Selling now in Port St. Joe, FL
WindMark Beach
About 708 homesites on the gulf at Port St. Joe, Gulf County
The city limit runs straight through this community, and the newer half, the one farther from town, is the half inside the city. It pays about 27 per cent more property tax on the same value, under the same address and the same association. The good news is real too: there are no district assessments here at all, and we checked that four ways. Both are below.
- Area
- Gulf County, FL
- Homesites
- About 708
- In-city rate
- 14.53 mills
- County rate
- 11.44 mills
At a glance
WindMark fast facts
Every figure here comes from actual tax bills on parcels in this community, the state revenue department's certified tables, the state auditor general's district registry, the developer's own public filings, and federal and state mapping queried directly. Where we could not obtain a document, we say so and publish no number rather than estimate one.
- Area
- Port St. Joe, Gulf County
- Jurisdiction
- Split: part in the city, part not
- Size
- About 708 homesites in the pipeline
- Stage
- Selling, with earlier phases lived in
- In-city tax rate
- About 14.53 mills
- Unincorporated rate
- About 11.44 mills
- Difference
- About 27 percent, same community
- District assessments
- None, and we checked four ways
- Recent tax direction
- Down about 16 percent off the peak
- Flood zone
- All of it, and the builder half is the milder one
- County insurance average
- $3,245 with wind, $1,809 without
- Evacuation mapping
- Last edited in 2013, before the storm
- Homeowner association dues
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
- Current pricing and lots left
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
Figures come from tax bills on parcels in this community, the county property appraiser's parcel roll, the state revenue department's certified millage tables, the state auditor general's special district registry, the developer's public annual filings, county and federal mapping, and the state insurance regulator, all as of September 2026. Recorded plats and declarations, association dues, and the county's land development codes and development order could not be obtained and none is published here. All details are subject to change without notice.
Do not use the state's county summary millage figures here.
The revenue department publishes an average for taxing authorities that cover less than a whole county, and for this county those averages are well under a mill. Read literally they would understate the rate at a specific address here by roughly 2.7 mills, because they average a city levy across a county most of which is not in the city. Use the actual stack for the actual parcel, which is what this page does.
Where it is
On the gulf shoreline north of Port St. Joe, on the quiet stretch of coast between the bay and the cape. This is a small-town beach county rather than a resort strip: a working port town, a long undeveloped beach, and a drive to the nearest airport. Spend a night here before you decide, and do it out of season.
How to buy in WindMark Beach 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 recognise them and you lose it. Start here and we will set it up.
Set up a tourWhat a local would tell you
One community, one address, one association, and two tax jurisdictions 27 per cent apart
Everybody buying in Florida is told to check whether an address is inside a city, because it changes the tax rate. Almost nobody is told that the line can run through the middle of a single community, and that is exactly what happens here.
We mapped all 519 parcels in this community and they split cleanly on one east-west line. About 90 parcels, the original beachfront village and the part nearest to town, are unincorporated. About 429 parcels, all the newer phases and every lot the builder owns, are inside the city. That is backwards from what geography would suggest, and we verified it three independent ways before publishing it: federal census geography, the state revenue department's taxing authority code on the parcel roll, and the community identification numbers attached to federal flood map cases. All three agree.
Two actual tax bills, one from each side, give the consequence. The in-city stack totals about 14.53 mills and the unincorporated stack about 11.44, a difference of about 3.09 mills, or about 27 per cent. On a home with about $447,000 of taxable value that is about $1,383 a year, every year, between two houses in the same community with the same postal address and the same homeowners association.
The cause is a single substitution. The independent fire district levies about half a mill and its boundary stops at the municipal line, so unincorporated homes here pay the county stack plus that half mill. In-city homes do not pay the fire levy at all; they pay the city's own levy of about 3.59 mills instead. Annexation trades a half-mill fire levy for a three-and-a-half-mill city levy, and that swap is the entire gap. The arithmetic reconciles in both directions from the two bills, and as a check on the fire district boundary itself, the implied taxable bases of the county's fire districts tile the unincorporated county to within about a seventh of one per cent.
Now the news that runs the other way, and it is substantial. There are no community development district assessments here at all. No district, no municipal services taxing unit, no benefit unit, no non-ad-valorem assessment of any kind. We looked four separate ways: four actual tax bills all print a zero non-ad-valorem total; the state auditor general's registry of about 1,671 special districts contains none covering this community; the revenue department's table of every taxing authority in the county does not list one; and the same department's workbook shows those columns blank. Across the Florida communities we have written about, a district assessment routinely adds one to two and a half thousand dollars a year that no rate comparison captures. Here that line is genuinely zero.
And the direction of travel on the taxes themselves has been down. Tracing the same house across recent rolls, the bill has fallen about 16 per cent off its peak as the county rolled its rate from about 6.2 to about 5.9 to about 5.6 mills.
So ask three things before you contract: whether the specific lot is inside the city limit or not, in writing and from the property appraiser rather than the sales desk; the actual tax bill for a closed comparable on the same side of that line; and the association's recorded documents and dues, which are the one carrying cost this page could not obtain.
Find out which side of the city limit a specific lot is on
Nothing about the address, the signage or the association tells you, and it is worth about $1,383 a year on a typical value here.
The record
The house with the lower tax bill can be the more expensive one to buy
Here is a trap that catches buyers on this coast constantly, and it is worth more than the jurisdiction question on a single transaction. Comparing two homes in this community, one with a higher market value pays about $886.74 less in tax than a smaller inland one. That looks like an argument for the more expensive house. It is the opposite.
Florida caps how fast an assessed value can rise while the same owner holds a property. On a non-homesteaded property that cap is ten per cent a year, and over a long hold in a rising market the gap between market value and assessed value gets large. On the beachfront house in that comparison, the accumulated difference is roughly $290,305 of value that is not currently being taxed.
A buyer loses all of it at closing. The cap resets to market value on a change of ownership. That is about $3,322 a year of step-up landing on the new owner in the first bill after the sale. So the low tax figure on a listing for an older-held property here is describing the seller's position, not yours. We are not publishing the addresses, because these are identifiable owned homes, but the mechanism applies to every resale in this community and most of this county. Ask the property appraiser what the bill becomes at your purchase price, not what it was for the seller.
On the flood mapping, this community is in an unusual position and most of it is favourable. The panels here became effective in 2021, after the 2018 hurricane, so they are current rather than the decade-old maps we usually find. Every sampled point in every phase sits in a special flood hazard area, so flood insurance is a certainty rather than a question. What matters is which kind. What the builder is selling in the newer phases is the standard coastal zone at a base flood elevation of about nine feet. The wave velocity zone, where the map anticipates breaking waves and construction requirements are considerably stricter, is confined to the unincorporated gulf-front strip at about eleven to thirteen feet. So the half that pays more tax is the half in the milder flood designation, and the beachfront half is the reverse. Neither is a bad position, but they are different positions and they price differently to insure.
We also checked the map change record carefully, because on a coast like this it is where the surprises live. There are zero effective map revisions inside this community, controlled against several in each of four neighbouring counties, so the empty result is real. And there is exactly one individual map amendment case inside this community, which was denied. County-wide there are several hundred amendment cases including dozens that succeeded in removing property from the flood zone, and none of them is here. Take that as a plain statement about the ground rather than a paperwork failure.
Now the gap we could not close, and it is the most important sentence on this page for a coastal buyer. We could not obtain the county's or the city's land development codes, the comprehensive plan or the development order, all of which were blocked or unavailable. That means we cannot tell you how substantial damage is determined here, or how the rule that requires a damaged building to be brought up to current elevation standards once repair costs pass half its value is applied locally. On a shoreline that took a major hurricane within the last decade, that is a real question and not an academic one. Put it to the county building department in writing before you go firm, and ask specifically what happens to an existing home at a nine-foot base flood elevation if it is substantially damaged.
Two other limits worth naming. We obtained no recorded plat and no recorded declaration, so no association dues figure, no private assessment and no rescission right appears anywhere on this page. In a community with a full amenity programme that is a meaningful hole in the carrying cost and we will not fill it with an estimate. And the property appraiser's own millage chart was blocked to us, so the rate figures above come from actual tax bills and the state's certified tables instead, which we would argue is the better source anyway.
What to ask for that is not published: the association's recorded declaration, current budget, dues and any capital contribution at closing; the jurisdiction of the specific lot in writing; the projected tax bill at your purchase price rather than the seller's; the flood zone and base flood elevation for the lot with an elevation certificate; and the county's substantial damage and reconstruction requirements in writing.
The area
The evacuation map was last edited before the storm that rewrote the flood map
On paper there is an inversion here that looks like a finding. The original gulf-front village, the part actually in the wave velocity zone, sits in the first evacuation zone. The newer phases, about four miles farther along the same shoreline, sit in the second. Same water, same exposure to the same weather, different call.
Then you check where the boundary comes from and it stops being a finding about the ground. The line between the two zones tracks a regional planning council boundary, which is an administrative division rather than a hydrological one. And every evacuation polygon in this county carries a last-edited date of 2013: five years before the hurricane that came ashore nearby and eight years before the flood maps that now govern here. The neighbouring county refreshed its zones in 2018.
So treat the zone letter at a specific address here as an administrative artefact rather than a current risk assessment, and ask county emergency management directly what the current guidance is. We would rather hand you a stale-data warning than a false comfort, and on a barrier shoreline the practical answer is that you leave when you are told to leave regardless of the letter on the map.
On insurance, the state regulator puts the average county homeowners premium at about $3,245 including wind and about $1,809 excluding it. For regional scale, the county immediately east runs about $5,181, the county west about $3,247, and two counties further round the coast run about $2,997 and about $2,486.
Read all of that carefully, because this particular table needs more caution than most. A landlocked county with no coast at all comes in at about $3,512, above both coastal counties here, which tells you the two columns are describing different groups of policies rather than the same policies with a component removed. The excluding-wind populations in this part of the state are also microscopic, in one county a single policy, and the regulator excludes insurers that file as trade secret. This county shows only about 269 owner-occupied policies of the relevant form in the data at all. So use these as rough orientation and get an actual quote on the actual house, with the actual elevation certificate and roof age, before you commit to anything.
On schools we have nothing for you and we would rather say so than repeat a listing site. We could not obtain an authoritative attendance boundary for this address, so we name no schools. Run the exact address through the district's own tool.
What we can tell you about the community itself comes from the developer's own public annual filings, which is a better source than a brochure because it is a regulated disclosure. The pipeline here is about 708 homesites: roughly 224 platted or under development, about 155 in engineering and permitting, and about 329 more entitled beyond that, under a development order that has been in place for years. The builder actively selling here owns about 131 lots by recorded count. So this is a long build-out on a coast that does not build quickly, next to an original village that has been lived in for years. For most buyers that combination, a finished neighbourhood to walk and a long runway still ahead, is the most useful thing about the place.
What you need to know
Buying new construction with someone on your side
Representation is free and the timing is the catch, as above. It is worth more than usual here for two reasons specific to this community. The first is that the jurisdiction of a specific lot is worth about $1,383 a year and nothing you can see on the ground tells you which side it is on. The second is that a coastal purchase turns on documents rather than impressions: the flood zone and base flood elevation for the lot, the elevation certificate, the association's recorded declaration, and what the county requires if a home is substantially damaged.
It is also worth saying what is genuinely good here, because it is unusual on this site. No district assessments of any kind, a tax bill that has fallen about 16 per cent off its peak, current flood maps rather than decade-old ones, and the milder of the two coastal flood designations on the newer phases. Against that, a coastal insurance market that needs a real quote and an evacuation map nobody has touched since 2013.
On the builder, we name only what a primary record supports. D.R. Horton is the homebuilder actively selling here and owns about 131 lots in this community by recorded count; the land developer is a separate long-established Florida land company, and we are not naming entities. We did not search Florida regulatory enforcement records or civil dockets for any builder, so read the absence of any such note as unchecked, not clean. If that matters to you, ask and we will have it pulled properly rather than repeat a rumour.
The rest is the same everywhere and it is not complicated: hire your own independent inspector at pre-drywall, again at final walkthrough, and once more before the one-year warranty expires. On a coastal build, ask that inspector specifically about the wind-borne debris protection, the roof attachment and the elevation of the mechanical equipment. Read the limited warranty booklet before you sign rather than after.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by D.R. Horton, any homebuilder, any developer of WindMark, the City of Port St. Joe, or Gulf County. The builder is identified here because it is a builder 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
WindMark FAQ
What is WindMark Beach?
It is a gulf-front community on the shoreline north of Port St. Joe in Gulf County, with about 708 homesites in the developer's stated pipeline: roughly 224 platted or under development, about 155 in engineering and permitting, and about 329 more entitled beyond that. The land developer is a long-established Florida land company and D.R. Horton is the homebuilder actively selling here, owning about 131 lots in the community by recorded count. The original beachfront village has been in place for years, so part of this community is lived-in and walkable while the newer phases are being built.
Why do two homes here pay such different tax rates?
Because the city limit runs straight through the community, and the split is the opposite of what geography would suggest. We mapped all 519 parcels and they divide cleanly on a single line: about 90 parcels, the original beachfront village nearest to town, are unincorporated, and about 429 parcels, all the newer phases including every lot the builder owns, are inside the city. We verified that three separate ways, through federal census geography, through the state revenue department's taxing authority code on the parcel roll, and through the community identification numbers on federal flood map cases. Two actual tax bills confirm the consequence: the in-city stack totals about 14.53 mills and the unincorporated stack about 11.44, a difference of about 3.09 mills or about 27 per cent. On a home with about $447,000 of taxable value that is about $1,383 a year, in one community, on one address, under one homeowners association.
What causes the 27 per cent gap?
A swap, and it is worth understanding rather than just noting. The independent fire district levies about half a mill and its boundary stops at the municipal line, so unincorporated homes here pay the county stack plus that half mill. Homes inside the city do not pay the fire levy at all; they pay the city's own levy of about 3.59 mills instead. So annexation effectively trades a half-mill fire levy for a three-and-a-half-mill city levy, and the entire gap between the two halves of this community is that one substitution. The arithmetic reconciles in both directions from the two tax bills. Whether the city services you get back are worth the difference is a judgement, but you should at least know which side of the line a specific home is on, because nothing about the address, the signage or the association tells you.
Are there community development district assessments here?
No, and this is genuinely unusual. We looked for one four separate ways and found nothing every time. Four actual tax bills from different parts of the community all print a total of zero for non-ad-valorem assessments. The state auditor general's registry of about 1,671 special districts, including about 989 community development districts, contains none covering this community. The state revenue department's table enumerating every taxing authority in this county does not list one. And the same department's workbook shows blank columns where special district and services unit millage would appear. Across the communities we have written about in Florida, district assessments routinely add one to two and a half thousand dollars a year that never shows up in a rate comparison. Here that line is zero, and it is one of the strongest points in this community's favour.
What is the flood picture?
Every part of this community is in a mapped special flood hazard area, and the important detail is which kind. The flood maps here became effective in 2021, after the 2018 hurricane, so they are current rather than stale. What the builder is selling in the newer phases is the standard coastal zone at a base flood elevation of about nine feet. The wave velocity zone, where the map anticipates breaking waves and construction requirements are considerably stricter, is confined to the unincorporated gulf-front strip, at base flood elevations of about eleven to thirteen feet. So the newer, in-city half pays more tax and sits in the milder flood designation, and the older beachfront half is the reverse. We also found zero map revisions inside this community, controlled against several in each neighbouring county, and exactly one individual map amendment case, which was denied. County-wide there are hundreds of amendment cases and dozens of successful ones, and none of them is here.
Is the evacuation zone information reliable?
Not as current as it looks, and we would rather tell you than let you rely on it. On paper there is an inversion: the original gulf-front village, the part actually in the wave zone, sits in the first evacuation zone, while the newer phases about four miles farther along the same shoreline sit in the second. That looks like a meaningful finding until you check the mapping, and the boundary turns out to follow a regional planning council line rather than anything about the ground. More to the point, every evacuation polygon in this county carries a last-edited date of 2013, five years before the hurricane that came ashore nearby and eight years before the current flood map. The neighbouring county refreshed its zones in 2018. So treat the zone letter here as an administrative artefact rather than a current risk assessment, and ask county emergency management directly what the current guidance is for the specific address.
Before you walk into a sales office
Get your inside track on WindMark Beach
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 side of the city limit a specific lot is on, the projected tax bill at your purchase price, the flood zone and elevation certificate for the lot, the association's dues and recorded documents, and what the builder will actually give on incentives at your price point.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.