Selling now in Wildwood, FL
Moultrie Creek
A 55+ village in the Villages of Southern Oaks, City of Wildwood
The homes here are easy to understand. The money is not, and almost nobody explains it properly. Your amenity fee is a private contract with the developer, not a district charge, it is secured like a mortgage, and when you sell it resets to whatever new buyers are paying. And the bond on your homesite costs 2.12 times its principal if you pay it out over the full 31 years. Both come from the recorded documents, and both are below.
- Area
- Wildwood, FL
- District
- Number 15
- Age restriction
- 55 plus
- Beyond the mortgage
- About $8k to $11.5k
At a glance
Moultrie Creek fast facts
Everything in the left column comes from adopted district budgets, published bond schedules, recorded covenants and certified tax rates rather than from a sales office. You can check every one of them.
- Area
- City of Wildwood, Sumter County
- Jurisdiction
- Incorporated city, not unincorporated
- Part of
- Villages of Southern Oaks
- Its community district
- District 15, about 1,378 acres
- Age restriction
- 55 plus, and strictly written
- Builder
- The Villages, by recorded covenant
- Bond debt per home
- About $26,000 to $50,000
- What that bond costs if you pay it out
- 2.12 times the principal
- Maintenance assessment
- About $357 to $891 a year
- That assessment last year
- Rose 5 percent on every line
- Amenity fee
- A private contract, not a district charge
- All in beyond the mortgage
- Roughly $8,100 to $11,500 a year
- Your amenity fee on resale
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
- Current pricing and incentives
- Ask before you contractGet pricing
Figures come from the recorded declaration of covenants for a Southern Oaks unit in this district, the district's adopted maintenance assessment resolution and its published per-unit bond amortisation schedules, the district's and the operating district's audited financial statements, county adopted budgets and workshop minutes, the property appraiser's certified 2025 rates, state evacuation and federal flood mapping, and the state's draft tentative road work program, all as of September 2026. The amenity fee amount is reported rather than verified. All details are subject to change without notice.
The covenants are not identical across Southern Oaks. Read yours.
We compared the recorded declaration for a unit in this district against one from the neighbouring district and they use entirely different templates. The older one contains no amenity fee section at all, which means the fee for those homes is set somewhere else. Never assume what is written about one village applies to another. Ask for the declaration recorded against your specific unit number.
Where it is
South of the state road in the newest part of the community, inside the City of Wildwood rather than unincorporated Sumter County. That distinction adds a city millage to your bill and it is often glossed over. Drive it, and drive it in season.
How to buy in Moultrie Creek without leaving money on the table
The person at the sales desk works for the seller. You can have a Florida agent on your side instead, touring with you, reading the contract and the recorded covenants line by line, and pushing for every incentive and credit on offer. It costs you nothing: on new construction the seller already budgets your agent's fee whether you bring one or not. The one catch is timing. You usually need your own agent from the very first visit, or it will not be recognised and you lose it. Start here and we will set it up.
Set up a tourWhat a local would tell you
Your amenity fee is a private contract, it is secured like a mortgage, and your buyer does not inherit it
Almost everyone arrives here thinking the monthly amenity fee is a homeowner association charge or a district assessment. It is neither. The recorded declaration is explicit: each owner agrees to pay the developer, or its assignee, a monthly fee against each homesite in the amount set in that owner's deed. It never appears on your tax bill because it is not a public charge at all.
Four features of that contract deserve your attention, and all four are in the instrument rather than in anyone's opinion.
One, it escalates and the escalation banks. The fee is indexed to a national consumer price measure and adjusted annually. Then the declaration adds a sentence people miss: adjustments not used on any adjustment date may be made any time thereafter. An increase the developer declines to take in a soft year is not forgiven. It is available later.
Two, it is secured as a continuing lien in the nature of a mortgage on your homesite, superior to all other liens except an institutional first mortgage, and it may be foreclosed the way a mortgage is foreclosed. It also continues from month to month whether the homesite is vacant or occupied.
Three, and this is the one that changes how you should think about the whole purchase: the fee does not carry over on resale. The declaration says that when an owner transfers their interest, the new owner is obligated to pay the prevalent fee then in force and effect for new owners of homesites in the most recent addition or unit. So a low fee is not an asset you pass on. Your buyer is repriced to whatever new construction is paying that year, however long you held yours.
Four, it buys no ownership. The declaration states that owners have no right, title, claim or interest in the recreational areas, that the developer is the sole and exclusive owner of them, and that the fee is a fee for services and is in no way adjusted according to the cost of providing those services. That last clause is unusual and worth reading twice: what you pay is not tied to what it costs to deliver.
Reported figures put the fee around $204 a month in 2026, said to have crossed $200 for the first time that January. We could not verify that from a recorded deed, because the county clerk's records system was unreachable from our end, so treat the amount as reported and the terms above as verified. And note the drafting warning above: the covenants are not uniform across Southern Oaks, and the neighbouring district's older template contains no amenity fee section at all.
So ask five things in writing before you contract: the declaration recorded against your specific unit number, not a sample; the exact amenity fee stated in the deed you will receive; the bond principal and annual debt assessment for that homesite and the payoff figure; the current maintenance assessment for that unit; and which fire district your parcel sits in, because the two rates differ enormously.
Get the bond payoff figure before you decide
Paying it out costs 2.12 times the principal. Paying it off is a single number the district will give you. We will get it for your homesite.
The record
A bond that costs twice its principal, and a district that owes the developer $7 million
The district publishes per-unit bond amortisation schedules, which is more than most Florida districts do, and they contain a number nobody puts on a brochure. Across every product type we checked, on the first bond series at about 5.19 per cent over 31 annual payments to 2054, the total paid is 2.12 times the principal. A homesite with about $47,995 of principal pays about $3,284 a year and about $101,811 in total. A courtyard villa at about $25,694 of principal pays about $1,758 a year and about $54,504 in total. For the district's first phase as a whole, principal of about $155.5 million carries net interest of about $152.6 million plus administration of about $21.8 million.
You can prepay in full, and people do. The audited statements confirm the assessments may be prepaid in total or in annual instalments, the neighbouring district publishes an annual payoff cut-off date, and its adopted budget carries dedicated principal prepayment appropriations running to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So the real choice is straightforward once someone puts it plainly: pay about $47,995 now, or pay about $101,811 over 31 years. We could not verify whether partial prepayment with recalculation is allowed, so ask before you assume it.
On the maintenance assessment, which is the district's other line on your tax bill, there is a trend worth knowing. This district's adopted schedule runs from about $357 to about $891 a lot, and every line in its first phase rose exactly five per cent year over year, with total billing more than doubling as the second phase came on. The neighbouring, more mature district shows zero per cent change on all of its unit rows, two years running. That is the difference between buying into a district that is still building and one that has finished, and it is a reasonable thing to price in.
Now the structure, because it explains where the money goes. The audited statements show this district owing about $7.0 million to the developer, and describe the mechanism plainly: the developer funds construction of the improvements, and from bond proceeds the district pays the developer for the completed improvements transferred to it. So the developer builds, the district issues tax-exempt debt, the district buys the work from the developer, and homeowners repay it for 31 years. That is not improper and it is how most large Florida districts work. It is simply worth understanding as a machine rather than as a fee.
On control, the audits are direct. Three of five board seats were landowner-elected and two developer-appointed at the last year end, and landowner voting in Florida is one vote per acre, so the unplatted balance decides those elections. The separate district that operates your recreation facilities discloses that every one of its board members is an employee of or affiliated with the developer. Under state law, resident-elector seats open six years after the initial appointments and only once the district has at least 250 qualified electors, which for a district established in late 2022 points to roughly 2028 or 2029, one seat at a time. Also worth knowing: your recreation facilities are owned by the developer, and the district operates them under an interlocal agreement rather than owning them.
Two smaller things that tell you something. The district pays a developer-owned utility company and a developer-owned newspaper for legal advertisements, both disclosed as related-party transactions. And in the neighbouring district, the developer's contribution toward deed compliance covered one hundred per cent of that budget line in one year and about half of it the next, with the remainder now falling on the maintenance assessment. That is a cost quietly migrating from the developer to homeowners, and it is visible only if you read two consecutive budgets.
What to ask for that is not published: the development agreement recorded and incorporated into your deed, which owners agree in advance the developer may amend unilaterally; the district's most recent audited statements; the payoff figure for your homesite's bond; whether your utilities come from the public dependent district or from the private developer-owned companies, because that differs between adjacent villages here; and a sample tax bill for a closed comparable showing every line.
The area
A county tax rate now below where the fight started, and no state money inside the gates
Start with jurisdiction, because it is routinely glossed over. This district is inside the City of Wildwood, not unincorporated Sumter County. Both the recorded declaration and the district's audited statements say so. That means a city millage of about 2.83 sits on top of your bill. Certified 2025 rates come to about 12.81 mills before fire, made up of county at 4.89, schools at 4.91, the water board at 0.18 and the city at 2.83.
Fire is the genuine open question and it is worth about eight tenths of a mill. There are two fire districts in this county at very different rates, about 0.86 and about 0.05, and we could not determine which one covers parcels in this district, because we could not obtain a parcel-level tax bill. Worse, it is about to change: county workshop minutes from mid 2025 record a consensus to move to a methodology covering seventy per cent of fire and rescue as a cost of readiness with thirty per cent on ad valorem, producing a flat dollar rate per square foot for all uses. Under that, larger homes pay more than they would under a millage. Ask which district you are in and what the adopted methodology looks like for the coming year.
On the county rate itself, the news is better than the reputation. In the 2019 budget year the county adopted a rate of 6.7000 mills, which its own budget described as a 25.6 per cent increase over the prior year's 5.3365 and a 33.09 per cent increase over the rolled-back rate. By the current budget year the adopted rate is 4.8900, which the county's own minutes call the lowest rate considered in a proposed budget for the county. So the rate today sits about 0.45 mills below where it was before the increase, around 8.4 per cent lower than the pre-fight baseline. We verified the two endpoints and not the years between, so treat the path as confirmed only at its ends.
One warning on that arithmetic. The county's own two offices publish different totals for the same components: the property appraiser lists the three main levies summing to about 9.99 and shows fire separately, while the budget office prints about 10.84, which is the same figure with the county fire rate silently folded in. Same components, two official sources, two answers. Never quote a county total without decomposing it.
On roads, separate the regional grid from what is inside the gates, because they are funded completely differently. The state's draft tentative work program, which is marked subject to change on every page, carries real construction money for the regional network: two large add-lanes projects on the north-south highway at about $69.5 million and $72.2 million, resurfacing on that highway and on the state road, a signal installation, a county road widening and a bridge rehabilitation, plus a very large turnpike widening in the final year of the program. Other segments carry right of way or design money only.
Then the finding that matters most. Nothing in the state program touches the internal road network of this community. No internal collector, no parkway extension, no new interchange serving this district. Those roads are built by the developer and conveyed to the districts, which is precisely what the seven million dollars owed to the developer represents and what your bond assessment repays. The honest framing: the state is widening and resurfacing the grid around you, and the roads inside your community are on your own assessment.
On hurricanes, the result is clean and controlled. The state's surge layer returns no evacuation zone at this village or its neighbour, and our control points on two different coasts correctly returned category one and category two zones, so the layer works and the negative is real.
On flooding, be careful with anything you read at village level. Sampled points in two nearby villages returned areas of minimal flood hazard, but the centroids of this village and of one in the neighbouring district both returned a special flood hazard area with a mapped base flood elevation. The likely reason is mundane: every village here is platted around engineered retention lakes, and a centroid tends to land on the water. The correct statement is that these villages are predominantly minimal-hazard with mapped higher-risk pockets around their water features, and that flood risk must be checked lot by lot rather than village by village. Panel effective dates in the area are a mix of 2013 and 2020, so quote the panel, not the county.
On insurance we have to give you nothing, and we would rather do that than give you something wrong. We could not obtain an average homeowners premium for this county from the state regulator; its data tools returned errors at every endpoint we tried, and every figure available elsewhere came from an insurance agency or a lead-generation site. Get a bindable quote on the specific address.
What you need to know
Buying new construction with someone on your side
Representation is free and the timing is the catch, as above. It matters unusually much here, and not for the reason you would guess. There is only one builder, so there is nothing to price against inside the community. What there is instead is a stack of recorded documents that determine most of your monthly cost, and reading them is the job.
On the builder, the single-builder structure is not an assumption. It is written into the recorded covenants: the home must be placed on the homesite and constructed by the developer or its designee, and the developer has the sole right to build the home at the owner's cost. That is a genuinely different arrangement from an ordinary master plan and you should go in knowing it.
A note on naming, because it matters if you ever need to enforce anything. Three differently named developer entities appear across three primary documents for adjacent districts here: one signs the covenants, another is described in this district's audit as the developer and initial owner, and a third appears in the operating district's audit. We are not going to publish one of them as though it were the settled answer. The audits' own description is a family-owned business established for the single purpose of developing this community, now spanning roughly ninety square miles across three counties.
Two things we will not claim. We did not obtain the development agreement that is recorded and incorporated into every deed here, and owners agree in advance that the developer may amend it unilaterally, including by adding lands, without any owner joining and with each owner waiving objection. That is the single most important document we could not read, and you should ask for it. And we did not search Florida regulatory enforcement records or civil dockets, so read the absence of any such note as unchecked, not clean.
The rest is the same everywhere: hire your own independent inspector at pre-drywall, again at final walkthrough, and once more before the one-year warranty expires. Read the limited warranty booklet before you sign rather than after. And read what the purchase agreement says about completion timing, price changes before closing, and dispute resolution.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Villages, any homebuilder, any developer of Moultrie Creek, the City of Wildwood, or Sumter County. The developer is identified here because it is the developer of this community, 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 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
Moultrie Creek FAQ
What is The Village of Moultrie Creek?
It is one of the newer villages in the Villages of Southern Oaks, the southward expansion below the state road, inside community development district 15 in the City of Wildwood, Sumter County. The district covers about 1,378 gross acres and was established in late 2022. Its first phase carries roughly 3,616 units and its second about 3,700, and the second phase was billed a maintenance assessment for the first time in the most recent year, which tells you exactly how new it is. One naming caution worth having: Southern Oaks is not a community, it is the plat-name umbrella over the whole expansion spanning at least four districts and fifteen thousand homes. The villages are the named neighbourhoods inside it, and this is one of them.
What is the amenity fee, and does it stay the same when I sell?
No, and this is the single most important thing on this page. The amenity fee is not a district assessment and it does not appear on your tax bill. It is a private monthly contract with the developer, set in your deed. Three features of it come straight from the recorded declaration. It escalates annually with a national consumer price index, and unused escalation is banked rather than forfeited: the instrument says adjustments not used on any adjustment date may be made any time thereafter. It is secured as a continuing lien in the nature of a mortgage, superior to everything except an institutional first mortgage, and foreclosable like one. And on transfer, the new owner does not inherit your rate. The instrument says the new owner pays the prevalent fee then in force for new owners of homesites in the most recent addition or unit of Southern Oaks. So however long you hold a lower rate, your buyer resets to the current new-construction rate. It is also payable whether the home is vacant or occupied, it buys you no ownership interest in the amenities, and the declaration says plainly that it is a fee for services and is in no way adjusted according to the cost of providing those services. Reported figures put it around $204 a month in 2026, but we could not verify that from a recorded deed and we are labelling it as reported.
How does the bond work and should I pay it off?
Your community district issues bonds to buy the completed infrastructure, and the repayment lands on your tax bill as a debt assessment for 31 annual payments running to 2054, at about 5.19 per cent on the first series. Here is the number nobody puts in front of buyers. From the district's own published per-unit amortisation schedules, the total paid over the life is consistently 2.12 times the principal. A homesite carrying about $47,995 of principal pays about $3,284 a year and about $101,811 in total. A courtyard villa carrying about $25,694 pays about $1,758 a year and about $54,504 in total. Across the district's first phase the principal is about $155.5 million, the net interest about $152.6 million and the administration about $21.8 million, for a total assessment of about $329.8 million. The assessment can be prepaid in full, and people do it at scale: the neighbouring district publishes an annual payoff cut-off date and budgets hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in principal prepayments. We could not verify whether partial prepayment with recalculation is allowed, so ask.
What does it actually cost me a year beyond the mortgage?
Roughly $8,100 to $11,500, before insurance and utilities, for a homesteaded home in the $300,000 to $400,000 band. Worked from the adopted schedules and certified rates: a single-family home at $400,000 runs about $3,351 of bond, about $707 of maintenance, about $2,448 of amenity fee and about $4,908 of property tax, or roughly $951 a month. A courtyard villa at $300,000 runs about $1,794, $378, $2,448 and $3,541, or about $680 a month. Four caveats ship with that number. The amenity component, which is a fifth to a third of the total, is reported rather than primary-sourced. The fire component is unresolved between two very different district rates and we could not determine which applies here. The bond ends in 2054 or on prepayment while everything else is perpetual. And a non-homesteaded buyer, meaning a second home or an investment, pays roughly $650 to $900 more a year in property tax at these values.
Who controls the district, and when do residents get a say?
The developer, for now, and the audits say so plainly. As of the most recent fiscal year end, three of the district's five board seats were landowner-elected and two were developer-appointed. Landowner voting in Florida is one vote per acre, so the developer's unplatted balance controls those elections in practice. The separate district that operates your recreation facilities discloses that every one of its board members is an employee of or affiliated with the developer. Under state law, resident-elector seats become available six years after the initial appointment and only once there are at least 250 qualified electors in the district. Given this district was established in late 2022, that points to roughly 2028 or 2029, and then only one seat at a time as terms expire. Worth knowing separately that your recreation facilities are owned by the developer, not by the district; the district operates them under an interlocal agreement.
How strict is the age restriction really?
Stricter than most buyers expect, and it is worth reading before you plan a summer with grandchildren. The recorded declaration requires that every occupied home have at least one resident aged 55 or over. It then says no person under nineteen may be a permanent resident, and that people under nineteen may visit and temporarily reside for periods not exceeding thirty days in total in any calendar year. That thirty days is cumulative across the year, not per visit. Hardship exceptions exist but are at the developer's sole discretion and cannot push the community below the federal eighty per cent floor. The developer holds what the instrument calls the sole and absolute authority to deny occupancy, and residents must certify the names and dates of birth of all occupants from time to time on request. Separately, the developer can amend the restrictions unilaterally by recording an instrument, and no amendment is effective without its signature. There is no owner vote to amend them.
Before you walk into a sales office
Get your inside track on The Village of Moultrie Creek
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 visit, and who will get you the answers this page could not: the exact amenity fee written into the deed you would receive, the declaration recorded against your specific unit, the bond principal and payoff figure for that homesite, which fire district the parcel sits in, and the current flood determination for that lot.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.