Cassata Oaks, Venice, Florida

At a glance

Homes planned

60 single-family homes

Lot mix

50 standard lots and 10 estate lots

Site size

About 40 acres

Owner of record

M/I Homes

City

City of Venice, Sarasota County

Street

Auburn Oaks Circle, off North Auburn Road

Water and sewer

City of Venice water, sewer and reuse

Site status

Cleared and graded, ponds dug

Pricing

Not yet released Get notified

Floor plans

Not yet released Get notified

Sales center

Not yet announced Get notified

Homeowners association dues

Not yet released 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.

About the community

Cassata Oaks is sixty single-family homes on roughly forty acres, divided into fifty standard lots and ten estate lots. The lot mix is the detail worth holding onto, because the ten estate lots are not scattered through the plan. They sit along the southern edge, each with its own pond, which is both the premium position in the community and the position closest to the horse farm. More on that below, because it cuts both ways and a buyer deserves both halves.

The approvals ran the normal course. The land came into the City of Venice and was rezoned to a single-family residential category in the late summer of 2024, on an adopted ordinance rather than a recommendation. Site work was authorised in 2025, and the county assigned addresses in January 2026 on a single private street, Auburn Oaks Circle, entered from North Auburn Road. Addresses are a sharper signal than most people realise: a county does not hand out house numbers for a project that is not happening.

What has not happened yet is the plat recording. The final plat is the instrument that legally creates the sixty individual lots, and until it records nobody can close on one. Only a preliminary plat exists today. So the honest status is a site that is physically ready and legally not quite there, which is a very normal place for a community to be about two or three quarters before it opens.

M/I Homes owns the land outright and is doing the horizontal work itself rather than buying finished lots from a developer. It paid about 130,000 dollars a lot for the raw ground in early 2026. That figure is worth knowing, because land basis is the floor under everything that follows: nobody buys dirt at that price to sell cheap houses on it. It is not a price and should not be read as one, but it does tell you which half of the Venice market this community will land in.

Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by M/I Homes. M/I Homes and its community names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here for identification only. All community information is compiled from public records and is subject to change.

The horse farm next door, which is the whole story

Directly against the southern boundary is Fox Lea Farm, a working equestrian show venue that has been there for decades. It is not a paddock with a few horses. It runs more than forty events a year, and its winter calendar includes a nine-week tour that brings competitors, trailers, grooms and spectators to the site for most of January, February and into March. The 2027 tour is already published as running from late January into the third week of March.

Here is the part that matters if you are choosing a lot. Every Friday night of that tour, the farm runs an evening show-jumping class under lights, with amplified commentary and music. That is nine consecutive Friday nights of stadium lighting and a public-address system immediately beyond the southern property line, which is exactly where the ten estate lots are. In the other nine months it is far quieter, and even in season a Tuesday is nothing like a Friday. But if you buy an estate lot and expect silence on a February evening, you will be unhappy, and nobody at a sales desk is going to lead with that.

The city record shows this was taken seriously during approval rather than waved through. The perimeter walls on the south and east sides were raised from six feet to eight. A hundred-foot natural buffer along the boundary is being retained as screening, with the existing scrub deliberately left in place rather than cleared and replanted. The internal road right-of-way was narrowed from sixty feet to fifty specifically to make room for that buffer. And each estate lot gets its own pond along the edge, which you can see dug in the most recent aerial imagery. That is a real design response, and it is a better signal than any marketing claim about privacy.

There is also a straightforwardly good side to this, and it is the reason the community exists at all. Fox Lea is why this land stayed open. A previous project on this same ground, under an older name, was proposed and died after 2015 in the face of the farm and its neighbours. A working show farm on your southern boundary is agricultural land that is not going to become two hundred townhouses, which in this part of Sarasota County is worth something permanent. You are buying a quiet green edge with nine loud Fridays attached. Decide with your eyes open and pick your lot accordingly.

Location and what is actually nearby

Border Road runs along the township line at the northern edge of the Venice city area, and North Auburn Road drops south from it toward Venice proper. The practical geography is good: you are inland of the congestion but close to all of it. Downtown Venice, with its genuinely intact 1920s main street, its restaurants and its theatre, is a short drive south-west, and Venice Beach and Caspersen Beach are a little beyond that. Caspersen is the one people drive past the pretty beaches for, because it is where the shark teeth wash up.

The Legacy Trail is the local amenity that changes daily life more than any clubhouse would. It is a paved rail-trail running from Venice up toward Sarasota, and its southern extension put a genuinely useful bike route within reach of this area. North of here is Wellen Park and the Atlanta Braves spring training complex at CoolToday Park, which has become the area's event and restaurant cluster. I-75 is east, giving you Sarasota in one direction and Port Charlotte and Fort Myers in the other. Sarasota Memorial has a hospital campus in Venice, which matters to a lot of buyers here.

The honest counterpoint is that this is Venice, and Venice is busy in season. From January through March the traffic on the main routes roughly doubles, restaurants need reservations, and the beach parking fills by mid-morning. Residents learn the back roads and the off-peak hours. If you are moving from a northern state and visiting in February, you are seeing the worst of the traffic and the best of the weather at the same time, which is a confusing basis for a decision.

What it will cost beyond the mortgage

Property tax, and the city line. This parcel is inside the City of Venice, not in the surrounding county, and that is a correction worth money rather than a technicality. City parcels totalled about 14.93 mills in the 2025 tax year against about 11.47 mills for the county's other areas, a gap of roughly three and a half mills. On 500,000 dollars of taxable value that is in the region of 1,700 dollars a year extra, every year. You get city water, sewer, reuse water and city services in exchange, which is a fair trade, but it should be in your budget from the start rather than discovered on the first bill. The 2026 rates were not yet published when this page was written. Florida's homestead exemption, set statewide by Florida law and the state constitution rather than by any county, shelters 51,411 dollars of assessed value on a primary residence.

Community development district fees, and why this one has none. Across much of Florida a new community carries a district assessment on top of property tax for decades, repaying bonds that funded the roads and pipes. Cassata Oaks does not appear on the county's list of districts that levy such assessments. We checked that against the list itself, because a district assessment never shows up in a property's tax code and you genuinely cannot infer its absence from one. The comparison that makes this concrete: the same builder's other Venice community about a mile north does sit inside a district, which holds well over a hundred acres there. Same builder, same town, materially different carrying cost. One caveat stated plainly - districts are usually created at or just before platting, and this plat has not recorded, so this is true today rather than promised forever.

Insurance. This is a coastal city and insurance is a serious line item, not a footnote. The state insurance regulator put the average Sarasota County homeowners premium including wind at about 3,457 dollars, on data as of the end of March 2026. A new home built to current code, with a new roof and a wind mitigation inspection, typically prices below the average of the surrounding housing stock, sometimes well below, because so much of that average is older roofs. Get a real quote on a specific plan before you commit, and ask what the deductible is as a percentage rather than a number.

Flood, stated precisely. About a quarter of this tract is mapped inside the special flood hazard area on the map that took effect in the spring of 2024, and the centre of the site falls inside it, with base flood elevations in the ten to thirteen foot range. We tested that against the whole parcel outline rather than a single point, which matters: a single rounded point returned nothing at all because of a known gap in the data, and only the full outline plus a control query gave the real answer. So some lots here will require flood insurance as a condition of a mortgage and some will not, and which is which depends on the finished grade and the elevation certificate for your specific home. Ask for the elevation certificate. On new construction the pad is usually built up, and a finished floor well above the base flood elevation is what drives the premium down.

One genuine offset most buyers never hear about. The City of Venice participates in the federal community rating programme at a strong level, which earns a 25 percent discount on flood insurance premiums for properties inside the special flood hazard area. That is a quarter off, for living in a city that has invested in its floodplain management. It is one of the better arguments for the city tax line discussed above.

Flood claim history, in context. Two numbers that get blended and should not be. Of every federal flood insurance claim ever filed in Sarasota County, the single month of September 2024 accounts for about 34.5 percent. Counting by calendar year, 2024 as a whole accounts for about 54.4 percent. Those are two different measures of the same hurricane season, roughly twenty points apart, and we label them separately rather than averaging them into something meaningless. Locally, the inland postal area around this site has about 408 claims on record against roughly 1,111 for the barrier-island area a few miles west, which is the clearest possible illustration that in Venice the difference between inland and island is the whole ballgame. For the current year, none have been recorded in this postal area through the data freeze.

Water, sewer and power. City of Venice water, sewer and reuse water for irrigation. This is not a well-and-septic community: a lift station has already been addressed on the site, which is as clear a sign of central sewer as exists, and the tract sits inside the city's urban service area.

What new construction near here is actually selling for

Cassata Oaks has no published price, so the useful exercise is to look at what is being asked nearby right now and at what the land underneath this community cost. Everything below was published by the builders themselves and is accurate as of late October 2026. None of it is a prediction about this community.

The same builder was selling from the high three hundreds at another Venice community a few miles away, on an already-platted site with a different lot programme. Its other Venice community about a mile north of here, the one inside a district, is a larger and more amenity-heavy master plan and prices accordingly. Across the wider Venice and Nokomis band, new single-family product spans a very wide range, because this market runs everything from paired villas to custom homes on half-acre lots within a few miles of each other.

The land basis is the more informative number here. M/I Homes paid roughly 130,000 dollars per lot for raw, unplatted ground in early 2026, before spending anything on roads, drainage, the eight-foot walls or the ponds. Horizontal development on a site like this commonly adds a substantial further sum per lot. Nobody assembles a finished lot at that cost basis and then sells an entry-level house on it. Combine that with a ten-lot estate tier and the absence of a district assessment, and the reasonable expectation is a mid-to-upper-tier Venice product rather than a volume one. That is an inference from a recorded land price, clearly labelled as such, and not a figure anybody has released.

One practical point about buying early into sixty homes. The ten estate lots are the scarce product here, and they are the ones with both the ponds and the horse farm behind them. On a community this size the first release is usually a dozen or two lots, and it goes to people who were ready before the model opened. If a specific lot position matters to you, being on a list months ahead is the only way to be in that conversation at all.

Schools

Sarasota County Schools serves the entire county and has a strong reputation statewide, so the district-level answer is a genuinely positive one. The specific attendance zones are a different question, and we will not answer it by guessing. Zones are assigned by address, the final plat has not recorded, and naming an elementary school for a lot that does not legally exist yet is the single most damaging error a page like this can make. Once your address is issued, run it through the district's own locator. If a particular school is the reason you are buying here, make it a written condition rather than a conversation at a sales desk.

Buying new construction with someone on your side

The person at the sales desk in a builder's model home works for the builder. They are frequently helpful and entirely pleasant, and they are also paid to represent the party across the table from you. You are entitled to your own representation, and on new construction it generally costs you nothing extra, because builders budget for a buyer's agent whether or not you bring one.

The timing is what catches people out. Most builders will only recognise your agent if that agent is named from your first visit or first registration. Walk in alone, hand over your details at the desk, and in many cases the right to be represented is gone for the whole transaction. On a community like this one, where lot selection genuinely changes what you are buying, that is an expensive thing to give away for nothing.

A pre-construction contract is not a resale contract either. Deposit structure, specification allowances, what happens when the schedule slips, what the warranty covers and for how long, whether your price is locked, and what the builder is obliged to disclose about the pond behind your lot are all worth reading closely. Here there is a specific question to ask in writing: which lots are mapped inside the special flood hazard area, and what finished floor elevation is planned for the one you want.

Communities it is easy to confuse

Venice is full of near-misses for this name and it is worth being careful. Cassata Lakes is a different, already-built community from the same builder, on different land with a recorded plat. There is also a small ten-lot project marketed locally under a Cassata name by an unrelated developer, which is not this. Auburn Woods, Auburn Lakes and Auburn Hammocks are all separate existing subdivisions that share the road name. And the 43-lot preliminary plat further up North Auburn Road, on the old radio-station site, belongs to a completely different applicant. If you are comparing communities, compare the tax jurisdiction and the district assessment as carefully as the floor plan, because in this corner of Sarasota County those two lines differ more between neighbours than the houses do.

Questions