Selling now in North Port, FL
Wellen Park Golf & Country Club
A Lennar golf neighbourhood inside Wellen Park, in the City of North Port
Homes from about $234,990, a course and clubhouse already open, and three things worth knowing before you tour. Club membership here is mandatory and attached to the home, not chosen by you. The published 2024 schedule put association and club charges at about $7,530 a year before a single dollar of tax or district assessment. And the course currently sells public tee times. All three below, with the full cost stack.
- City
- North Port, FL
- Builder
- Lennar
- Homes
- About 1,300 to 1,375
- Club
- Mandatory
At a glance
Wellen Park Golf & Country Club fast facts
What is published, and what you will have to ask for. The unpublished ones are the difference between the sticker price and what the house actually costs you every month.
- Area
- Wellen Park, City of North Port, FL
- Mailing address says
- Venice. The city is North Port.
- Builder
- Lennar, the only one here
- Homes at buildout
- About 1,300 to 1,375
- Built and platted so far
- About 82 percent
- Published pricing
- $234,990 to $763,999, Sept 2026
- Club membership
- Mandatory, and attached to the home
- District assessment
- About $1,727 to $2,832 a year
- Association and club, as published for 2024
- About $7,530 a year
- Property tax rate
- About 14.51 mills, 2025 certified
- Evacuation zone
- C, which evacuates for a Category 3
- Whether your home carries golf or social
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
- Current-year club and association fees
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
- District assessment on a Carriage home
- Not published anywhereGet pricing
Pricing and plans are as published by the builder in September 2026 and change frequently. District assessment figures are the district's own adopted numbers for its 2027 fiscal year. Association and club figures are from the builder's published 2024 schedule for one product line; we could not obtain a current-year or other-product schedule. Tax rates are from the most recently certified roll. All details are subject to change without notice.
Where it is
Inside the Wellen Park master plan, off River Road in the City of North Port, with a Venice mailing address. Drive the commute and the school run yourself, at a realistic hour, before you commit.
How to buy Wellen Park Golf & Country Club without leaving money on the table
The person at the builder's sales desk works for the builder. You can have a Florida agent on your side instead, touring with you, reading the contract line by line, and pushing for every incentive, upgrade and closing-cost credit the builder will give. It costs you nothing: on new construction the builder already budgets your agent's fee whether you bring one or not. The one catch is timing. You usually need your own agent from the very first visit, or the builder will not recognize them and you lose it. Start here and we will set it up.
Set up a tourWhat a local would tell you
The membership is attached to the house, and the course sells tee times to the public
You will find this community described as bundled golf in one place and as golf-optional in another, and buyers reasonably conclude that someone is wrong. Nobody is. Here is the actual rule, in the builder's own published words: every home comes with either a golf membership or a social membership, and both memberships are attached to the home and can transfer with sale or rental only.
Read that carefully, because four things follow. Club membership is mandatory on every home here. The tier is fixed by the house, not chosen by you, so whether you get golf depends on which home you buy rather than what you want. You cannot resign it or sell it separately from the house. And a future buyer inherits it, which is a feature if they want golf and an obstacle if they do not. Get the tier written into your purchase contract rather than taking a salesperson's word for it.
Now the cost, which is the part most buyers underestimate by a wide margin. The only fee schedule published in full is the builder's own executed sheet for the 2024 calendar year, for a golf-designated executive home. On it: $3,508 a year to the master association including bulk cable and internet, $1,680 to the golf club for the course, pro shop and maintenance facility, a $750 non-alcoholic food and beverage minimum you are billed for whether you spend it or not, and $1,592 for homesite maintenance. That is about $7,530 a year in association and club charges alone. At closing the same schedule listed a $3,000 builder fee, $1,500 irrigation hookup, a $450 survey fee, and two separate $1,500 capital contributions, one to the club and one to the association.
Be clear on the limits of that. We could not obtain a 2025 or 2026 schedule, or any schedule for the condominium, carriage, coach or estate products, or for a social-membership home. Treat $7,530 as the 2024 published figure for one product line, not as your number, and ask for yours. It is the largest recurring cost attached to this address and it is on no listing.
Then there is the thing we have not seen written anywhere: the course is currently a public-access operation. It is run by an outside management company, and its own website advertises online tee time booking for the public, a published rate card, and a seasonal pass at $2,500 for a single player or $4,000 for a couple, with members booking seven days ahead against three days for everyone else. So residents paying a compulsory golf assessment are, at present, sharing their course with paying outside play. You will see it said that it goes fully private at buildout. We looked for that trigger and that date in a document and could not find either, so ask for it in writing.
Stack it up and the annual carrying cost on a golf-designated executive home looks like this: roughly $7,530 in association and club charges, about $2,385 in district assessment, property taxes at about 14.51 mills, plus separate city assessments for solid waste, roads and drainage, fire and stormwater. None of it is hidden exactly, but no single document puts it together.
So ask five things in writing before you contract: whether your specific home carries a golf or a social membership; the current-year fee schedule for your exact product line; what a social membership costs and excludes; when and on what trigger the course stops selling public tee times; and who holds title to the clubhouse, pools and fitness centre, and whether control of the association has passed from the builder to residents yet.
The district
Thirteen assessment layers, and yours is going down for the first time
The infrastructure here is financed through an improvement district that is unusual in two ways. It was created not by a city or a county but by a special act of the Florida legislature, and it covers more than twelve thousand acres across both the city and the unincorporated county. It is divided into thirteen units of development, and those are not places you live. They are stacked layers: you pay a small district-wide administrative layer, a larger layer covering the arterial roads serving everything inside the city, and then your own neighbourhood's layer with its two bond issues.
One thing worth understanding about how the amount is set: it is driven by lot width, not by what your house is worth. A fifty-foot homesite is the baseline; a seventy-five-foot lot pays about a quarter more; the condominium products pay less. Nothing about your purchase price enters into it.
For the current year the adopted totals across all layers run about $1,727 on a four-storey condominium, about $1,951 on a two-storey, about $2,174 on a coach home, about $2,385 on a fifty-foot homesite and about $2,832 on a seventy-five. Every one of those is down $22.92 from last year, which is genuinely unusual and worth saying.
Put it in proportion, though, because the decline is the tail and not the trend. Four years ago the fifty-foot bill was about $1,110; the following year about $2,288. It more than doubled when the second bond came onto the tax roll, and this year's step down is what happens afterwards. The adopted budget shows both bond layers issued with fixed principal against a fixed unit count, so expect roughly flat for the next twenty-five years rather than falling. Debt service is about 79 per cent of the district bill and runs to 2053. Not optional, not tied to value, and a resale buyer inherits it.
Two practical notes. If you are looking at the carriage product, the adopted budget shows a placeholder rather than a number, with the lot-width factor decided but the unit count not, so there is currently no published district assessment for a carriage home. Ask the district directly. And the district's own public financial page has not published a budget newer than four years ago; the current one exists but is linked from nowhere. Ask the district manager for it rather than trusting the website.
One structural risk worth knowing, because it has already happened here. The district once levied a special assessment across every irrigation-connected owner in the whole district, about $81 a head, to cover legal costs arising from a dispute with a completely different neighbourhood's association. Nobody in this neighbourhood had anything to do with it. That is a feature of sharing a thirteen-layer district with fifteen other neighbourhoods, and it can happen again.
What to ask for that is not published: the current-year fee schedule for your product line, which membership tier your home carries, the two recorded declarations, who holds title to the amenities, whether association control has passed to residents, the district assessment for a carriage home, the city's current fire and road-and-drainage assessment rates, and a full sample tax bill for a closed comparable so you can see all the stacks together.
Find out which membership your home carries
It is fixed to the house, you cannot change it, and it is worth thousands a year either way.
The area
A Venice address, a North Port tax bill, and residents who sued to change it
This is the local history most buyers never hear, and it answers a question they all eventually ask. The land was annexed by the City of North Port in 2002 at the then-landowners' request. Two decades later a resident group organised to reverse it, gathered nearly a thousand signatures, and petitioned to leave, arguing the annexation had served the landowner and the city's revenue rather than residents and that leaving would save owners between $7,500 and $15,000 in property taxes over a decade with no service reduction. That figure is the group's estimate, not a court's finding.
The city denied the petitions unanimously, pointing to a commissioned study projecting it would lose $16.3 million over six years. A circuit court initially sided with the residents; the city rejected the proposal a second time; the legislature then changed the rules for such petitions going forward. In late 2025 an appellate court ended it on grounds worth understanding precisely: changing a city's boundaries is an exclusively legislative act, the statutory process is the only route available, and the lower court had no jurisdiction to review it at all. That is not a ruling that the city was right on the merits; it is a ruling that there is no merits review by that route. A rehearing was denied and a supreme court appeal announced, though we could not confirm its status. No court has ever found the annexation unlawful.
The arithmetic does roughly support the residents' number. A North Port address carries about 14.51 mills against about 11.47 in unincorporated Sarasota County, a gap of roughly three mills, or about $1,215 a year on $400,000 of taxable value. Be fair to the city about that, though: North Port residents do not pay the county's emergency medical services levy, and they do not pay the county fire assessment that unincorporated owners are billed separately, roughly $257 a year on a two-thousand-square-foot home. The real net gap is smaller than three mills. What is not smaller is the number of lines: city assessments for solid waste, roads and drainage, fire and stormwater land on the same bill as the district assessment and the tax.
On schools, the assignment changed this year. Querying the district's own boundary mapping at this location returns Taylor Ranch Elementary, Venice Middle and Wellen Park High, which opened in August 2026 with more than twelve hundred students, the county's first new public high school in twenty-five years. Be careful with any list you find: school lists circulating for this community mix schools of choice with actual zoned assignments, and some omit the zoned high school entirely. Run your own address. The district earned an A for the twenty-third consecutive year.
On healthcare, the distinction matters and marketing blurs it. What exists in North Port today is a freestanding emergency department with an outpatient centre: no inpatient beds, no intensive care, no maternity, and a patient needing admission is transferred out. The nearest inpatient hospitals are in Venice and Port Charlotte. North Port's first acute-care hospital is genuinely under construction near the interstate, with press reporting an opening around 2028; we could not verify bed count, cost or date from the operator, so do not plan around it.
On roads, the good news is real and close. River Road, the connector north to the interstate, is being widened to six lanes across about five miles at a cost of about $47.5 million, with shared-use paths, two wildlife crossings and new lighting; construction began in 2022 and completion is estimated for early 2027. Roughly $40 million is programmed to resurface the adjoining interstate segment. Against that, one thing is not funded: US 41 through Wellen Park carries no capacity improvement at all in the county's current five-year programme, which is itself stamped subject to change.
On flooding, be precise, because the easy read is wrong. At the sales centre the mapping shows minimal hazard, but that designation came from a map revision rather than the underlying panel, and the mapping here was revised as recently as February 2026. The wider picture is a patchwork: most of the surrounding land mapped as X is the five-hundred-year floodplain rather than minimal hazard, and there is real one-per-cent-chance flood zone within a mile, some of it combined riverine and coastal. Never accept a community-level flood answer here. And this location sits in evacuation zone C, which evacuates for a Category 3 or stronger. An inland-feeling, minimal-hazard-mapped golf community reads as storm-safe; it is not outside the evacuation zones.
As for what a major storm does here, the national hurricane centre's own report on Hurricane Ian records the Peace, Myakka and Alafia rivers cresting to record levels and a stretch of the interstate in southern Sarasota County closed by flooding. We could not verify a structure-damage count for this community and will not invent one. What we can verify is that four years on, the district still budgets a quarter of a million dollars a year for storm recovery landscaping in the layer this neighbourhood pays into.
On insurance, the state regulator's most recent figures put the average Sarasota County homeowners premium at about $3,457 including wind, measured in March 2026 and slightly down from the prior report. That is a countywide average including barrier-island property, so it is context rather than a quote, and the condominium products here are insured through a master policy. Get a bindable quote on the specific address before your inspection period ends.
Finally, resale, bluntly. Within this neighbourhood the builder is nearly finished at roughly 82 per cent platted. But the master plan around it is sixteen neighbourhoods, sixteen builders, eleven thousand acres of which about seven thousand are still undeveloped, and twenty-two thousand homes at buildout, and district-wide only about ten thousand lots are platted, so Wellen Park is roughly 45 per cent built. For a decade at least, a seller here competes against new product across the fence carrying incentives near thirteen per cent of price, around $48,000 on a typical sale, that a private seller cannot match. Add a mandatory club membership the next buyer inherits and a bond assessment running to 2053: buy for the house and the life, and plan to hold.
What you need to know
Buying new construction with someone on your side
Representation is free and the timing is the catch, as above. Here it matters for a specific and quantifiable reason: the incentive.
The builder reported sales incentives running near thirteen per cent of price in mid-2026, on an average sale of about $371,000. That is roughly $48,000 of concession on a typical home, and the company's own published terms make clear an offer may require financing through its affiliated mortgage company while not requiring it to buy the house. Both are true at once, and the distinction is the whole point: you do not need the affiliate to buy, but you may need it to keep the incentive. That is the largest negotiable number in the transaction and it deserves someone running the comparison who is not paid by either side of it.
On the record, fairly and in both directions. This builder delivered roughly 82,600 homes nationally in its 2025 fiscal year and guided to about the same for 2026, so raw counts of anything scale accordingly. Public compliance databases show roughly $24 million in aggregate penalties across sixty-five records over twenty-five years, mostly environmental and individually small. The largest single item was a 2018 federal settlement involving the company's then mortgage arm over loan certification. There is also a live Florida case covering 552 homes and claiming roughly $200 million, alleging defects in a large majority of them, in which a court declined to send the dispute to arbitration in late 2025. Those are allegations and there has been no finding of liability; we could not locate a substantive public company response beyond its arbitration motion, so we are not going to invent one.
One more thing specific to this community. Figures circulating for the district assessment here do not match the district's own adopted numbers, and at least one figure in circulation appears to be the association fee wearing the district's label. Use the district's adopted table, not an estimator, and get an estoppel for your specific parcel before closing.
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. Read the limited warranty booklet before you sign rather than after. And read what the purchase agreement says about completion timing, price changes before closing, and dispute resolution.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Lennar, any homebuilder, the developer of Wellen Park Golf & Country Club, the City of North Port, or Sarasota County. The builder and developer are identified here because they are the builder and developer 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 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
Wellen Park Golf & Country Club FAQ
What is Wellen Park Golf & Country Club?
It is one neighbourhood inside Wellen Park, a very large master plan on the former Thomas Ranch. The master developer is a partnership that holds roughly 9,600 acres; Lennar is the only homebuilder in this particular neighbourhood, selling five product lines from condominiums up to estate homes. The neighbourhood is planned for somewhere between about 1,300 and 1,375 homes, and roughly 82 per cent of the lots are platted, so it is well along. The golf course, clubhouse and welcome centre are all open.
Is the mailing address really wrong about the city?
Not wrong exactly, but it will mislead you about your tax bill. The postal address is Venice, and both the builder and the postal service use it. The community is inside the incorporated City of North Port, and that is what the tax bill follows. The land was annexed by North Port in 2002, and the improvement district that bills you defines its main assessment area as all district land within the City of North Port, with this neighbourhood's platted lots sitting inside that roll. The practical difference is real: a North Port address carries about 14.51 mills of property tax against about 11.47 mills in unincorporated Sarasota County, roughly three mills, or about $1,215 a year on $400,000 of taxable value.
Is golf membership mandatory?
Club membership is mandatory. Golf membership specifically is not universal, and this is the single most misunderstood thing about this community. In the builder's own words, every home comes with either a golf membership or a social membership, and both are attached to the home and can transfer only with a sale or a rental. In plain terms, the membership runs with the house, the tier is fixed by the house rather than chosen by you, you cannot resign it or sell it separately, and a future buyer inherits it. That is why you will see the community described as bundled golf in one place and as optional golf in another. Both are describing real homes; they are just describing different ones. Ask, in the contract, which tier your specific home carries.
What does it actually cost to carry a home here each year?
More than the district assessment, and more than most buyers expect. The only fee schedule published in full is the builder's own for the 2024 calendar year, for a golf-designated executive home. On that schedule the master association was $3,508 a year including bulk cable and internet, the golf club assessment $1,680, a non-alcoholic food and beverage minimum $750, and homesite maintenance $1,592, for a total of about $7,530 a year. On top of that sits the community district assessment, which for the current year runs about $1,727 on a four-storey condominium up to $2,832 on a seventy-five-foot homesite, plus property taxes at about 14.51 mills, plus separate city assessments for solid waste, roads and drainage, fire and stormwater. And at closing that same schedule listed a $3,000 builder fee, $1,500 irrigation hookup, $450 survey fee, and two separate $1,500 capital contributions, one to the golf club and one to the association. We could not obtain a 2025 or 2026 schedule, or any schedule for the other product lines, so treat those figures as the 2024 published ones and ask for yours in writing.
Is the golf course private to residents?
Not currently, and this is worth knowing before you pay a mandatory golf assessment. The course operates as a public-access facility under an outside management company. Its own website advertises online tee-time booking for the public, a published rate card, and a seasonal pass at $2,500 for a single player or $4,000 for a couple, with members able to book seven days ahead against three days for the public. So residents paying a compulsory golf assessment are at present sharing the course with paying outside play. You will see it said that the course goes fully private at buildout. We could not find that trigger or a date in any primary document, so ask for it in writing rather than taking it as given.
Is the district assessment going up or down?
Down by $22.92 this year, and that is genuinely unusual, but do not read it as a trend. The bill for a fifty-foot homesite was about $1,110 four years ago and about $2,288 the following year. It more than doubled when the second bond came onto the tax roll, and this year's small decline is the tail of that, not a paydown. The adopted budget shows both bond layers issued with fixed principal and a fixed unit count, so the sensible expectation is roughly flat for about the next twenty-five years rather than falling. Debt service is about 79 per cent of the district bill and runs to 2053. One more thing worth flagging: if you are looking at the Carriage product, the adopted budget shows a placeholder rather than a number for it, so there is currently no published district assessment for a Carriage home at all. Ask the district directly.
Before you walk into a sales office
Get your inside track on Wellen Park Golf & Country Club
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 membership tier your specific home carries, the current-year fee schedule for your product line, what a social membership costs, when the course stops selling public tee times, and which incentives survive if you do not use the affiliated lender.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.