RD Ranch

Running Dog. This is our favourite thing on this page and nobody else will tell you, because it takes a trip through the deed record to find. The land the builder bought in the summer of 2022 was Running Dog Ranch, a greyhound and bird-dog property on State Road 52, and that company is a grantor of record on one of the three deeds that transferred the ranch. The builder's own coming-soon copy gestures at it, describing land once known for its sprinting hounds and flocking quail, but it never actually spells the two letters out. Separately, the land's zoning instrument carries a completely different name, Swope, which is the family and company name behind the other parcels that made up the ranch, and the county's own 2026 filings now fuse the two into a single hybrid name. So if you go looking for this project in public records, you need all three names: the marketing name, the ranch name and the zoning name. That is exactly why a project like this is hard to find and easy to lose track of.

Approved, yes, twice over on instruments that each stand alone, and further along in the dirt than on paper. The county commission adopted the planned development rezoning for this land in the spring of 2022, and that entitlement runs to 2042. The county then issued a mass grading permit covering about four hundred and thirty-one acres in the summer of 2023, which authorises selective clearing and earthwork, specifically the excavation of ponds and the placement of fill in the areas planned for homes. A preliminary site plan for the community's amenity centre was approved in the summer of 2024, and the access and right-of-way approvals for the grading and the amenity work are either complete or formally exempt. So the dirt is permitted and has been moving for three years. What has not happened is everything downstream of that: no plat has recorded, no street has a name, no address has been assigned, no building permit of any kind exists, and no price has been released. Two subdivision construction plans are on file for the first phases and neither is approved yet. The newest filing, for the main spine roads through the site, was only submitted in October 2026.

Both halves of that question have surprising answers, and the second one corrects something we had wrong ourselves. Lennar is the homebuilder and developer of record. That is not a claim we take from a marketing page: Lennar is named as the developer on the county filings for both residential phases and as both applicant and developer on the 2026 spine road filing, one subdivision plan is submitted in terms on Lennar's behalf, and a 2026 county application is literally titled with Lennar's name attached to the zoning district. Lennar also took fee title to the ranch itself through three deeds in the summer of 2022. But Lennar does not own the land today. Six weeks after buying it, Lennar sold the land to a pair of land-banking entities funded by an investment platform based in Washington, under option agreements that ran back to Lennar. In the summer of 2024 the land moved again, to a land investment fund based on Fifth Avenue in New York, with a fresh development option recorded to Lennar the same day and amended as recently as June 2026. So the honest answer to who owns RD Ranch is a Manhattan land fund, while the builder holds a recorded option to take the lots down as it needs them. This is now standard practice among the large national builders and it is not a warning sign. It does mean the land can change hands again, and that the timing of construction is driven by a takedown schedule rather than by a builder sitting on its own balance sheet. None of which appears on any brochure.

No to both, and we tested the plat question harder than we test most things because it is the single claim most often got wrong. The county clerk maintains a plat index that works geographically, by land section, which makes it a genuine spatial test rather than a name search. We ran both land sections this site occupies, for both subdivision plats and condominium plats, and all four came back with no records. Then we ran live controls in the same session: three other nearby sections returned nine plats, a Connerton phase and an Asbel Creek phase respectively, so the index answers for this area and the zero is real rather than a dead filter. We also ran name searches on both the marketing name and the zoning name across both plat types, with a control that returned nearly two hundred rows, and checked the official records plat index directly. Nothing. The neighbouring sections are also empty, which tells you something true about this place: it is raw ranch country. The consequence is that there are no lots, no lot numbers and no street names anywhere in the public record. There are exactly two addresses on the whole property, both legacy ranch driveways off the highway dating from the 1990s, and the county has created no new address points at all, in an addressing system we confirmed is live and current. So the usual thing we offer at this stage, the street names nobody else has, does not exist here yet.

Single-family detached homes and attached townhomes, both already entitled, with about four hundred and fifty-eight units in the plans filed so far. That breaks down as three hundred and ten detached homesites on about a hundred and twelve acres in the first phase, and a further hundred and forty-eight units of detached and townhome product on about a hundred and fifty acres in another. Those are county filings rather than marketing, which matters. We can also tell you the product mix is moving: a 2026 modification to the zoning district asks to add a rear-loaded detached product alongside the front-loaded detached and attached products the district already permits, which lines up with the builder's own description of a townhome and single-family community. What we could not find is the total number of homes the district actually allows. The rezoning record gives acreage but no unit cap, the 2026 modification leaves its housing-types field blank, and we could not locate the adopting ordinance document. So treat four hundred and fifty-eight as the number in filed plans and not as the ceiling. For scale, the graded area is about four hundred and thirty-one acres, the zoning district covers about four hundred and ninety-three, and the 2026 road filing describes a master plan of about six hundred and nine acres spanning two entitlements. This is a large project by any measure. Nothing in any record restricts it by age.

Correct, and we rechecked it specifically rather than relying on an earlier read, because that is the single fact that would make this page worthless. The builder has a community page up, and it is a bare coming-soon page: a paragraph of copy about the ranching heritage and an interest-list form, and that is all. No price, no price range, no floor plans, no plan names, no sales office address, no opening hours, no move-in-ready inventory and no community map. We also checked whether the community appears on the builder's main regional list of communities, and it does not, which tells you it is not yet on their sellable roster and exists only on a standalone promotional link. A major third-party new-home listing service carries forty-one of that builder's communities in this county with starting prices attached, and this is not one of them. We found no listing on any of four major portals, and no home here can have sold because no lot legally exists. One caveat on how to read all that, which cuts in our favour: a coming-soon page with no price is not evidence that the opportunity has passed. It is the opposite. What would close this window is published pricing, an open sales centre or a model, and none of those exists today.

We believe so, and we are going to show you our reasoning rather than just assert it, because this is where pages like this most often go wrong. A large builder with townhome product on a big tract is exactly the shape a build-to-rent project takes in this county. The evidence for for-sale is good: the first-phase county filing describes three hundred and ten single-family detached home sites and is filed as subdivision construction plans, which is the paperwork for creating individually saleable lots, and it is submitted by name on the builder's behalf. The second phase is filed as a subdivision of single-family and townhome units. The zoning modification describes products in for-sale terms. The builder entity named throughout is the same corporate entity that appears as seller on that builder's ordinary retail home closings in this county, not one of the separate rental arms the big builders use. And the interest-list page routes to mortgage pre-qualification, which is a buyer funnel and not a leasing one. We also checked for every rental and build-to-rent operator name that has turned up in this county before, and none of them appears anywhere on this project. Here is the honest limitation: the two strongest proofs of for-sale intent are a recorded plat creating saleable lots, or a recorded condominium declaration, and neither exists yet. We tested for a condominium filing specifically and found none. So we are calling this for-sale on strong secondary evidence and telling you plainly that the plat-level proof is still ahead of it.

Mostly no, and the detail is worth having because the county's recent flood history is dramatic and almost all of it happened somewhere else. We queried the federal flood mapping across the whole of the zoning district's parcels rather than at a single point, and the picture is a split: the great majority of the land is mapped outside the special flood hazard area, in the category described as minimal hazard, with mapped hazard area running along the internal drainage, including some areas carrying published base flood elevations in the mid sixties to mid seventies of feet. The centre of the site is mapped outside the hazard area. The county's own parcel records corroborate that split with acreages, and record no evacuation zone for this land at all. That last point matters more than it sounds. This county's flood claims record runs to more than fourteen thousand claims, and the concentration is extraordinary: the single month of September 2024 accounts for about four thousand two hundred and seventy claims, which is twenty-nine per cent of every claim ever recorded in the county, while the 2024 calendar year accounts for about four thousand nine hundred, or thirty-four per cent. We give you both figures separately because they are different numbers and quoting one as the other overstates things. Through the current data freeze, 2026 shows eight claims and 2025 shows sixteen. Almost all of that 2024 damage landed on the coastal west side of the county. This site is inland, better than twenty-five miles from the Gulf, outside the evacuation zones, with the buildable ground mapped outside the hazard area. Still get a determination for your actual lot once lots exist, because the grading permit here is explicitly about excavating ponds and placing fill, which moves water around by design.

Probably, and there is no record of one yet, and we want to be careful to say exactly that and nothing stronger. We searched the county official records index under both the marketing name and the zoning name, searched the county permit and planning record set, and searched the web, and found no district instrument for this community. We also tried the state's own registry of special districts and the page returns an error, so we could not check the authoritative list. The adjacent large master community does have its own district, and it would be a mistake to attribute that one to this project. Why we say probably: this builder's pattern in this county is to establish a district before sales begin, and a four-hundred-acre project with spine roads, ponds and utilities to fund is exactly what districts are created to finance. So the sensible expectation is that a district assessment will exist by the time homes are sold here, and the honest statement of fact today is that none is on record. This is a question to ask before you sign anything, and to ask in a specific way: not whether there is a district, but what the assessment per home will be, over how many years, and whether it is already in place or still to be created. A district assessment is a second line on a Florida tax bill, commonly for twenty to thirty years, and it is the most common unpleasant surprise in Florida new construction.

The bill will be levied by the county, the school board and the regional water management basin, and we are not going to publish a rate because we did not verify the current adopted ones. What we can usefully explain is a mechanic that catches almost everybody on a project like this. These parcels today carry agricultural and vacant land classifications, because this is still a working ranch landscape, and those classifications keep assessed values very low. They will be lost as the land is developed. That means the tax history of this land tells you nothing at all about what a finished home here will cost to own, and anyone quoting you the current taxes on the parcel is quoting a farm. Add to that the standard Florida timing trap: a finished home is assessed as of the first of January following completion, so your first full-year bill is the first year the house itself appears on the roll rather than bare land, and it routinely arrives higher than people expect. Florida's additional homestead exemption is set statewide by Florida law rather than by this county, and applies only from the January after you establish residency. If a district assessment is created here, as we expect, that will sit on top of all of the above.

The site fronts State Road 52 on its north side, at Ehren Cutoff, which is how the county's own road filing describes it. The practical geography: Land O' Lakes proper is about seven and a half miles south, Wesley Chapel and the State Road 54 corridor about nine miles south-east, Dade City about twelve and a half miles east, and both Tampa International Airport and downtown Tampa about twenty-five miles south in a straight line. On the two things a commuter actually cares about, we are giving you approximations and labelling them as such: the interstate interchange at State Road 52 is roughly three miles east, and the Suncoast Parkway interchange at State Road 52 is roughly seven miles west. State Road 52 itself has been substantially widened across this part of the county, which is the reason land here is being entitled at this scale at all. Two toll and interstate options in opposite directions off a widened arterial is a genuinely good position for central Pasco, and it is the core of the location case. The honest counterweight is that twenty-five miles to Tampa is a long commute whatever the road quality, this is a car-dependent part of the state with no rail option, and the Parkway is a toll road, so budget for it. Immediately to the south-west is a very large established master community with its own district, and the parcel adjoining this one in the same land section is held by the same land fund, so expect this corner of the county to keep building out for years.

A graded ranch. Three years of permitted earthwork means ponds have been cut and fill has been placed across the areas planned for homes, but there are no paved streets with names, no utilities you could point at as finished, no model, no sales trailer and no amenity building, even though the amenity centre's site plan was approved back in 2024 and no building permit ever followed it. There is one genuinely interesting physical feature worth knowing about: an abandoned Seaboard Coast Line railroad right of way of about fifteen acres runs across the property, and one of the main parcels is legally described in relation to it, with an easement alongside it for access. Old rail corridors sometimes become trails and sometimes become roads, and either way it is a real, checkable feature that will shape the layout. One more oddity from the records that nobody advertises: the future land use designation on this land reads as an employment centre, which means residential product is being planned on a land use category intended for jobs, inside an approved planned development that permits it. That is not improper and it is common in large Florida districts, but it is worth understanding that the long-term plan for this corner of the county anticipates commercial and employment uses nearby, not just houses.

This site is served by the Pasco County School District, which runs countywide, and we are deliberately not naming individual schools. On this community that is not caution, it is arithmetic: attendance assignment follows a specific address, and there is no address here. The county has created no new address points for this project, there is no plat, and there are no lot numbers, so there is nothing to run through an assignment tool. There is an elementary school about four miles south-west in the neighbouring master community, and we mention it only as a landmark for orientation and not as an assignment, because assuming it would be a genuine error. This is also an area where the district is actively adding capacity as these large districts build out, which is exactly the circumstance in which boundaries get redrawn. Use the district's own locator once your address exists, and get the answer in writing before you sign anything.

Several things, and the most important one is a permit we deliberately refuse to characterise. The regional water management district's environmental resource permit for this site is the one approval we could not read. Every one of the district's mapping services, across two separate servers, answered every single request with a server-side failure for the whole time we were working, including the bare service address and a control query designed to return nothing but a count, across eleven attempts over about twenty-five minutes, while the district's main website answered normally throughout. So this is the district's own systems failing, not a wrong address on our part. Their permit search form does answer, but it is the kind of form our tools cannot submit. We did reach a document index for the two relevant applications, and both document trails run from late 2023 through to late June 2026, which is consistent with permits being issued shortly afterwards but is not proof of it. So the honest statement is that we could not retrieve the status, which is a completely different thing from the permit being merely applied for, and we are not going to let the second masquerade as the first. It does not change the approval picture, because the adopted rezoning and the issued county grading permit each settle that independently. Beyond that: we could not establish the total number of homes the district allows, any street names, any district assessment, whether the amenity building has been built, the contents of one recorded notice, or one of the two entitlement numbers cited on the 2026 road filing. And we have no recent aerial imagery, so our picture of the current state of the dirt comes from the permit record rather than from looking at it.

Because on this community the gap between the dirt and the paperwork is unusually wide, and that gap is where the decisions get made. Grading has been permitted and running for three years, but the first phase construction plan has sat in revision since 2023, the spine roads were only applied for in October 2026, and no plat has ever recorded. When those three things resolve, they resolve quickly and in a bundle: the plat records, the lot dimensions and street names appear with it, addresses get assigned, a district may be created, a model gets permitted, and a price list follows. On a project of four hundred and fifty-eight or more homes the first releases are the ones with the best lots relative to the eventual build-out. Joining a list now costs nothing, puts no deposit at risk and creates no obligation. What it does is put you in front of a real estate professional licensed in Florida who represents you rather than the seller, before you ever put your own name on a builder's registration form, which is the one step in this process that is genuinely hard to undo afterwards.