buying in Venice (Sarasota, Port Charlotte, North Port: mineral rights, short sales, foreclosures)

[peavoe]

Is there anyone with some insight as to Stoneybrook in Venice? We are looking to buy a Lennar home. Has anyone had any quality issues or insight as to them as builder/developer? Also the location as far as getting around. Thanks, Peavoe

[TamRE]

Stoneybrook in Venice is off of River Rd and has an I-75 highway exit. There have been some issues with Lennar Homes, a few have had defective drywall and a few have had pin hole leaks. Stoneybrook at Venice is a family oriented community with many amenities but I have found there to be a lot of retirees living there as well. It is not too far of a drive to go into Venice and to Venice Beach. You can also go south to North Port or Port Charlotte for the mall and other activities.

Buyers are required to pay a $1200 capital assessment fee at closing. There is also a CDD fee, an HOA fee and taxes. There were previously a lot of bank foreclosures and short sales in the community, but they are pretty much all normal sales now. I am only showing one bank foreclosure in the MLS.

Here is the link to Stoneybrook at Venice with Lennar Homes - Stoneybrook at Venice - New Homes in Venice, FL - Lennar

There were some other threads on City-Data on Stoneybrook in Venice if you do a search you should be able to find them. Here are a couple I found: Stoneybrook Venice Florida, Stoneybrook Bradenton vs. Stoneybrook Venice, Is anyone familiar with the Stoneybrook Community?

[macrodome2]

We just purchased a home in June in Stoneybrook. We would be classified as snowbirds. We looked a numerous communities. We rented a house in Stoneybrook last year for the month of December and ended up buying a house about 6 houses down from that one. Our house was built in 2008 and was built by US Homes which became part of Lennar.

We chose Stoneybrook over a retirement community because we wanted a mixed age, family oriented community. I noticed our family picnic discussions were starting to revolve around too many health issues and I didn't want to be in a community where the topic of the day is "what ails you".

Our must have list was a newer house (at least post 2002), with a lake view, no house pool, but really nice community pool. The nicest community pools then left us with Venetia, Sawgrass, IslandWalk, and Stoneybrook. IslandWalk also has a CDD. We looked at Pelican Pointe, Lakes of Jacaranda, and Southwood because they all had low HOA fees. None of the pools were that nice. We looked at Grand Palm but they too have a CDD fee which is higher than Stoneybrook and we noticed that the community pool was no deeper than 4ft in any section and the lap pool was only 4.5ft. Although Venetian Falls has a great pool it is a 55+ community.

People get very excited about a CDD fee, but the City of Venice taxes on a roughly $300K property in Sawgrass were about $800/yr. You can get that info about specific homes on the Sarasota Tax Assessors site. In addition, you may find as we did that the lower price of the house in a CDD community makes up for the CDD fee. The prices of the homes in non-CDD communities tend to be quite a bit higher. We figured that if we spent $1,000/yr on the CDD (which is higher than what we are paying now) for 20 years, that would still be less than what we'd have to spend to get an equivalent home in Venetia, Sawgrass, or Pelican Pointe because their prices are so much higher. The only justification we could see is if you were a golfer then it would be nice to be right on the course.

And don't forget the trade off in insurance rates. Although the HOA was lower in Lakes of Jacaranda and Southwood, that would get eaten up in increased insurance rates since those homes were mostly built in the mid to late 1990's. There were only a few homes in the Lakes of Jacaranda post 2002.

One final note- we looked at the DR Horton homes near Venetia. They are doing something very strange with the water and mineral rights on the land. You don't own them and they transfer them to a parent company of DRH that owns water and mineral rights. You can see the transfers on the Sarasota county site. It was a little too bizarre for us. Last development we looked at was the Morrison one, but nothing seemed to be going on there when we were looking. It was very barren.