Washington County, Florida · near Chipley · APN 05-0313-0004: Get In Early on a Growing Sunny Hills Homesite

A High, Dry Foothold in a Town That's Filling Back In

Plenty of folks have decided that owning a piece of warm-weather Florida is something that happened to other people a while back, before the prices ran off. This lot argues otherwise. It is a high-and-dry, nearly half-acre piece on Viking Drive in Sunny Hills, a north Florida community where the roads went in decades ago and the houses are only now coming back.

This is a place to build something real and to be early doing it. Site-built homes are what go up here, so picture a modest house set off a quiet paved road, a yard with room to stretch, and a community that is adding neighbors a little at a time instead of all at once. A snowbird who would rather own one warm spot than rent a different one every winter, a young family planning a first build, or somebody who just wants to plant a flag in a growing town before everyone else notices will all find room on it.

Here is the part worth repeating at dinner. Sunny Hills was drawn up by the Deltona Corporation in the late 1960s as a planned city for sixty thousand people, and they paved better than two hundred miles of streets for a crowd that never showed. Today only about six hundred homes sit on all that pavement, and Deltona is building here again. You would be buying into the quiet years of a place that was always meant to be a town.

One thing to get straight before you plan the well: the neighborhood is served by a community water system, so the deed steers you to a hookup rather than a private well, and a well is only in play if service does not reach the lot. Power runs through the area, sewer is by septic, and the ground here sits high and out of the flood zone.

A clear, dry corner of Florida with your name on it is a fine thing to start. This one is just waiting on somebody to break ground.