Mira Mar

The land under this project carries the highest millage code in the county. Total 16.8815 mills across thirteen authorities, because the downtown improvement district bolts a single flat 2.0000 mills onto the plain city rate of 14.8815. That 2.0000 is exactly the statutory ceiling, taken in full. The school board is the largest single item at 6.0950 across three lines, which is thirty-six per cent of the whole bill.

And a residential buyer here will almost certainly never pay it. This is the inversion. The improvement district is not a boundary that catches whatever stands inside it. It is a levy applied folio by folio, and the county applies it to commercial folios. Two completed condominium towers stand physically inside the district footprint, and all 173 of their residential unit folios are assessed at the plain city rate while their commercial and common folios carry the district rate. Same buildings, two codes, split by what each folio is used for.

We also want to correct something we published earlier in this series. We wrote that no residential condominium units exist inside the downtown improvement district. As a statement about folios that is exactly right and still is. As a statement about the ground it is wrong: 240 homes stand inside the district today, 173 of them condominium units. The accurate sentence is that no residential condominium folio in this county is assessed at the district rate.

So the practical arithmetic runs the other way from the headline. On the established practice at the two nearest precedents, a residential unit at this address should be assessed at 14.8815 rather than 16.8815 from the day the declaration records, a two mill reduction worth about $2,072 a year on a million dollar unit. The commercial space and the historic building will stay in the higher code. Get the expected assessment code in writing rather than trusting either number.

The homestead exemption is noise at these values. It saves a flat $691.70 a year in the district code and $591.70 in the plain city code, at any assessed value at or above $75,000. On the median unit at the completed building one block north that is about four per cent of the bill, and on a top floor unit about 1.4 per cent. The two mill code difference is worth three and a half times the entire exemption.

On what the site itself is worth, the gap is the largest we have measured. Two purchases totalling about $24,843,000 against a current assessed value of about $12,325,900, so the assessor carries the assembled site at 49.6 per cent of what was paid for it, three years after the larger purchase. Land value and entitlement value diverge: the roll is valuing a 1922 building about to come down, not an approved eighteen storey scheme.

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 practical version: the headline rate is the highest in the county and is probably not your rate. The association budget is the real unknown, and on two towers sharing a podium with a restored historic building it will be the number that decides your carrying cost. Get the budget and the reserve schedule in writing.

This is the most interesting hazard result in the series, and it corrects something we have published about downtown Sarasota. Queried at five points, this one parcel returns three different federal flood answers: AE with a base flood elevation of eight feet at the centre, shaded X at two corners and unshaded X at two more. The ground falls about four and a half feet across the site, from 10.8 feet at one corner to 6.2 at another, and the zone boundary follows the fall.

At the middle of the site that puts the ground below the base flood. About 6.6 feet against a base flood elevation of 8.0, so roughly a foot and a half under, on a panel that took effect in 2024. At the south west corner it is about 1.8 feet under. The county's own layer agrees with the federal one at the centre, which does not always happen.

The evacuation picture is where the downtown assumption breaks completely. Evacuation level A, a category one zone, modelled for a ten foot surge. That is identical to the Golden Gate Point peninsula on every measure and nothing like Main Street eight blocks inland, which is level C, category three and eighteen feet, on ground 13.5 feet higher. A category one surge zone is the coastal high hazard area on the statutory definition. Two downtown Sarasota addresses about a kilometre apart, and they are not in the same risk conversation.

On other pages in this series we print a caveat that postcode wide flood claims come from low lying ground rather than from the subject parcel. This is the first building where the two point the same way. This 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. This parcel sits below its own base flood elevation, inside that postcode. No velocity zone or wave action line touches the site, which is the one point in its favour.

Within that year the damage came from the storm that missed rather than the one that landed. The September 2024 storm produced 514 claims and about $93.7 million here; the October storm that actually made landfall in this county produced 210 and about $5.0 million, so the one that missed out-paid the landfall nearly nineteen to one. The 2022 hurricane that dominates Florida insurance conversation produced eight claims in this postcode in the whole year. Ask what design wind speed and finished floor elevation the plans are sealed to.

On schools this address does something none of the others did. It returns the same three schools as a building a kilometre away with the opposite hazard profile and a different millage code. Seven buildings in this series have now produced four distinct school sets rather than seven. Confirm with the district before you contract.

The best read on who buys at this end of Palm Avenue is the completed tower one block north. Of its 39 units, 43.6 per cent are somebody's homesteaded permanent residence, 38 of the 39 have distinct owners and the largest single holding anywhere in the building is two units. Thirty-eight and a half per cent are held by entities or trusts. That is a resident building rather than an investor block, and it is the most useful thing on this page about your future neighbours.

One last number, because it is quoted loosely everywhere. The assessor carries that building's units at a mean of 77 per cent of what buyers actually paid, but the range runs from 53 per cent to 109 per cent, and the steepest discounts are on the most expensive units rather than spread proportionally. Anyone quoting you a single rule of thumb for assessed value against price is quoting the middle of a distribution that is twice as wide at the ends.