Lecanto Preserve, Lecanto, Florida

At a glance

Homes in the first phase

281 platted lots on about 105 acres

Master plan

Roughly 800 to 850 homes planned overall

Builder

D.R. Horton

Community

Lecanto, unincorporated Citrus County

Site status

First homes under building permit

Water and sewer

Central county water, sewer and reuse

Streets

Private, maintained by the community

District assessment

Expected, roughly 1,000 to 1,300 dollars a year

Pricing

Not yet released Get notified

Floor plans

One plan shown, no sizes or prices released Get notified

Sales center

Permitted, not yet open Get notified

Homeowners association dues

Not yet released Get notified

Details on this page are compiled from public entitlement records and are targets, not commitments. Pricing, floor plans, home counts, and timing have not been released by the builder and are subject to change without notice.

About the community

The first phase is the firm part: a final plat approved in the middle of 2026 creating 281 lots on roughly 105 acres. Nine streets are named and carry assigned addresses, among them Lecanto Preserve Drive, Soaring Eagle Loop, Mourning Dove Loop, Black Bear Loop, Deer Path Lane, Night Owl Lane, Jay Bird Lane, Cardinal Hill Lane and Falcon Path Lane. If you have been driving past wondering what is going in, those are the roads being cut.

Beyond that first phase, this is a phased master plan rather than a single subdivision. Its district boundary covers a little over 200 acres, and the planning documents contemplate somewhere in the region of 800 to 850 homes across the whole thing over time, a mix of single-family and townhomes, with a retail parcel of about thirty acres. We publish the phase numbers as firm and the master numbers as a range, because that is honestly what the records support. One figure to actively disbelieve: a county data field lists this project at nearly 1,500 acres. It is not. The mapped footprint is a small fraction of that and the same record contradicts itself, so the number is almost certainly a typing error. It has circulated, so it is worth naming and dismissing.

The structure behind the community is worth understanding because it affects who you are actually dealing with. A development company owns the land, obtained the approvals and is installing the roads, drainage and utilities. It is then selling finished lots to D.R. Horton in a series of takedowns, and D.R. Horton is the homebuilder that will market and construct the houses for sale to buyers. So the name on the public record is not the name that will be on the sign, which is why this community has been quiet in search results while physically getting built.

On the ground, the honest status is early vertical. The first two dozen houses are under building permit, issued from late summer into the middle of October 2026, on Deer Path, Soaring Eagle and Night Owl. None has been completed. A temporary model home with a sales office has been permitted on Falcon Path Lane and is not open. So if you drive out there you will see roads, utilities and the beginnings of framing, and no sales trailer to walk into yet.

Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by D.R. Horton. D.R. Horton 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.

Location and what is actually nearby

Lecanto is unincorporated Citrus County, the inland middle of the Nature Coast, sitting between Crystal River on the Gulf side and Inverness on the lake side. The community fronts the band between the main east-west state road, a short distance north, and the county highway immediately to the east. That county highway has just been widened to four lanes divided along the stretch nearest here, finished at the start of 2026, which is the single most relevant piece of infrastructure news for anyone buying: traffic counts on these two roads have risen roughly ten to twenty percent over the past decade and the widening is the county getting ahead of it.

What Citrus County is actually for is the water. Crystal River and Kings Bay, about fifteen minutes west, are the only place in the United States where you can legally swim with manatees, and several hundred of them winter in the spring-fed bay. Three Sisters Springs is the postcard. Homosassa Springs is south. Fort Island Gulf Beach is the local beach, out at the end of a causeway through salt marsh. Inland, the Withlacoochee State Trail runs nearly fifty miles of paved rail-trail, and the Withlacoochee State Forest is one of the largest in Florida. This is a county people retire to and a county people fish in, and it has stayed far cheaper than the Gulf coast an hour south.

The practical trade-offs are real and worth saying. There is no interstate. The Suncoast Parkway extension has brought Tampa within reach but it is a toll road and it is still a long commute. Everyday shopping is in Crystal River or along the main corridor, hospital care is in the county, and anything specialist means Ocala, about an hour north-east, or Tampa. If you want urban amenity on your doorstep, this is not the place. If you want five acres of state forest and a spring run on your weekend, it is hard to beat for the money.

What it will cost beyond the mortgage

The district assessment, which is the big one. This community has its own development district, created in 2024, which issued bonds to pay for the roads, drainage and utilities. You repay a share of those bonds every year on top of your property tax bill, typically for about thirty years. On the preliminary bond figures the annual installment works out at roughly 1,043 dollars for a forty-foot lot and roughly 1,304 dollars for a fifty-foot lot, with the first phase split about 85 of the narrower lots to 195 of the wider ones. Those figures come from a draft official statement, so they are subject to change before the bonds are finalised, and there is usually a separate smaller annual charge for operating and maintaining the district on top. Nobody is hiding this, but nobody volunteers it either, and over thirty years it is one of the largest numbers in the whole decision. Ask for the current figure in writing for your specific lot width.

Worth knowing how we established this, because the obvious method does not work. A Florida district assessment is not an ad-valorem tax and never appears in a property's tax code, so the county tax-code list shows no district here at all. The district is real regardless. Anyone who tells you a Florida community has no district fee because of what a tax code says has checked the wrong thing.

Property tax. The total rate for unincorporated Citrus County came to about 14.83 mills in the 2025 tax year, of which roughly 5.35 is schools and the rest is county and other levies. That is a middling Florida rate, and there is no city line because this is unincorporated. The 2026 final rates were not published when this page was written. Florida's homestead exemption, set statewide by Florida law and the state constitution rather than by any county, shelters 51,411 dollars of assessed value on a primary residence.

Private streets. The roads inside the community are private rather than county-maintained. The county will not resurface them. That bill falls on the homeowners association or the district, which means it eventually falls on residents in a dues increase or a special assessment. It is one of the most commonly overlooked long-term costs in new Florida construction and it is worth asking who holds the reserve for it and how much is in it.

Insurance. We could not obtain a credible county-level or postal-code average for Citrus County, so rather than invent one we will give you the honest statewide figure: the state regulator put the average Florida homeowners premium including wind at about 3,736 dollars in late September 2026. That is a statewide average and nothing more. Two things genuinely help here: the site is outside the windborne debris region, roughly eight miles inland of it, which relaxes some opening protection requirements, and a brand-new roof built to current code is the single biggest premium lever available to you. Get a real quote on a specific plan.

Flood. This is one of the better-verified facts on the page. The plat is mapped outside the special flood hazard area, and five independent sources agree: two vintages of the county flood map, the county hazard layer, the national flood layer, and the project's own bond document. We also confirmed the map layer was actually answering rather than silently returning nothing, by checking that it reports high-hazard areas both immediately around the envelope and in quantity a few miles off. The site sits outside the coastal high hazard area and outside every modelled storm surge zone, with the nearest major-hurricane surge zone roughly two miles west, and ground elevations run from the mid-twenties to over a hundred feet. For a Nature Coast address that is a genuinely strong position, and it is the sort of thing worth knowing when a county's reputation is shaped by its coastline.

Flood claim history, in context. Two measures, labelled separately because they are not the same thing. Of every federal flood claim ever filed in Citrus County, the single month of September 2024 accounts for about 23.7 percent of the claims and nearly 44 percent of the dollars. Counting by calendar year, 2024 as a whole accounts for about 25.1 percent of claims. The local picture is the striking part: the postal area covering this community has recorded two claims in total since 1978, which is a rounding error against a county total of over seven thousand. For 2025 and 2026, none have been recorded here through the data freeze. Citrus County floods on its coast, and this is not the coast.

Water, sewer and power. Central county water, sewer and reuse water, not a well and a septic tank, with an energised lift station already serving the site. Electricity comes from the local member-owned rural cooperative rather than a large investor-owned utility. See the next section for why the sewer connection exists at all, because it is the most interesting thing about this community.

Why this community is on sewer when its neighbours are not

Most of residential Citrus County is on wells and septic tanks. This community is not, and the reason is a line on a map that almost nobody outside county planning looks at: the land sits inside a designated priority protection area for the springs that feed Kings Bay at Crystal River.

Kings Bay is spring-fed, and those springs draw from the same shallow aquifer that a septic drainfield discharges into. Nitrogen from septic systems is the main reason the bay shifted over decades from eelgrass to algae, which is a direct threat to the manatee population that is the county's single biggest economic asset. The state and county response has been to restrict new septic density inside the protection area and push development onto central sewer, which is why there is a substantial offsite sewer run in this project's infrastructure budget and, arguably, why the development district exists at all. Somebody had to finance a pipe.

For a buyer this cuts in a genuinely useful direction. You are paying a district assessment partly for a sewer connection your neighbours in older subdivisions do not have. That means no drainfield to replace at ten to twenty thousand dollars, no pump-outs, no restrictions on where you can put a pool or an addition, and no exposure to the septic-to-sewer conversion mandates that have been working their way across spring-protection areas in Florida and that land as a five-figure bill on existing homeowners. Framed that way, the assessment is less a tax than a pre-paid upgrade. It is still a real cost and you should still know the number, but it is not money going nowhere.

What kind of homes these are likely to be

No floor plan library and no pricing have been released, so this section is about what the records already tell you rather than what anyone has announced. Two things are genuinely informative.

The first is lot width, which is published in the district's bond documents and is the single best predictor of what a community will feel like. The first phase is split roughly 85 narrower lots at forty feet wide to 195 wider lots at fifty feet. That is a production-scale suburban pattern rather than a large-lot one: a fifty-foot lot typically carries a two-car garage across most of the frontage and a modest side yard, and a forty-foot lot is usually a narrower plan, sometimes with the garage set back or reached from the side. If you are coming from an older Citrus County neighbourhood on a quarter or a half acre, this will feel considerably tighter, and that is the trade for central sewer, new construction and a brand-new street.

The second is the product line. The one plan the builder has put on the community page so far belongs to its value-oriented series, the line it uses for straightforward, efficiently specified homes rather than its higher-specification brands. That is the builder's own categorisation, not our inference, and it is a reasonable signal about where this community will sit in the local market. Citrus County has remained one of the more affordable coastal-adjacent counties in Florida, well below the Gulf coast an hour south, and a value-series product on forty-and-fifty-foot lots is consistent with that.

We could not obtain reliable published starting prices for comparable new communities in this immediate part of Citrus County, so rather than put a made-up range on the page we will say plainly that we do not have one. What we can tell you is to budget the district assessment described above as part of your monthly figure from the very first conversation, because on a value-series home it is a materially larger share of the total carrying cost than it would be on an expensive one.

Communities and prices it is easy to confuse

Two warnings specific to this one. First, the same builder runs a separate program selling homes on scattered individual lots elsewhere in Citrus County, and that program does advertise a starting price. It is a different product on different land and that price says nothing about this community. If you find a Citrus County price attached to this builder, check which program it belongs to before you anchor on it. Second, there is another community with a similar name a short distance away, a small townhome project, which is a completely separate development by a different builder. Finally, several national listing aggregators generate a page for almost any Citrus County subdivision name whether or not anything is for sale, and those pages are not evidence that homes are on the market.

Buying new construction with someone on your side

The person at the sales desk in a builder's model home works for the builder. They are usually helpful and entirely pleasant, and they are also paid to represent the party across the table. 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 timing is the trap. Most builders will only recognise your agent if that agent is named at your first visit or first registration. That matters more here than usual, because the model home and sales office are permitted but not yet open, which means the registration moment has not happened yet for anybody. If you think you might want representation, this is the window to arrange it in.

On a community with a development district there is also a specific list of questions worth putting in writing before you sign: the current annual district installment for your exact lot width, the separate operations charge, how many years remain on the bonds, whether the amenities will be owned by the district or the association, and who holds the reserve for resurfacing the private streets. A pre-construction contract is not a resale contract, and the answers to those questions are worth more than any upgrade allowance you will be offered.

Questions