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Tucker Bayou, Santa Rosa Beach, Florida

Forty-seven single-family detached lots, plus civic and recreational land, on about 21 acres of unincorporated south Walton County, north of Dog Hobble Lane and east of North County Road 395. The county approved it, an overlay ordinance was adopted, a detailed plan order followed, a site-work permit was issued, and the dirt has been moving since the late spring of 2026. One condition of that approval is why this page is worth your time: homes here are permanently restricted from short-term rental activity. On the 30A corridor that is rare, and it cuts both ways. There is no pricing, there are no floor plans, and no homebuilder has been named in the public record yet.

At a glance

Homes approved

47 single-family detached lots

Site size

About 21 acres, including civic and recreational land

Where

North of Dog Hobble Lane, east of North County Road 395

Jurisdiction

Unincorporated south Walton County, no city

Mailing city and ZIP

Santa Rosa Beach 32459

Short-term rental

Permanently prohibited by the approval

Stage

Site work under way

Recorded plat

None recorded on the records available

Internal street names

None exist yet, because no plat has recorded

Special flood hazard area

Site mapped partly inside

Wetlands

Estuarine and freshwater wetlands on the site

School district

Walton County School District

Homebuilder

Not named in the public record yet Get notified

Community development district

Not confirmed either way Get notified

Pricing

Not released, and none exists yet Get notified

Floor plans

Not released Get notified

Homeowners association dues

Not released Get notified

Sales office or model home

Not announced Get notified

First deliveries

Not announced 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.

Permanently no short-term rentals, and what that really means

The county's approving order limits the project to single-family detached development that is permanently restricted from short-term rental activity. That is a condition of the development order itself, not a house rule in a handbook, and not something a future set of owners can quietly repeal because enough of them fancy the income. It came in attached to the permission to build at all.

To see why that is rare, look at where you are. South Walton and the 30A corridor is one of the most rental-saturated residential markets in the country, and the housing stock was built around that: bunk rooms, pools sized for a party of twelve, four parking spaces, a management sign in the yard. For a visitor that is the product. For a resident it is the central quality-of-life question.

What a permanent prohibition buys is hard to buy any other way here. You get neighbours. The car next door belongs to the same family in February and in July. Saturday sounds like a neighbourhood rather than a hotel corridor. Nobody drags roller luggage past your window at eleven at night on a changeover day. The children on the street in June are the same children in September. Street parking is predictable, and the wear on the common areas is the wear of forty-seven households rather than of forty-seven households plus a continuous rotation of guests with no stake in the place.

The resale argument is genuinely two-sided. A permanent restriction narrows the buyer pool for every house here forever: the investor who would pay a premium for rentable square footage is excluded from your resale, and in a resort market that is a real slice of demand to give up. In exchange you get buyers who want what you want, and a community whose character cannot be rewritten by an owner who never sets foot in it.

So be honest about the second case. If any part of your plan involved covering the mortgage with peak-season weeks, this community cannot do it and never will. That is not a detail to negotiate at the contract table; it is a disqualifier, and better learned now than after a deposit goes hard. Longer-term leasing is a separate question, and the governing documents, when they exist, are what will answer it. Do not infer anything about annual tenancy from the short-term condition alone.

What is approved here

This project is unusually well approved for something this early. On record, as reported: a county final order in the autumn of 2025, an overlay ordinance adopted over the site, a detailed planned-unit-development final order in the winter of 2026, and an issued site-work permit in the spring of 2026. That is both tiers of the county's planned-unit-development process plus the authorisation that lets a contractor move earth. Most communities this early have one or two.

What they approve is forty-seven single-family detached lots with civic and recreational land on about 21 acres. The approval is also unusually prescriptive about how the houses look and sit, because the conditions tie the site to the neighbourhood plan for the adjacent Point Washington area: tree protection, dark-skies lighting so the night sky is not washed out by coach lamps, and a historical pattern book governing architecture. Parking is pushed to the side or rear, front-access garages are set well back behind the house face, and a privacy fence runs along the Dog Hobble Lane boundary.

One honest limit. The order approves single family detached development. It does not use the words for sale anywhere on its face, and no lot has been conveyed because no plat exists to convey one from. For-sale is strongly indicated and nothing in the file points the other way, but this page describes what the order approves rather than making a claim the instrument does not carry.

Where the project actually stands

Site work: actual ground disturbance inside the property line, not a rendering. The clock started in the late spring 2026 window, about two months after the site-work permission issued. Imagery through the late autumn of 2026 shows a coherent north-south corridor of cleared ground down the centre of the parcel with a widened disturbed area off it, which is the signature of a spine road prism plus a stormwater pond and staging. It sits inside the parcel boundary, the land around it reads unchanged, and the same measurement across the two previous autumns shows undisturbed vegetation, so this is neither a neighbour's dirt nor a seasonal artefact.

What has not happened is the plat. The parcel's legal description still reads as unplatted metes-and-bounds land, and the county's recorded-plat index stops short of this project. That negative was tested rather than assumed, by running a known recorded subdivision through the same index first.

The consequences catch people out. There are no internal street names yet, because streets get their names when the plat records. Any street you can see on a map near this site is a pre-existing road serving existing houses, not community inventory, and anyone quoting you a street name inside Tucker Bayou today is inventing it. There are no lot addresses, and no lot can be sold, because the lots do not yet exist as legal objects.

The conditions themselves describe the next steps, which beats anybody's guess. A lot reconfiguration has to be recorded before technical approval of the planned unit development. Fire hydrants become operational once construction of structures begins, and street signs go in once the access roads are developed. So: roads and infrastructure, then a recording event, then the first vertical work. Each is a target subject to change. We also cannot date the first house permit, because this county has no anonymous public building-permit search, so the position on vertical and model-home permits is not established rather than none.

No homebuilder has been named yet

This is a genuine finding rather than a hole in the research. No vertical homebuilder appears anywhere in the public record for this project: not in the site-work permit, not in the county application, not in the hearing file. The parties on file are the landowner and its professional team. The landowner is also the permittee of record, and it is a small local development group based in the 30A area rather than an institutional sponsor. We are not printing its corporate name, because that is not a fact a buyer can use.

The uncertainty that creates is about product. This sponsor could sell finished lots to several custom builders, engage one regional builder, or bring in a national name, and those outcomes produce very different price points and timelines on the same ground. Until a name sits on a record, anyone telling you which is guessing.

Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the developer of this community or any homebuilder later named here. All community information here is compiled from public records and is subject to change.

Living inland of 30A on County Road 395

This site is not on the beach road. It is inland, off the north-south county road that links the coast highway to the main east-west highway through the county, next to the old Point Washington settlement on the bay side. That is a different place from a cottage two blocks from the sand. The beach is a drive rather than a walk. In exchange you are out of the summer crush on the coast road, off the route the rental turnover drives, and among live oaks and pine rather than dune scrub.

Two things define the land here: the bayou system feeding the bay on one side, and the state forest on the other. Point Washington State Forest covers a very large area of pine flatwoods and wetland immediately inland of the corridor, with trails through it, and it is why this part of the county has a hard edge rather than continuous sprawl. For anyone who runs, rides or walks a dog, a working forest at the end of the road beats most amenity packages and carries no assessment.

Then the question everybody asks and nobody answers straight: beach access. Nothing in the public record for this project grants it private, deeded or dedicated beach access of any kind. Access on this coast is a matter of public accesses, paid parking and a long local argument about where the public may sit. If beach access is a reason you are buying, treat it as an open question to be answered in writing by whoever eventually sells you a house, not as something the address implies.

Flood, wetlands and insurance on a bayou site

The property is mapped partly inside the special flood hazard area. That came from a query run over the whole parcel polygon rather than a single centre point, which is the only honest way to do it here: a centroid test on a parcel this shape can return a comfortable answer that is true of one acre and false of the next. Part of the parcel is mapped outside the hazard area, and part falls in a lower-probability flood area. Until lot lines exist and finished elevations are set, nobody can say which category a particular homesite lands in, and anyone giving you one flat answer for the whole community has not looked at the whole polygon.

There are also wetlands on the site, both estuarine and marine wetland and freshwater forested and shrub wetland. The approval carries fill and compensatory-storage conditions, which means the engineering had to quantify the fill placed in the regulated flood area and show that the storage volume displaced is given back elsewhere on site. That is why the stormwater pond is a design feature rather than an afterthought, and it is a decent sign: the flood exposure here has been examined by people with liability rather than waved at.

On insurance, there are two separate exposures. Flood is priced on elevation and mapping: on a lot mapped inside the hazard area a lender will require a policy whose premium turns substantially on the elevation certificate for the finished house, while a lot a few hundred feet away may need none. Windstorm is the other and usually the larger number on this coast, priced on construction, roof and distance from open water rather than on the flood map at all. New construction helps materially: a house built to the current code with a new roof and rated openings is what a wind-mitigation inspection credits. Get real quotes on a specific lot and plan before your deposit goes hard.

The cost stack nobody has priced yet

The first item is the one most often got wrong in Florida. Whether a community development district levies an annual assessment here has not been confirmed from public records, and we are not going to tell you there is none. No district is named in the county's order or in the overlay ordinance item, and a forty-seven-lot project with a local sponsor would not ordinarily carry one. But the county tax collector's list of non-ad-valorem levying authorities was not queried, and that is where the answer lives. A Florida district assessment is non-ad-valorem, so it never appears in a property's ad-valorem tax code and its absence there proves nothing. Make it one of your first questions: the difference between a community with a district and one without can run to hundreds of dollars a month for decades.

Second, a homeowners association. Expect one. The conditions contemplate a perpetual maintenance obligation for buffers and common areas, and with forty-seven homes, preserved wetlands, a stormwater pond and a governed streetscape there is real work for it. Dues have not been released, and a small association has thin reserves by definition, so read the budget and the reserve study rather than the glossy pages.

Third, property taxes, which cannot be quoted while the land is assessed as one undeveloped parcel. Expect the first full tax year on a finished house to jump hard, and note that the homestead exemption and the assessment cap start only once you own, occupy and file for them.

Fourth, insurance, covered above, and often the largest line after principal and interest. Fifth, the thing that will never be on the stack: short-term rental income. If you have been running the numbers on a 30A house with rental revenue in them, take that line out before comparing this community to any other.

Schools

Walton County School District serves the whole county, and that is as far as the record honestly takes us. We are not naming a specific school: assignment runs off a street address, these homesites have none yet, and boundaries get redrawn. If a particular school is a reason you are buying, make it a written condition.

Buying before a sales office opens, with someone on your side

There is no sales office here, no model home and no named homebuilder, which changes how first contact works and makes representation more rather than less important. At this stage your first interaction with whoever eventually sells here is almost always a registration rather than a visit: a form, an enquiry, a name on a list. That is where the representation question gets decided, and most people do not realise it is being decided at all.

The person at the desk in a builder's sales centre works for the builder. That is not a criticism, it is simply who they act for, and it means the only person in the room reading the contract on your behalf is whoever you bring with you.

You are entitled to your own representation, and on new construction it generally costs a buyer nothing extra, because builders budget for a buyer's agent whether or not you bring one. The catch is timing: most will only recognise your agent if that agent is named at your very first registration. Get representation in place first, then register. An interest list is not a contract, a deposit or a reservation; it is early information, and it settles that question before the moment it matters.

The pre-construction contract when the builder is not yet known

Because no plat has recorded, a contract signed early is a contract on a lot whose legal description does not yet exist. Ask in writing what happens if the recorded plat moves lot lines, changes your lot number or changes its dimensions, and what happens to your deposit if it does. Ask the same about flood: if your lot turns out to be mapped inside the hazard area and the elevation requirement raises the finished floor or the insurance cost, whose problem is that.

Then the ordinary pre-construction questions. How the deposit is held and when it goes hard. Whether the price is locked or exposed to cost escalation. What the builder may substitute, and whether that needs your consent. What happens if the schedule slips. What the structural warranty covers and who honours it. Whether you may bring your own inspector at frame stage and again before closing. Whether a lot premium or an incentive is tied to using the builder's own lender.

Two belong specifically here: put the short-term rental restriction in front of your own lawyer, and ask about the architectural pattern book before you fall in love with an elevation.

The honest tradeoffs

In favour: a permanent rental prohibition on the 30A corridor, close to unbuyable elsewhere here; a small forty-seven-home scale with civic and recreational land rather than a five-phase master plan; architectural governance, tree protection and dark-skies lighting; a state forest for a back fence; a position inland of the worst of the seasonal traffic; and an approval stack deep enough that the project's right to exist is not in question.

Against: no price, no plan, no dues and no builder, which is a lot of unknowns to hold; a site partly mapped inside the special flood hazard area, with wetlands, meaning elevation requirements and insurance arithmetic to do lot by lot; an unconfirmed district question; and no resort amenity package, because forty-seven homes cannot support one. If you wanted rental income, this is the wrong community.

Other names this goes by

County and state records call it Tucker Bayou, and there is no separate marketing name. Because the land records still describe the property by metes and bounds rather than by a plat, a records search on the name will not find it.

Questions