LKR at Lido Beach

The tax assumption about barrier islands is wrong here, and it is worth a paragraph. Lido Beach has no millage code of its own. All 1,246 parcels on this street sit in the plain city code at 14.8815 mills across twelve authorities, while Golden Gate Point, a ten block peninsula, has a dedicated code at 16.0862 and St Armands has one too. A Gulf front address pays the cheapest of the city's rates.

On this building's own recorded prices that works out as follows. At the median recorded sale of about $11,750,000 the ad valorem bill is roughly $174,900 a year. The same price inside the Golden Gate Point code would run about $189,000 and inside the downtown improvement district about $198,400, so this address saves roughly $14,200 and $23,500 a year against those two. At the lowest recorded sale the bill is about $80,400 and at the highest about $208,300.

The homestead exemption is close to irrelevant at these values. It saves a flat $591.70 a year at any assessed value at or above $75,000, which is about 0.34 per cent of a bill at the median sale and 0.28 per cent at the highest. The assessment growth cap that travels with it is the part worth having over a decade. The county publishes no per parcel split between the county and school portions, so we computed the saving from the rate table's own school columns.

Now the thing that will surprise anyone who looks up this parcel today. An eleven storey building with a declared construction cost of about $148,073,000, which passed its building final in the summer, sits on the current roll with an improvement value of zero, a new construction value of zero, no year built, no storey height and no living units, at exactly the same value as the year before. The whole 65 unit building is currently taxed as land, at about $395,400 for the year, or roughly $6,100 a unit.

That is a lien date artefact rather than a bargain, and the correction is arithmetic. The roll was struck on the first of January, before a single unit had closed and before the building had any occupancy certificate. Once 65 units land on the next roll at anything near the recorded sale prices, the building's ad valorem bill moves by an order of magnitude. Budget from what units actually traded at, not from what the parcel shows today.

We also cannot give you an assessed to sale ratio for this building, and we are not going to invent one. No unit here has ever been on a tax roll. What can be measured is the street: twelve qualified arm's length resales on Benjamin Franklin Drive in the last year run a median of 75.7 per cent of sale price, in a range from 65.9 to 91.2 per cent. Those are buildings completed between the mid seventies and 1980, so their assessments are market driven rather than construction driven, and that band does not automatically transfer to a new tower.

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.

This is the most regulated site in the series and we are going to set it out rather than summarise it. Queried at seven points across 645 feet of Gulf frontage, this one parcel returns four different base flood elevations across two zone families: 13 feet at the water's edge, 11 a little inland, 10 in the centre and 9 at the street. The federal and county maps agree with each other at every one of the seven points. Every previous site in this series returned a single answer.

A fifth number appears in the city's own file and matches none of the four. The permit states the design basis using a figure that the federal and county maps do not return anywhere on this parcel. Two official records disagree and we are reporting both rather than choosing. What is not in dispute is the response: the permit sets the bottom of the lowest horizontal structural member at 17 feet, which is four to eight feet of freeboard depending which mapped value you measure from.

Ground elevation does something here that it has not done anywhere else. Seven lidar points run from about 4.7 feet down to below zero at the seaward edge. The buildable body of the site sits between about 4.1 and 4.7 feet, which is the same band as Golden Gate Point and Siesta Key. What is different is that this parcel keeps going down to the waterline.

Four regulatory lines cross this single site, which is a first. The state coastal construction control line runs roughly through the middle of the parcel, about 330 feet in from the Gulf edge, so about the seaward half sits inside state coastal construction jurisdiction. The county's own beach setback line sits a further 160 feet seaward. The wave action line crosses. And the boundary between the two flood zone families runs through it as well. This is the first parcel in the series that the control line, the wave action line or a velocity zone touches at all.

The evacuation answer is the same as the bay side of the city, which surprises people. Level A, a category one zone, modelled for a ten foot surge, identical to Golden Gate Point. On ground of about four and a half feet, a ten foot surge is five to six feet of inundation in the weakest storm that exists. Florida treats a category one surge zone as the coastal high hazard area. One data warning: the county's evacuation coverage stops at the waterline, so the Gulf front test point returns no polygon at all and reads as having no designation. Snap inland before concluding anything.

On federal coastal barrier designation, which affects whether federal flood insurance is available at all, the answer is clean and close. The parcel is not inside any coastal barrier resources unit and not inside an otherwise protected area, so federal flood insurance availability is unaffected. The nearest such boundary sits about 820 feet away. That is the first time in this series the answer has been close enough to be worth saying.

And the postcode claim record comes with a caveat that is itself the finding. This Gulf front island shares a postcode with downtown Main Street, eight blocks inland on ground sixteen feet higher. That postcode has recorded about 1,179 federal flood insurance claims and roughly $108.4 million paid across the life of the programme, with 744 claims and about $100.2 million in 2024 alone. Within that year the September storm that missed produced 514 claims and about $93.7 million against the October landfall's 210 and about $5.0 million, roughly nineteen to one on money. The 2022 hurricane produced eight claims in the whole year.

On who your neighbours will be, we can measure the street but not this building. Across 1,094 condominium units on Benjamin Franklin Drive there are 1,067 distinct owners, the largest single holding is three units, 29.1 per cent are homesteaded and 42.2 per cent are held by entities or trusts. No occupancy figure exists for this building yet and any that is quoted to you is an artefact of an assessment date that preceded every closing. Schools here are Southside Elementary, Booker Middle and Booker High; confirm with the district before you contract.