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Roan Bridge, St. Cloud, Florida
On the far southeastern shoulder of the Orlando metro, where St. Cloud stops being a town and starts being cattle country, a large tract of old pasture between Eastern Avenue and Old Hickory Tree Road has been approved for a mixed-use neighborhood and permitted for its first phase of site work. The approvals are real and on record. The houses are not. There is no price, no floor plan, no model, no sales office, no street name and no address inside this phase, because none of those things exist yet. What follows is what the record establishes, what it does not, and what to ask.
What is actually on record
Four things are settled and verifiable, and together they put this project past the stage where most announced Florida neighborhoods sit. The City of St. Cloud approved a mixed-use concept plan over this land in 2017, later adopted a development agreement with the landowner by council resolution, and amended that agreement by council action in the summer of 2026. Those are adopted instruments, not recommendations. A preliminary subdivision plan was then approved in the autumn of 2025, fixing where the streets, blocks and drainage go.
Most usefully for judging timing, the first phase carries an issued state environmental resource permit for its site work. In Florida that is the permit you need before mass grading, stormwater construction or utility work can begin on a subdivision, and it was issued in the summer of 2025 for a footprint of about one hundred nineteen acres. That is the clearest public signal that dirt is moving or about to. The paper trail is live too: an off-site utility plan entered city review in the spring of 2026, the first phase's construction plans were still being acted on that summer, and the developer signed a utility agreement with the regional water authority late that summer. This is not a dormant entitlement.
What the record does not yet contain matters just as much. No final plat has been recorded for this phase, so the homesites do not legally exist as separate, saleable parcels with surveyed boundaries, and no addresses have been assigned.
The name, and the other names
This project answers to several names depending on which record you are reading. We use Roan Bridge because it is the common name and the one the approvals use. The permitted first increment of site work is recorded as Roan Bridge Phase I. The whole development is sometimes written as the Roan Bridge PUD or the Roan Bridge mixed-use district, which means the full approved master plan rather than this first residential phase, and the community development district carries the Roan Bridge name too. The apartment component inside the same master plan has its own brand, Creekside at Roan Bridge, which is the rental piece and not the for-sale neighborhood.
One oddity is worth flagging. State permit records here carry a mailing city hundreds of miles away, because that field reflects where the development company keeps its office. The land is inside the City of St. Cloud limits, which we confirmed geographically rather than from a mailing address, and that matters: city limits change both the tax bill and the permitting authority.
Who is developing it, and who is expected to build
The developer of record is DIX Developments, a Central Florida land and mixed-use developer that assembled this ground from nineteen parcels in the autumn of 2021 and carried it through entitlement, the development agreement, the district, the preliminary plan and the site-work permit. Every approval and active city case here is in that company's name.
A national homebuilder, D.R. Horton, holds a purchase contract for the for-sale homesites here and is the expected homebuilder for them. That is the accurate way to say it, and we will keep saying it that way, because the land is still owned by the development company on the current county roll and no homebuilder has taken title on the public record. The contract was reported in early 2025 as structured in two takedowns.
The distinction matters because a contract purchaser is not an owner. Contracts of this kind carry conditions and timelines and can be amended or assigned, so until a deed shows a builder taking title here, the company that eventually builds your house is an expectation rather than a recorded fact. We are not affiliated with the developer or with any homebuilder.
For sale and for rent are two different things here
This is the most important thing to understand here: the approved master plan is genuinely mixed use, and it holds two housing products with two ownership models. The single-family and townhome homesites are fee-simple for-sale product. The developer has stated on the record that the residential neighborhood was specifically designed for fee-simple ownership and that the homebuilder intends to develop it as a for-sale neighborhood. The detached homesites are forty-foot-wide lots, in both front-load and rear-load configurations.
The apartments are not. The master plan also carries a multifamily component, including units above ground-floor retail in a town center and garden-style walk-up buildings, which the developer has said it intends to retain, build and hold as rental under its own separate name. Published unit counts for that component differ across sources, so we will not present one as settled.
Treat that as neighborhood context rather than a warning. But do not let anyone tell you the for-sale homes and the rental apartments are the same thing, and do not let an apartment unit count drift into a conversation about how many houses are being built.
How big the first phase is
The first phase was last described publicly, in early 2025, as roughly four hundred twenty single-family homesites plus about two hundred townhome sites. Treat both as approximate: the preliminary plan approved in the autumn of 2025 superseded the plan those numbers came from, and no plat exists to confirm a count.
This is one phase of a substantially larger approved master plan spanning something on the order of two hundred seventy-plus acres, roughly two hundred thirty-five of them uplands. We deliberately do not publish a total unit count for the whole development, because the figures in circulation do not reconcile.
The master plan also sets aside a site for a future public school serving kindergarten through eighth grade and a site for a city fire station, plus a fourteen-acre lake, trails, parks and on the order of one hundred thousand square feet of commercial, retail and office space in a town center. Each is an entitlement. None is built, and no source we found places either the school site or the fire station site inside the first-phase footprint. They belong to the master plan, not this phase.
Where it sits, and how you get around
The land sits a couple of miles east of downtown St. Cloud, bounded roughly by East Nineteenth Street on the north, Eastern Avenue on the west, Old Hickory Tree Road on the east and Nolte Road to the south. This is the quieter side of town: pasture, oak hammock, ranch fence, and the open sky of the Kissimmee prairie edge rather than the middle of a subdivision belt.
The honest headline about getting around is that every drive that matters goes north or west. Downtown St. Cloud, with its lakefront park on East Lake Tohopekaliga and its small historic main street, is close enough to be the default errand run. Beyond that, Lake Nona and the medical and employment core around it is the nearest large concentration of jobs, reached north on the Narcoossee and Canoe Creek corridors. Downtown Orlando, the airport and the attractions corridor are all metro-scale drives by the Florida Turnpike or US 192.
We will not quote drive times, because we did not measure them and a single number for a commute like this is an off-peak best case. What we will tell you is where the pressure is. The north-south road network on this side of St. Cloud is the binding constraint, and everyone involved knows it. The amended development agreement is built around extending Orange Avenue south to Nolte Road as an alternative north-south route, with the city offsetting much of the developer's roadway cost through mobility fee credits. That road is funded and planned. It is not built. Drive your own commute, at the hour you would drive it.
Schools
The neighborhood falls within the Osceola County school district, which serves the whole county. We deliberately do not name individual schools here: attendance boundaries for a neighborhood with no platted lots and no addresses are not settled, and the district adjusts them as capacity comes online.
The school site in the master plan deserves one clear sentence, because it is easy to misread. A school site is a piece of land set aside. It is not an assigned school, not a commitment to a construction date, and it does not tell you which school a child would attend. If schools matter to your decision, take the question to the district once homesite addresses are active.
Flood, drainage and elevation
Here is the careful version, which is the only honest one. On the current federal flood maps, part of the first-phase footprint is mapped inside the special flood hazard area and most of it is mapped outside, and the piece mapped inside falls in a category where no base flood elevation has been determined. Because no final plat has been recorded and no addresses have been assigned, no individual future home site can be placed inside or outside the mapped hazard area yet. That happens lot by lot, after platting.
Expect the engineered stormwater system this project is permitted to build to change the picture, as it normally does in Florida: the site is graded, ponds and conveyance are built, and the mapped extent is often revised afterwards. Once a homesite is identified, get its flood determination in writing and ask whether a map revision has been applied for.
Insurance reality
This is inland Central Florida, so the dominant exposures are wind and rainfall rather than coastal storm surge. That helps less than buyers expect, because Florida property insurance is priced far more off statewide reinsurance costs than off any one site's hazard profile. A published market estimate for St. Cloud as of 2026 puts average annual home insurance in the region of two thousand four hundred dollars. Treat that as an aggregator estimate across existing stock, not a quote for a house that does not exist yet.
Two things usually help a new-construction buyer: a house built to current code with a new roof generally prices better than the local average, and a wind mitigation inspection typically earns real credits. One works against you. If a home sits on the portion of this land mapped inside the special flood hazard area, a federally backed lender will require a separate flood policy. Get a bindable quote before contract.
Property taxes and the community development district
Because this land is inside the City of St. Cloud rather than unincorporated county, the tax stack includes a city levy on top of the county and school levies. For the 2026 tax year the county adopted a general fund rate of about six point seven mills plus a fire and rescue levy of roughly one mill and a small library levy; the school board adopted a rate in the low five-mill range; the city adopted about five point one mills. Combined, the order of magnitude before exemptions is roughly eighteen to nineteen mills, meaningfully higher than a nearby unincorporated address. Those are the rates adopted in the 2025 budget season and they reset every year.
Separately, and invisibly to all of those figures, a community development district covers this land, established by city ordinance in 2022. Such a district is a special-purpose local government that finances infrastructure by issuing bonds and repays them through annual assessments on the homesites inside it. Those assessments are non-ad-valorem: they never appear in a tax rate and cannot be detected from one.
Here is the current position, with its date, because this is the cost question that matters most here. According to the district's own adopted budget for the fiscal year beginning in October 2026, it carries no debt service fund and no outstanding bonds, and its entire budgeted revenue is a landowner contribution of roughly one hundred eleven thousand dollars. In plain terms: the district exists, the developer pays its administrative cost, and it levies nothing on individual homesites today. It is also absent from the county's published roll of districts that certify such assessments.
Do not read that as a permanent no. The board is still landowner-controlled, as in every Florida district before homes are occupied, and it can issue debt and begin assessing at any point. Ask, at the moment you contract: what is the annual district assessment on this homesite, is it debt service, operations or both, and for how many years? Get it in writing, and never accept an assurance based on a property tax rate, because a tax rate structurally cannot answer it.
Utilities and infrastructure
Water and sewer are available at the property, and the developer has a recorded agreement with the regional water authority serving this part of Osceola County. The unglamorous sequence that precedes anything vertical runs utilities to the site, then mass grading and stormwater, then streets, then houses. The site-work permit and the utility agreement together say it is underway rather than hypothetical.
Growth on this corridor
St. Cloud has been one of Florida's faster-growing small cities for most of the past decade, and southeast Osceola County holds much of the Orlando metro's remaining developable land. So you are not choosing between a quiet rural edge and a built-out suburb. You are choosing a rural edge scheduled to stop being one. Within a few miles there are other approved and permitted residential projects at various stages. New rooftops bring the retail and road widenings missing today; they also bring traffic and a decade of construction.
What has not been released
Plainly, so there is no ambiguity. No pricing has been released for any home here. No floor plans have been released. There is no model home and no sales office open. No opening or launch date has been announced. No final plat has been recorded, so there are no lot numbers, no street names and no house numbers. No homeowners association budget or monthly figure has been published. No district assessment has been set for individual homesites. And no construction start date has been announced.
Those are genuine unknowns rather than omissions, and they are the facts that change first and change fast. Get notified and you will hear each of them from us as it is confirmed.
Buying into a phase that is not platted yet
Pre-construction in Florida is a different transaction from buying a house that exists, and this situation stacks two complications on top of that.
The first is that the homesites are not platted. Until a final plat is recorded there is no legally described lot to be the subject of a contract, so early reservations here are likely to be exactly that: reservations or lot holds against a plan, not binding purchase contracts for an identified parcel. Those arrangements vary enormously in how much they commit either side, and the deposit terms are where the difference lives. Ask whether you are signing a reservation or a purchase contract, whether your money is escrowed and with whom, and what happens to your position if the plan changes when the plat is drawn.
The second is ownership. The expected homebuilder does not own this land yet, so find out who the seller on your contract is and whether the homebuilder has closed on the block your home would sit on. A builder selling a home on land it has contracted for but not yet acquired is not unusual in Florida, but it is a contingency you are entitled to understand.
Beyond those two, the standard Florida new-construction cautions apply. You will be signing the homebuilder's own contract, drafted by its counsel, not the state-promulgated resale form. Deposits are often non-refundable after a short window and may be only partly escrowed, completion dates are targets with broad latitude for delay, many contracts allow price escalation between signing and closing, and most route defect claims into arbitration under rules the builder selected. None of that is unusual, and all of it is more negotiable than buyers assume.
Questions worth asking
Use this when it opens. Who is the seller on my contract, and has the homebuilder closed on my block? Has the final plat been recorded, and what is my lot? Am I signing a reservation or a purchase contract, how much of my deposit is escrowed, and when does it stop being refundable? Is there a price escalation clause, and is it capped? What is the completion window and what extends it? What is the annual district assessment on this homesite, how much is debt service, and for how many years? What is the association budget and monthly figure? Is this homesite mapped inside or outside the special flood hazard area? May I inspect before drywall goes up?
The honest tradeoffs
What you would be buying is the far southeastern edge of a large metro: open country, a small-town lakefront downtown a couple of miles away, and a long drive to most regional job centers. The arguments in favor are concrete. The entitlements are adopted rather than proposed, the first phase has an issued site-work permit rather than a pending application, the plan is genuinely mixed use rather than a bare subdivision, and as of today the district over it carries no bond debt.
The arguments against are equally concrete. The commute is the price of admission, and the road meant to relieve it is funded but not built. The town center, the school site and the fire station site are approved and none is standing. There is no plat, so there is no lot you can point at. The company expected to build the homes does not own the land yet. And the landscape will change over the next decade, improving services and degrading the quiet. This page is for the person weighing a planned community in a growth path with their eyes open.
Get on the Roan Bridge interest list
Join and we will contact you when pricing is released, when floor plans are published, when the plat is recorded and homesites become identifiable, and when homes here become available to reserve. No cost, and you can leave at any time.
How this works, and who we are
Subdiview is a research and referral service. We are licensed in Illinois, not in Florida, and we are not affiliated with the developer of this land, with any homebuilder, with the community development district, or with any association connected to this project. We do not represent buyers in Florida ourselves, and we are not your agent in this transaction.
What we do is straightforward. We track approvals, permits, plats and public records for neighborhoods like this one, we publish what the record establishes and flag what it does not, and when you are ready to act we refer you to a licensed Florida real estate professional who can represent you locally. We are compensated by that professional's brokerage, not by you. You pay us nothing, and you are free to use any agent you like or none at all.
Common questions
Is Roan Bridge selling yet?
No. The land is approved and the first phase has an issued site-work permit, but no price has been released, no floor plans have been released, there is no model home and no sales office, and no opening date has been announced. The interest list exists for the moment any of that changes.
How many homes will be in the first phase?
The first phase was last described publicly in early 2025 as roughly 420 single-family homesites plus about 200 townhome sites. A revised preliminary subdivision plan was approved in autumn 2025 and superseded the plan those counts came from, so treat them as approximate. The first phase is one phase of a larger approved master plan.
Who is building the homes?
A national homebuilder holds a purchase contract for the for-sale homesites and is the expected homebuilder, but the land is still owned by the development company on the current county roll, and no homebuilder has taken title on the record. Until that closing shows up, the builder is a contract purchaser rather than the owner here.
Are these homes for sale or for rent?
The single-family and townhome homesites are fee-simple for-sale product, and the developer has said on the record that the neighborhood was specifically designed that way. Separately, the same master plan includes an apartment component the developer intends to build and hold as rental under its own different name. They are two different things in one master plan.
What are the street names and addresses?
There are none yet. No final plat has been recorded for this phase and no addresses have been assigned, which means there are no lot numbers, no street names and no house numbers in existence. Anyone quoting you a specific address inside this phase today is quoting something that does not exist.
Is the site in a flood hazard area?
Partly. Part of the first-phase footprint is mapped inside the special flood hazard area and most of it is mapped outside. Because no plat has been recorded and no addresses have been assigned, no individual future home site can be placed either way yet. Confirm it lot by lot once the plat is recorded.
Is there a CDD, and what will it cost?
A community development district was established over this land by city ordinance in 2022. As of its own adopted budget for the fiscal year beginning in October 2026, it carries no bonds and no debt service, and its only revenue is a contribution from the landowner, so it levies nothing on individual homesites today. That can change once the district issues debt, so ask what the assessment will be at the time you contract.
Which school district serves it?
The Osceola County school district. The master plan also sets aside a site for a future kindergarten through eighth grade public school, which is an entitlement and not the same thing as an assigned school. Attendance boundaries for an unbuilt neighborhood are not settled, so confirm assignment with the district before relying on it.
Everything above is drawn from City of St. Cloud, Osceola County and State of Florida public records as of October 2026, and from the developer's and the district's own published materials. Approvals, plans, timing, pricing, tax rates, insurance costs and district assessments can and do change, and any date is a target rather than a commitment. Verify anything you intend to rely on with the city, the county, the district and your own licensed professionals.