Coming soon in Downtown Sarasota, FL
625 Palm Avenue
625 South Palm Avenue, downtown Sarasota
This condominium has legally existed since March 2025, and the state's own roll still says it does not. At twelve units there is no prospectus, and the association will never be required to publish anything. The whole record is below.
- Address
- 625 South Palm Avenue
- Size
- 12 units, 5 storeys
- Tax rate
- 14.8815 mills
- Declaration
- Recorded
At a glance
625 Palm fast facts
Every figure below is read from the recorded declaration itself, the county appraiser's folio records and certified rate table, the city permit record including its inspection log, the federal flood and claim files, or the county's hazard layers with a control behind each result. Where the county does not publish something, we say so rather than estimating.
- Record address
- 625 South Palm Avenue, Sarasota, FL 34236
- Filed as
- 625 Palm Avenue, a Condominium
- Size
- 12 units, 5 storeys, one building
- Declaration
- Recorded in March 2025, and readable today
- What the state roll says
- Still not recorded, eighteen months on
- Prospectus required
- No, at twelve units. Short by nine
- Association website duty
- Never attaches. Short by thirteen units
- Ownership share
- One twelfth each, whatever the unit size
- Tax rate
- 14.8815 mills, outside the downtown district
- Flood zone
- X, but the coastal 0.2 percent band
- Ground elevation
- About 10 feet, six below its downtown siblings
- Evacuation level
- A, a category one zone, first ordered out
- Pricing and release dates
- Not published yet
- Association dues and reserves
- Not a public record at any stage
Not published yet
Not published yet
Location: see 625 South Palm Avenue on the map. Figures carry the dates shown and are subject to change.
What the public record actually says
This condominium exists, and the state list everyone relies on says it does not
Almost every pre-construction condominium page you will read, including our own, starts from the same premise: the declaration has not been recorded, so the condominium does not legally exist yet. Here that premise is false. The Declaration of Condominium for 625 Palm Avenue, a Condominium was recorded with the county clerk in March 2025. It runs to 102 pages, it names the association, and we retrieved and read it.
The state's recorded roll does not know. Eighteen months later it still reports this project as unrecorded. That roll, differenced against the statewide filing index, is the only instrument by which anyone can enumerate Florida's pre-construction condominium market. It is how this page, and every page like it, gets built.
It is not a processing lag, and the control settles it. The state roll is current: it carries a Sarasota recording from one month before we pulled it. It also carries two Sarasota condominiums recorded sixteen and seventeen days after this one, both with unit counts and status. The roll processed condominiums recorded later and missed this one. At least three recorded Sarasota condominiums are absent from it, and this is the oldest.
There is a second reason it is easy to miss, and it will catch anyone doing this properly. A complete census of every condominium plat recorded in this county since 2023 does not include this building, because the survey was recorded as an exhibit to the declaration rather than as a separate plat. Three other recently recorded condominiums do appear in that census, so the method works. It simply returns a false negative here. Check the official records party index, not the plat index.
Why this matters to you rather than to a researcher. Everything that follows on this page about your rights and the building's obligations turns on that recording date. The reserve study clock, the turnover backstop and the developer's disclosure duties all run from it, and the state record denies it happened. A buyer, an agent or a lender relying on the state list would conclude there is nothing here yet, and would be eighteen months behind.
Two smaller corrections while we are in the record. The state's version of the name is an abbreviation, not the legal name. The recorded instrument and the county roll both carry 625 Palm Avenue, a Condominium, and that is what will appear on a deed. And the sponsor is not local, though the state record is the only one that suggests otherwise: the county owner record and all four city permits give a Colorado address.
Take these four to the sales office: the recorded declaration with all exhibits, which is public and which you should read before you sign anything; confirmation of the recorded unit designation on your specific unit, because the county's address list numbers these units differently from the declaration; the proposed association budget and reserve schedule; and the construction timetable measured against the permit record rather than the brochure.
What this actually costs
The smallest home pays what the largest pays, forever, because the declaration says so
Start with the clause that governs this building's economics, because it is unusual and it is permanent. Article VII of the recorded declaration states that the developer has not considered the size of the unit in apportioning common expenses or ownership, and that each unit has an undivided one twelfth share of the common elements and common surplus. Twelve units, twelve equal shares, regardless of how big each home is.
Two things follow, and both are checkable. First, it explains something odd on the tax roll: all twelve unit folios are assessed at an identical $280,000. The assessor allocates a recorded but unbuilt condominium's land value across the unit folios by the declaration's own ownership shares, so equal shares produce identical assessments. That flat figure is not a placeholder. It is the developer's own formula applied to dirt.
Second, and this is the one to price. Common expenses are apportioned on the same one twelfth basis, so the smallest home in this building will carry exactly the same share as the largest, permanently, unless the declaration is amended. Most Florida declarations apportion by unit size or by a schedule of percentages. This one expressly declines to. If you are buying at the smaller end of the mix you are cross subsidising the larger end by the developer's drafting, and you should price that before you fall in love with a floor plan.
The flat assessment itself is ordinary, so nobody should read it as a red flag. Across every vacant coded condominium unit folio in this county, 68 of them spanning 21 condominiums, the value is identical within each condominium in all 21 cases. What is unusual here is the size of the number, not its flatness.
On the tax rate, this is the cleanest of the three downtown sites we have looked at. Total 14.8815 mills: the school board at 6.0950 across three lines, the city at 3.2730 plus 0.1348 of debt, the county at 3.2273 plus 0.0667 of debt, emergency medical services at 0.7300, the public hospital board at 1.0420, water management at 0.1831, mosquito control at 0.0520, a trail debt line at 0.0382 and the inland navigation district at 0.0394. The school board is 41 per cent of the bill and 1.89 times the county's own operating levy.
And here the downtown district question is closed, which it is not at either sibling. Four blocks north, one site sits inside a district levying two extra mills on the land, where a census found no residential condominium units at all and nobody can say which rate the finished homes will pay. Here the twelve unit folios already exist and already carry the plain city code. There is no two mill uncertainty to price. That certainty is worth about $2,638 a year on a comparable unit, and here it is a fact rather than a hope.
What the building costs today, and what it will cost. Each unit folio is billed about $4,167 a year on its $280,000 assessment, so roughly $50,000 across the condominium, all of it currently paid by the developer. Using the permit's own declared construction value plus the land the roll already carries as a floor, the first full year after completion is about $22,022 per unit. That is a floor rather than an estimate.
The better guide is directly across the street. A seventeen unit boutique condominium opposite, completed in 2018, has a median assessed value of about $3,323,300 and a median of about $878 per square foot, and bills about $49,453 a unit a year. If the finished homes here assess anywhere near their immediate neighbour, the real per unit figure is closer to $49,500 than to $22,000. Publish the floor as a floor and the neighbour as a neighbour, and do not let anyone blend them into a single friendly number.
The homestead exemption is close to irrelevant at this price point. It saves a flat $591.70 a year at any assessed value at or above $75,000. That is 14.2 per cent of the bill on the folios as they stand today, 2.7 per cent at the construction cost floor, and about 1.2 per cent at the neighbour's median. It does not scale with the home. The cap on future assessment growth is genuinely valuable over time; the first year cash saving is not.
One line we will not print. Non ad valorem assessments in this county sit behind a tax collector that blocks automated retrieval, so we could not read this parcel's lines. Every figure above is the ad valorem bill only. This county has no ad valorem community development districts at all.
The compliance clock
The only clock in this series already running, on a building that does not exist yet
Since the Surfside collapse Florida has built a hard timetable around structural inspection and reserve funding. On every other pre-construction page we have written, the clocks have not started, because the condominium has not been created. Here it has.
The reserve clock is running. A structural integrity reserve study is due on a ten year cycle measured from the creation of the condominium. This condominium was created in March 2025, so the first study falls due by March 2035. The building is five storeys, comfortably over the three storey trigger.
Read that as the advantage it is. By the time the first study is due, this building will be roughly six to eight years old on any plausible schedule, so its first structural reserve study lands early in its life rather than late. At most condominiums that cycle begins when the building is already finished and occupied. Here a buyer gets the study sooner, relative to the building's age, than the statute usually delivers it.
The turnover clock is running too, and it has a hard outer date. Control passes to owners at the first of several triggers, and the backstop is seven years from the recording of the declaration, which is March 2032. None of the percentage triggers can have started, because not one unit has been conveyed. A search of the clerk's records on the condominium's own name returns exactly one instrument: the declaration itself. All twelve folios remain in the developer's name eighteen months on.
The funding inversion is the same everywhere and sharper at this size. Before turnover the developer must obtain an inspection report and deliver studies covering roof, structure, fireproofing, plumbing, electrical, waterproofing, windows, elevators, heating and cooling, the pool, the pavement and the drainage, and may not vote to waive reserves. Nothing requires the developer to put a dollar into the reserve. At twelve units, the first real reserve contribution comes from twelve owners, each carrying one twelfth of it by the equal share clause. Twelve people funding a five storey concrete building's first reserve is a materially thinner base than twenty-seven or a hundred and fifty.
The milestone inspection is the one clock that cannot be dated, and the rule most people quote is the repealed one. Current law sets the first milestone inspection at thirty years from the certificate of occupancy, with twenty-five available only where the local enforcement agency determines that local conditions, including proximity to salt water, require it. A full text search of the entire city code returns the word milestone exactly once, in an unrelated article about wastewater permits, and the city publishes forms with no age threshold and no ordinance. On the earliest defensible completion, that is a first inspection due by 2058 at the statutory default or 2053 if the city ever decides. We publish both.
Now what a buyer can and cannot see, which is genuinely better here than at either sibling. Because the declaration is recorded, you can read it today: the unit boundaries, the one twelfth share schedule, the common and limited common elements, the parking allocation of two covered stalls per unit, and the amenity commitment. It is a public document. That is a real advantage and you should use it.
What still does not exist is the part that matters most over time. No prospectus, because the building is below twenty units. No association website, and no obligation ever to have one, because it is below twenty-five. No budget with actual rather than projected figures, no reserve study until 2035, no inspection history, no claims history, no assessment history, and no third party sale on any unit against which to test a price. The ordinary way a resale buyer in 2031 would check this association's finances, by opening its website, will not exist, because the law that creates that duty starts at twenty-five units and this building has twelve.
What to demand in writing before your rescission period closes: the recorded declaration with every exhibit; the proposed budget with its reserve schedule; the developer's stated position on funding reserves before turnover; whether the association will voluntarily maintain a website and publish its records despite never being required to, which tells you a great deal about who you are dealing with; and the construction timetable measured against the permit record.
Get notified when the first inspection is logged
The permit has been live for eighteen months and the city has recorded none.
The area
Six feet lower than its siblings, first out in an evacuation, and a street of primary homes
This address is not the same as the downtown sites four blocks north, and the differences are in the federal data rather than anyone's opinion. All three read zone X. Only this one is the shaded X, the 0.2 per cent annual chance coastal flood hazard band, against the minimal hazard designation at the other two. Ground elevation here is about 10 feet against roughly 15 and 16 there. It is still outside the special flood hazard area, so flood insurance is not federally required and rates remain favourable.
The evacuation picture is materially worse, and it is the most useful single fact on this page. Evacuation level A, a category one zone, modelled for a 10 foot surge. Both sites four blocks north are level C, a category three zone. This building is in the first area ordered out, in the weakest storm. Florida defines the coastal high hazard area as the category one surge zone, so on that definition this site qualifies, though the county publishes no polygon under that label and we did not confirm it adopts the definition.
The city is building it as though it were in a mapped flood zone, which tells you what the enforcement agency thinks. The permit sets a minimum finished floor elevation of 12 feet against ground of roughly 10, requires a final finished floor certificate, opened and approved a federal flood review track, and imposes flood opening and elevation certificate conditions written for mapped zones. The building four blocks north, on the same city's permit form, carries no minimum finished floor elevation and no certificate requirement at all. Two downtown Sarasota condominiums, one enforcement agency, opposite treatment.
The postcode claim record corrects the two storms everyone names. This postcode has recorded about 1,179 federal flood insurance claims and roughly $108.4 million paid across the life of the programme, of which 744 claims and about $100.2 million came in 2024 alone. Within that year the September storm produced 514 claims and about $93.7 million while the October storm that actually made landfall here produced 210 and about $5.0 million. The storm that missed out-paid the landfall roughly nineteen to one, and the 2022 hurricane that dominates Florida insurance conversation produced eight claims here in the whole year.
The usual caveat applies with much less force here, and we will not pretend otherwise. Those claims are postcode wide and concentrate in the low lying bayfront. At about 15 or 16 feet the sites four blocks north are plainly not where they came from. At about 10 feet, in the coastal band and in evacuation level A, this address is meaningfully closer to that population. Price flood cover on its merits rather than skipping it because no lender demands it.
On schools, this address assigns to an elementary school, a middle school and a high school that match the site on Main Street and differ at all three levels from the tower on Cocoanut Avenue. So of the three downtown sites, two share a school set and the northernmost is entirely different. Confirm with the district before you contract, because the published boundary layers carry older revision dates.
Ownership across the street is the best answer on this page to who your neighbours will be. The seventeen unit boutique condominium directly opposite, completed in 2018, is 94 per cent homesteaded, has no entity owners at all, and has seventeen distinct owners for seventeen units. It is the most owner occupied building in the entire downtown census.
Read that as the argument it is. A boutique Palm Avenue building of this size, once it has had time to season, is a street of primary homes rather than an investor float. Nobody across the road holds more than one unit. Across the wider downtown census of 634 units in seven completed buildings there are 621 distinct owners. If you are buying to live in it, this is the part of the county where the people around you are most likely doing the same.
What you need to know
Buying pre-construction with someone on your side
Representation costs you nothing and the timing is the catch: in a pre-construction sales gallery your agent generally has to be with you or named at your very first contact for the registration to stand. Sort it out before you call.
The case for it here is sharper than on any other page in this series. At twelve units no prospectus is required and the association will never have to publish anything. The documents you are handed at contract, inside a short rescission window, are close to the entirety of what you will ever be given without asking. Somebody experienced should be reading them and asking for what is missing.
The second reason is the one this page opened with. The state's own roll reports this condominium as unrecorded when it has existed since March 2025. If the record that governs your reserve clock and your turnover backstop is wrong in the public database, it is worth having someone verify the recorded instrument directly. It is a public document and it can be pulled.
Know what the statute gives you. On a developer sale you are entitled to the condominium documents, and you have a rescission right measured in days from the later of signing or delivery of those documents. The first ten per cent of your deposit is held in escrow, and above ten per cent the statute permits the developer to use the money for construction once work has begun. We did not search Florida regulatory enforcement records or civil dockets for any builder, developer, contractor or land-holding entity, so read the absence of any such note as unchecked, not clean.
The rest is specific to a small building. Ask how the roof, the lift and the exterior are scheduled in the reserve study, because on twelve owners those three items are the whole risk. Ask what design wind speed and opening protection the plans are sealed to, and ask for the finished floor elevation against the permit's twelve foot minimum. Confirm the recorded unit designation on your contract, because the county's address list numbers these units differently from the declaration. Get an independent inspection before closing and use the one year window afterwards. And read the limited warranty before you sign.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by LV7 Palm Development, any homebuilder, any developer of 625 Palm, the City of Sarasota, or Sarasota County. The developer is identified here because it is the developer of record in the state condominium filing and in the recorded declaration, 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, flood 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
625 Palm FAQ
Is 625 Palm Avenue actually recorded?
Yes. The Declaration of Condominium for 625 Palm Avenue, a Condominium was recorded with the county clerk in March 2025, runs to 102 pages, and we retrieved and read it. The condominium legally exists, its association is named in the instrument, and its twelve units carry folios on the county tax roll. The reason almost nobody knows this is that the state division's recorded roll still reports the project as unrecorded, eighteen months later.
Is the state record just lagging?
No, and the control is decisive. The state's recorded roll is current: it carries a Sarasota recording from one month before we retrieved it, and recordings from the three months before that. It also carries two Sarasota condominiums recorded sixteen and seventeen days after this one, both with unit counts and status. So the roll processed condominiums recorded later and missed this one. There is a second reason it is easy to miss: the survey here was recorded as an exhibit to the declaration rather than as a separate condominium plat, so a search of the plat index returns a false negative too. Anyone checking this address the two obvious ways would conclude no condominium exists.
How many units, and does that change my rights?
Twelve units, five storeys, one building, agreed by three independent sources: the recorded declaration, the city construction permit's structured fields, and the twelve unit folios on the tax roll. There is a thirteenth folio but it is the common element parcel, valued at zero, so do not count it as a unit. Twelve is below two thresholds that matter. More than twenty units would require the developer to deliver a prospectus before you contract, and this is short by nine. Twenty-five or more would require the association to maintain a website and post its budget, contracts, insurance policies and inspection reports, and this is short by thirteen. That second one never attaches at this size, so there will never be a place to go and read this association's finances.
Why is every unit assessed at the same value?
Because the declaration says so, and this is worth understanding before you buy. Article VII states that the developer has not considered the size of the unit in apportioning common expenses or ownership, and that each unit has an undivided one twelfth share. The assessor allocates a recorded but unbuilt condominium's land value across the unit folios by the declaration's own ownership shares, so twelve equal shares produce twelve identical assessments. The consequence is permanent and it is not about taxes: the smallest home in this building will pay exactly the same monthly assessment as the largest, forever, unless the declaration is amended. Most Florida declarations apportion by size or by a schedule of percentages. This one expressly declines to.
What is the state of construction?
The master construction permit was issued in the spring of 2025 with a declared value of $14,397,630 across 39,736 square feet, after fourteen months in review. Eighteen months after issue, the city has logged no inspections at all against it. The only two inspection entries at the address belong to the site staging permit: one failed siltation control and one closed without an inspection being performed. For comparison, the tower four blocks north, permitted eleven months earlier, has logged 291 inspections. What stands on this site is a fenced, cleared lot. The permit runs into 2028.
Is it in a flood zone?
Technically no, and the detail matters more here than at the other downtown sites. The parcel is in zone X and outside the special flood hazard area, so there is no federal requirement to carry flood insurance. But the subtype is the 0.2 per cent annual chance coastal band, not the minimal hazard designation the sites four blocks north carry, and ground elevation here is about 10 feet against roughly 16 there. The evacuation level is A, a category one zone, which is the first area ordered out in the weakest storm. And the city is building it as though it were in a mapped flood zone: the permit sets a minimum finished floor elevation of 12 feet, requires a final finished floor certificate, opened a federal flood review track, and imposes flood opening conditions before occupancy. The building four blocks north, on the same permit form from the same city, has none of those requirements.
Be first in line
Get on the 625 Palm interest list
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 contact with the sales gallery, and who will get you the answers this page could not: the recorded declaration with every exhibit, the proposed association budget and reserve schedule, the unit mix and which recorded unit designation your contract names, whether the association will publish its records voluntarily, the real construction timetable, and pricing as soon as it exists.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.