pine Trace

Second street

Forest View Lane

Home type

Single-family detached

Community development district

Inside an existing district

School district

Clay County District Schools

Homesite flood mapping

Mapped outside the special flood hazard area

Site work

Permitted

Pricing

Not yet released Get notified

Floor plans

Not yet released Get notified

District assessment amount

Not yet obtained Get notified

Homeowners association dues

Not yet released Get notified

Water and sewer servicing

Not yet confirmed Get notified

Recorded plat

Not yet recorded Get notified

Sales center

Not yet announced Get notified

First deliveries

Not yet announced Get notified

Details here are compiled from public entitlement and mapping records and are targets rather than commitments. Pricing, floor plans, phasing and timing have not been released publicly and are subject to change without notice.

What a near-acre homesite actually buys you

This is the whole story here, so it goes first. Roughly twenty-nine homesites across roughly forty gross acres is about one and a half gross acres each before streets, drainage and open space come out, consistent with the builder's own description of nearly one-acre homesites. Set that against the market. Most new construction in northeast Florida sits on lots forty, fifty or sixty feet wide, which is a quarter of an acre at the generous end and usually less. A near-acre homesite is a different category of thing.

What changes in practice is distance. On a fifty-foot lot the gap between your wall and your neighbour's is measured in feet and the rear yard ends before it starts. On something approaching an acre you get real side separation, a rear yard deep enough for a pool and a workshop with lawn left over, room for a side-entry garage or a boat parked out of sight, and the option of keeping mature trees rather than clearing to the setback lines. On wooded ground in this part of Clay County that last one matters: the canopy is why the older streets here feel the way they do, and bigger lots are how it survives construction.

The cost side is just as real and nobody at a sales desk opens with it. An acre of lawn is an acre you mow, irrigate and fertilise, and irrigation on that scale is a decision made before the slab is poured. If the servicing turns out to be well and septic rather than central utilities, the drainfield sits somewhere in that yard and is not negotiable afterwards. Large homesites also tend to carry large houses, because builders match product to land cost, so expect the eventual plan sheet to start higher than the same builder's standard-lot offering elsewhere in the county.

The scarcity is structural rather than fashionable. An acre per household only pencils where land is cheap enough, and within reasonable reach of Jacksonville that condition has been disappearing for a decade. Developers get more homes per acre of servicing cost out of narrow lots, so narrow lots are what gets built. A near-acre pod inside a master plan that already has its roads and its amenity centre is unusual precisely because land that could support one has mostly been subdivided more tightly already.

Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Pulte Homes. Pulte Homes and its community names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here for identification only. All community information is compiled from public records and is subject to change.

Where the project actually stands

Three things are on record. The first is an individual state environmental resource permit for the site work, issued in the spring of 2026 and past its review stage. The word individual matters: that is the full-review category of state stormwater permit, not a conceptual approval and not a pre-application, and it is the authorisation that lets earth move for the ponds, grading and drainage. The second is that Clay County has drawn a subdivision polygon for the project. The third is that the county assigned street addresses inside the property within days of that permit decision.

Here is the Clay County nuance that trips people up, and it cuts against the project rather than for it, so it is worth stating plainly. In Clay County, addressing happens at construction-plan approval, not when a plat records. Addresses existing on these two streets therefore tells you the engineering for the roads and utilities has been accepted. It does not tell you that individual lots exist. They do not yet.

No final plat has recorded on the records available. The property is still a single metes-and-bounds parcel with no lot descriptions, and a street-name search against the county parcel layer for the new street returns nothing. One caveat: a recording date has never been obtainable from the clerk's system in this research, so read it as not recorded on the records available rather than as impossible. No vertical construction is permitted either, and there is no model-home permit, which is what you would expect at the site-work stage rather than a warning sign.

On the retail side, the community is carried as coming soon with no starting price attached, no floor plans released and no sales centre hours. Pulte Homes owns the land, holds the state permit as the applicant and is the homebuilder, which is the full stack rather than a builder buying finished lots from someone else. One company therefore controls both when the lots are finished and what gets built on them, so a release schedule, when it appears, is one decision rather than two. Every date on this page is a target and subject to change.

The two streets

Twisted Pine Trace is the new street and carries the larger share, around twenty-two homesites. Forest View Lane is not new: it is an existing street in the surrounding Rolling Hills community, already lined with homes on older recorded plats, and the new pod extends it with around seven additional addresses at the far end. Keep that straight if you go looking, because searching Forest View Lane returns plenty of existing houses that have nothing to do with this project, while Twisted Pine Trace returns nothing at all yet.

The two streets will not feel identical. Forest View Lane homesites connect into an established neighbourhood with grown trees and finished landscaping. Twisted Pine Trace is the new run: a quieter street, and a longer wait for the mature look. Neither is better, but on a community this small that choice is most of the choice you get.

Street names and house numbers are usually locked when a plat records, and no plat has recorded here, so a homesite identified today by street and number can still move. Treat the two names as reliable and the numbering as provisional.

The cost stack: taxes, the district and dues

Start with the community development district, the item most likely to surprise you. A community development district is a special-purpose local government Florida law allows a developer to establish over a defined area. It issues bonds to pay for infrastructure such as roads, stormwater systems and amenities, and repays them through a non-ad-valorem assessment collected on your annual county tax bill, alongside an operations and maintenance charge for running what it owns. It is an obligation attached to the land, separate from your property tax and separate again from any homeowners association dues.

Every one of the planned homesites here sits inside an existing community development district covering the wider Rolling Hills area. That is not an inference and it is not read off a tax code, which cannot tell you whether a district exists. Each of the roughly twenty-nine residential addresses was tested individually against the county's own district mapping, and all of them fell inside the district boundary. The district is already established and already operating; permitted drainage works in the wider community were transferred into its care in 2024.

What we could not obtain, as of late October 2026, is the per-home annual assessment amount. The tax collector's system was not reachable during this research and no state filing for the district was retrieved, and we will not estimate a figure, because the range across Florida districts is wide enough that a guess would be worse than silence. Do this instead: ask in writing for the total annual district assessment on your specific homesite, how it splits between debt service and operations, and how many years of debt service remain.

On property tax, budget from what you will pay rather than from a published median. A new house is assessed on its completed value in the year it is finished, so the first full bill lands well above whatever the raw land generated and well above a county-wide median built from decades of older homes carrying accumulated assessment caps. Because this site is unincorporated you pay the county and school rates with no municipal rate on top, which is a real saving against an in-city address. Rates are set annually; this reflects the position as of late October 2026.

Then add association dues, which have not been published. A pod inside a larger master plan often carries two layers, a master association for the shared amenity set and a sub-association for the pod itself, so ask which structure applies here before you compare monthly payments against another community.

Flood, drainage and insurance

This one has two halves and flattening either of them would be dishonest, so here are both. All of the planned homesites are mapped outside the special flood hazard area, while portions of the larger parent parcel along the drainage corridor are mapped inside it, including a stretch mapped as floodway. Every one of the roughly twenty-nine residential address points was checked against the county's flood mapping individually, and all of them landed in the minimal-hazard mapping. The parcel centroid reads the same way.

That combination is a good sign rather than a worrying one. It says the wet edge of the property, the creek and wetland corridor, has been left as the wet edge and the buildable ground set back from it, which is consistent with a site carrying a full individual state stormwater permit. Practically, a lender is unlikely to require flood insurance on a homesite here, which is a real monthly difference, while the mapped floodway along the corridor is a hard constraint on what can ever be built near it. Maps get revised, so get the determination for your specific homesite in writing rather than relying on a community-level statement, this one included.

On homeowners insurance, Clay County is inland and well back from the ocean, which keeps it out of the worst of the coastal windstorm pressure behind the headlines about Florida premiums. It is still not cheap by national standards, because the whole state prices hurricane exposure. Pricing turns mostly on roof age, documented wind-mitigation features and construction type, which is the quiet advantage of buying new: a house built to current Florida code with a new roof and a complete mitigation report prices very differently from a nineteen-nineties house down the road. Get a real quote on the specific plan and homesite rather than working from an average, and keep flood as a separate line in that conversation.

Location, commute and the expressway question

Lake Asbury is the unincorporated middle of Clay County: established large-lot subdivisions and master plans off the county road corridor, between Middleburg to the west and the city of Green Cove Springs to the east. It is quiet and residential, and it is honest to say the daily-errand retail, the restaurants and the big-box shopping are a drive rather than a walk. The nearest concentration of all of it is Orange Park and the Fleming Island corridor to the north, which is also where much of the area's medical care sits.

For work, the orientation is north. Downtown Jacksonville is roughly thirty road miles away and Naval Air Station Jacksonville roughly twenty, both approximate rather than measured, and both are why a community like this exists here. The military and defence-contracting population around the air station is a large part of Clay County's housing demand, and the county has long been where a Jacksonville salary buys more land than Duval County does. Orange Park sits between and is the closer employment centre. Treat every drive time you are quoted as approximate.

The variable governing this whole corridor is the First Coast Expressway, the tolled state route being built as an outer beltway around the western and southern side of Jacksonville. What it already does is connect the Clay County corridor north toward Interstate 10 and the western side of the metro, a real improvement on the old route. What it does not yet do is reach Interstate 95 south of Jacksonville: the southern extension toward Green Cove Springs and across the river is a long-running project and it is not finished. We will not put a completion date on it, because the current construction status was not verified in this research. Test your own commute on the roads that exist today and treat any future improvement as upside rather than as part of the deal.

The city of Green Cove Springs, which supplies the mailing address, is east on the St. Johns River. It is the county seat, so the courthouse, the county offices, the riverfront and the fairgrounds are there. It is a short drive. It is still not where this land is.

Schools

Clay County District Schools serves the whole county, so the district is not in question. The specific schools are, and we would rather say so than guess. Attendance is assigned by address, these streets have only just been addressed, and the roads do not physically exist yet. Naming an elementary school for a house that cannot be found on a map is the most damaging thing a page like this can get wrong. Once your homesite has a real address, run it through the district's own locator, and if you are buying for a specific school make that a written condition of the contract. Zones are also redrawn as capacity opens, which in a growing county is not rare.

Buying new construction before a sales office opens

There is no sales centre here yet and no model home, so first contact will be a registration rather than a visit. An interest list is not a reservation, not a contract and not a place in a queue anybody owes you. What it gets you is notice: an email when pricing is published, when a homesite release is scheduled and when an opening date is set. On about twenty-nine homesites that notice is worth more than it would be on three hundred, because the first release is likely to be a large fraction of everything there is.

What it does not get you is a price, a lot hold or any protection from the terms changing. Nothing on a list binds anyone. Treat it as an alert, use the wait to get financing arranged and your questions written down, and arrive at the first release ready rather than researching.

The person at the desk in a builder's sales office works for the builder. They are usually helpful and usually pleasant, and they are also paid to represent the party on the other side of your contract. You are entitled to your own representation, and on new construction it generally costs you nothing extra, because builders budget for a buyer's agent whether or not you bring one.

The part that catches people is timing. Most builders will only recognise your agent if that agent is named at your very first visit or registration. Hand over your details with nobody on your side and in many cases you have given away the right to be represented for the rest of the transaction. Because first contact here is a form rather than a door, that mistake is unusually easy to make.

A pre-construction contract is also not a resale contract, and it is worth knowing where the negotiating room sits before you are in front of one. Deposit structure and when deposits go hard, specification allowances and what counts as an upgrade, what happens if the schedule slips, whether the price is locked against cost escalation, what the warranty covers and for how long, and whether you can bring your own inspector at frame stage and again before closing: those terms decide how it goes. On a near-acre homesite add two more. Ask what the builder will and will not do about tree retention on your lot, and get water, sewer and any drainfield placement in writing.

Other names this goes by

You will find this community under several names, which is why this page carries all of them. The retail brand is The Ranch at Rolling Hills. The county subdivision record and the state permitting record both carry it as Rolling Hills Ranch, which is also the name earlier coverage used. Searching Rolling Hills alone returns the wider Rolling Hills master-planned community this pod sits inside, an older and much larger neighbourhood with its own streets and amenity centre. People also search it as Lake Asbury new construction and by the mailing city, Green Cove Springs.

Two traps. A separate, unrelated Rolling Hills community in St. Augustine, over in St. Johns County, has been open and selling for years; press and listings about that one are not about this. And the wider Rolling Hills area in Clay County contains older recorded neighbourhoods with similar names and shared streets, so check the street before drawing a conclusion from a tax record or a sold comparable. Twisted Pine Trace belongs only to this project.

Questions