Posts from September 2026

Florida runs four separate loan and assistance programs for first-time buyers through the Florida Housing Finance Corporation, plus a fifth built just for teachers, nurses, first responders and veterans called Hometown Heroes. Volusia County runs its own down payment program on top of those. As of late September 2026, that county program is paused for new applicants, though it is still funding the applications already in its pipeline. None of this is free money with no strings attached. Every program here is a loan, not a grant, and most of them have to be repaid when you sell, refinance or stop living in the home.

That is not a reason to skip them. It is a reason to understand what you are actually signing up for before your lender starts talking dollar figures. This guide walk...

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The My Safe Florida Home Program pays a licensed inspector to come out and evaluate your home for hurricane weak points at no cost to you, and if you qualify afterward, it can match your own money two dollars for every one you put in toward fixing what the inspector finds, up to $10,000 from the state. That is the whole idea in one sentence. The inspection is the easy part. The grant, the money that actually pays for a new roof or impact windows, has real rules about who can get it, what it can be spent on and how much you have to put in yourself.

For Volusia County homeowners, this program sits at the intersection of two things we get asked about constantly: what it actually costs to harden an older Florida home against wind, and how that work shows up later as a credit on your...

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If you already own a homesteaded house in Volusia County, Amendment 3 is less about whether you should sell before or after November 3 and more about a clock that has nothing to do with the election. That clock is Florida's Save Our Homes portability window, and it keeps running no matter which way the vote goes.

We wrote about what Amendment 3 does for homeowners and buyers in general in our first article on the amendment. This one is for a narrower group: owners who are thinking about listing their current home and buying their next one, whether that next home is a few miles away in P...

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Oak Hill is a city of fewer than 2,000 people on the west shore of the Indian River and Mosquito Lagoon, at the southern edge of Volusia County. It has no downtown strip and no chain grocery store on every corner. What it has is water on one side of US Highway 1 and open, sparsely built land on the other, which is exactly why buyers who want a boat ramp instead of a boardwalk keep finding their way here.

We show Oak Hill to buyers looking for two very different things that happen to sit in the same small city: a waterfront lot on the lagoon, or a few acres inland where the nearest neighbor isn't visible from the porch. Both exist here in a way they don't in the busier towns north and south of it. This guide covers how those two kinds of property differ, what a well and septic sy...

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New Smyrna Beach is really two towns joined by a couple of bridges: a barrier island where Flagler Avenue runs down to the sand, and a mainland where Canal Street's old storefronts sit along the Indian River. About 30,142 people live here across the whole city, and where you land on that island-versus-mainland question changes almost everything else about the purchase, from the insurance quote to the drive to the grocery store.

We work with buyers across Volusia County, and New Smyrna Beach is one of the towns where the first conversation is rarely about price. It's about which side of the water they want to wake up on. This guide walks through both sides, what a home here actually costs to carry, and how New Smyrna Beach compares with the towns around it, before you start scrol...

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Edgewater is a city of about 23,100 people on the west shore of the Indian River, south of New Smyrna Beach and north of Oak Hill, and it is built almost entirely around water. Canals run through its neighborhoods, boat ramps sit a short drive from nearly every street, and the Mosquito Lagoon is the reason most people end up looking here in the first place. It is quieter and more affordable than the beach towns on either side of it, and that is exactly the trade a lot of buyers are making on purpose.

We show Edgewater to buyers who want water access without a barrier-island price tag, and to people who simply want a smaller, calmer city between two busier ones. Tourism tied to the waterways is the main driver of the local economy, and it shows in how the city is built: boat ramp...

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