Posts from September 2026

A new construction contract in Volusia County does not work like a resale contract. You are signing the builder's own paperwork, not the standard state form, and Florida law requires a specific deposit protection that most buyers have never heard of until they ask about it. Understand the contract, the inspection schedule and the real cost of owning the finished home, and a new build can be one of the more predictable purchases you make. Skip that homework and the surprises show up later, on the tax bill, the HOA statement or the punch list.

This guide walks through what to check in a builder's contract, how permitting and inspections actually work, what a Community Development District or homeowners' association disclosure means for you, and what a new home costs once the sale...

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Commercial property in Volusia County plays by a different rulebook than the house next door. It gets no homestead exemption, its assessed value can climb by up to 10 percent a year under state law instead of the Save Our Homes cap a homesteaded house gets, which is 3 percent or the change in inflation, whichever is lower (2.7 percent for 2026), and until recently every dollar of rent collected on it carried a state sales tax. That tax is gone now. Florida repealed the sales tax on commercial rent for good, effective October 1, 2025. What replaced it, for a buyer, is a longer list of questions on zoning, financing, environmental risk and property tax that a house across the street never has to answer.

This guide is for anyone looking at office, retail, warehouse or other commerc...

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Holly Hill is a small city of about 13,000 people wedged between Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach, and it is the only one of the three that sits entirely on the mainland. There is no barrier island here, no oceanfront strip. The Halifax River is the water you get, and for a lot of buyers that trade works out fine: an established street, two different downtowns close by on either side, and a Census median home value of $205,100 in 2024.

We show Holly Hill to buyers who want to be close to everything without paying for ocean frontage. This guide covers how the city is laid out along the river and US-1, what its history actually is, what an older home here means at inspection time, what it costs to own, and how it stacks up against Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach next door.

H...

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Orange City is a small city of about 12,600 people on U.S. Highway 17-92, sitting between DeLand to the north and Deltona to the south, with the St. Johns River and Blue Spring State Park on its western edge. It is older than most of its neighbors, incorporated in 1882, and its downtown still carries a 19th-century historic district with a working hotel from that same era. Buyers come here for a smaller footprint than Deltona, and one genuinely famous neighbor: hundreds of manatees that winter in the spring just west of downtown.

This guide covers how the city is laid out, what its history actually looks like on the ground, the neighborhoods buyers ask us about, what a home here costs to own, and how Orange City compares with DeLand, Deltona and Enterprise. You can browse everyt...

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Enterprise sits on the north shore of Lake Monroe, an 8,771-acre stretch of the St. Johns River, and it has never been incorporated as a city. There is no Enterprise city hall, no Enterprise mayor and no Enterprise police department. What Enterprise has instead is a shoreline, a county government that runs its services, and a history that outranks almost anywhere else in Volusia County. For more than four decades in the 1800s, this small community was the seat of three different counties in turn. Buyers looking here are usually after the water, the quiet, and a piece of Florida that was old news before Daytona Beach or Deltona existed.

This guide covers how Enterprise is laid out along Lake Monroe, the county-seat and steamboat-era history that shaped it, what it means to buy a...

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Pierson is a town of about 1,540 people in the far northwest corner of Volusia County, and it is built around one crop: the fern. For more than a century, growers here have shipped cut foliage to florists across North America and Europe, and that agricultural base still shapes what land looks like, how homes are served, and what you need to check before you buy. If you want acreage, a working farm, or simply room between you and the next house, Pierson is one of the few places left in Volusia County where that is still the normal way to live.

This guide covers how Pierson came to be the way it is, what kind of land and homes you will find, the practical questions rural buyers ask about wells, septic systems and agricultural tax classification, and how Pierson compares with its n...

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