Mallard Landing

Start with the number a buyer will find first, because both versions of it are wrong. The county publishes an unincorporated total of 12.8410 mills, which is just the county levy plus the school levies. Every one of the county's 31,139 parcels also sits in a water management district, so the real unincorporated totals are 13.0711 or 13.0203. The published figure describes no parcel anywhere in the county.

The city figure on the same table is wrong the other way. It publishes a city total of 19.3313 while its own itemisation on the same page adds up to 19.0313, a gap of exactly 0.3000 of a mill with nothing behind it. So the one table errs low outside the city and high inside it. The real rate at this address is 19.0313, worth about $4,665 on the median new build with homestead.

There is also a whole taxing district the county does not publish at all. The roll carries three district codes covering 1,202, 27,291 and 2,646 parcels, which sums to the county's 31,139 exactly. The county publishes millage for two of them. So about 1,202 parcels have no published rate of any kind. Whatever those parcels are, their owners cannot look up what they pay.

Now the flat charges, which is where the interesting behaviour is. A finished house pays $392.52 for solid waste, $143.34 for fire and $179.11 for emergency medical service, so $714.97 a year. A vacant lot pays $156.40 for fire and nothing else. Completing a house raises the flat charges by about 357 per cent, which is what you would expect. What you would not expect is the direction of the fire line.

The vacant lot pays more for fire protection than the house that replaces it. Fire on a vacant or agricultural parcel is $156.40. Fire on a dwelling unit is $143.34. Building the house cuts the fire charge by 9.1 per cent. On an unincorporated vacant lot at the roll's standard value that $156.40 is about 95.7 per cent of the entire ad valorem tax bill: a charge on no millage table nearly doubles the cost of holding land.

The flat structure is also steeply regressive, which matters at this price point. That $714.97 works out to about 2.48 mills on the median new build, which is about 19.3 per cent of the entire published unincorporated millage. On the cheapest new house in the county it is about 4.47 mills and on the dearest about 0.65. The cheapest new house in this county carries nearly seven times the effective flat-charge rate of the most expensive one, from charges that appear on no rate table anywhere.

And the direction of travel over the last two years is the familiar one. The county cut its millage from 7.8000 to 7.5000, a reduction of about 3.85 per cent, while raising solid waste 4.10 per cent, fire 6.03 per cent and emergency medical service 7.32 per cent, for a total flat increase of 5.28 per cent. The rate cut is the number that gets announced. The flat charges are the ones that moved.

One thing we could not resolve, and it is worth naming. The county's adopted budget prints the fire and emergency medical rate tables with no statement of assessment area whatsoever, no definition, no unincorporated qualifier and no reference to any agreement with the city. So we cannot tell you from the published record whether the county fire charge reaches parcels inside the city limits. That is a $143.34 question and it should be answered in writing before you contract.

One structural point about where the county's charges do and do not go. The county runs a separate unincorporated service area covering animal control, planning, code enforcement, the building department and mosquito control, and it is funded from general revenue rather than from any separate published rate. Fire and emergency medical service are not in it. So the usual shortcut of assuming that county services split neatly along the city line does not hold here, in either direction, and that is part of why the fire question above is genuinely open rather than lazy.

The practical version: at this address the ad valorem rate is knowable and the flat charges are not fully knowable, which is the reverse of the usual situation. Get the city's residential collection rate, get a written answer on whether the county fire assessment applies inside the city, and get the association's budget, because none of the three is published where a buyer can find it.

The lake is the thing everyone asks about, and the honest answer is about timing rather than water. The effective flood map for this county took effect in 2015. The Herbert Hoover Dike rehabilitation was completed in early 2022, about six and a half years later, and no federal flood hazard determination has been published for this county since 2015. So the map in force was drawn around a structure in a condition it is no longer in, and nothing has been published to reflect the change in either direction.

For this specific community we cannot give you a flood share. The lots do not exist as assessed parcels, so there is no parcel geometry to test against the flood layer by any of the three usual methods. We will not estimate one from the surrounding blocks, because that is exactly the kind of number that gets repeated as fact. Order a determination and an elevation certificate on the specific lot when you reserve it.

What the claim record says is more useful anyway, and it inverts the usual reasoning. Of this county's paid federal flood claims, those rated outside the mandated hazard area were paid more often than those rated inside it: about 61.0 per cent against about 48.6 per cent. About 30.7 per cent of all paid building claims here were rated outside it entirely. In this county, being outside the mandated zone is not evidence of being dry.

And the scale of the flood programme here is tiny against the storm record. Across the two postcodes covering this county there have been about 23,838 federal assistance registrations against about 295 federal flood insurance claims in the entire history of the programme. That is about 81 to 1. In the postcode covering this community, about 3,806 registrations had federally verified damage to the house and about 318 reported flood damage, roughly twelve to one, with only about 5.8 per cent carrying flood cover at all.

So the mechanism to budget for is wind. This is a flat, exposed interior county on the north shore of the lake, and the damage that shows up in federal inspections here is overwhelmingly wind and debris rather than water. That argues for taking opening protection and mitigation credits seriously, and for pricing flood cover on its own merits rather than assuming the mandated zone answers the question.

On wind data the county publishes nothing. Its planning page lists zoning, future land use and flood hazard areas as what its mapping provides, and wind is absent from the list. A neighbouring Florida county publishes a full public wind speed mapping application, so the query is sound and the absence here is a choice. The only machine-readable option covering this address is a statewide research dataset. We assert no design wind speed on this page; ask for the sealed plan value.

On schools there is a product but not a layer. The district publishes static boundary maps with no date printed on them, from a page whose most recent dated item is from the 2020-21 school year, and there is no queryable boundary file anywhere. The only consistent national attendance geometry covering this county is eleven years old. The county runs one public high school, so that question is countywide; the elementary assignment is the live one and it should come from the district in writing.

On what this place actually is, the geography explains most of the rest. This is the north shore of the big lake, at the crossroads of the main north-south and east-west highways through the Florida interior, about an hour inland from the Treasure Coast and roughly two hours from either coast's major airports. It is cattle and citrus country with a working downtown, a rodeo, and a lake economy, and the housing stock reflects that: fewer than a quarter of the county's 31,139 parcels are single-family site-built homes.

Which is why this community is a genuine change in what the city offers. About 120 single-family homes were completed county-wide across the two most recent roll years, only about five of them inside the city limits. A hundred homesites inside those limits is a meaningful addition on that base. It also means there is very little recent in-city comparable sales evidence to price against, which cuts both ways for an early buyer and is worth having somebody work on before a price list exists.