Need advice on best area to try outside of Orlando . Currently living in St. John’s county. (Oviedo: lease)

[Skeens84]

I posted on here last year when we were In search of our first Florida residence and we ended up moving to St Augustine and we are renting in a master planned community between St Augustine and Jax. We are in a 2017 Lennar home. We stayed a couple months on the south side of Jax and then came down here and signed a year lease.

We are a family of four with two young girls 3 and 1 years respectively. I work from home in the medical field, my wife is a nurse but is a stay at home mom currently. We have an end budget of $500k for a home purchase. We love the beach and have always wanted to live directly beachside but we worry about hurricanes and flooding.

We are driving approx 35 minutes to get to the beach from our current location to St Augustine beach / Anastasia island, which might I add is beautiful. The problem is, we are only a few miles from the intercostal water way, so we still remain at risk for hurricanes and flooding BuT we still have to travel to get to the beach.

The schools here are top notch and that’s what brought us here. But due to the HOA , property taxes, CDD fees, and insurance rates, the house we can get is much less . You will pay a 450,000 dollar mortgage on a $300k house when you add all the extra fees in. We do not like the HOA who won’t even allow us to have a bounce house in the tiny yard we do have . We also can’t wash or clean stuff in our drive way. Too many rules for us to enjoy day to day life.

So I’ll get to the point . We love it here and we could Be happy long term. But I keep thinking we may be better served by living somewhere such as Oviedo, Winter springs, St. Cloud , or Chuluota.
For a few reasons:

We would like to purchase our own property and build our own custom house. We are not liking the builder specials. They look amazing , but not what we want.

Secondly we do not want to deal with an HOA, and would rather just have our own pool and go to a planet fitness or whatever, so amenities really don’t matter much to us..

Also we are having to drive to the beach 35 minutes or worse with traffic, so why do we need to live on the coast and remain at a higher risk for hurricanes and flooding PLUS pay the higher costs of property and property taxes, to only still have to drive 35 minutes or more to the beach?.

In addition, there’s little to no property to be had here. At least affordable. If you go west, you hit the St. John’s river and we would rather not deal with the flooding risks and if you go further west , across the river, the schools are not as good. So it makes sense to me to look at a community outside of Orlando since we don’t have a commute issue , which seems to be the big downfall of Orlando . So commuting freedom is something I want to leverage .

I do not want to go further south or even the southwest because we have seen first hand the algae bloom issues and we have enough seasonal allergy issues and we prefer the east coast beaches for the water sports and styles.

So we lean towards Oviedo and I have found the Chuluota area to be appealing, we love and come from a rural setting, we spend time outdoors biking and swimming and would like to be less than an hour to the beach.

We would probably aim for Canaveral seashore or even new Smyrna which we like And have enjoyed time there before. Chuluota is close enough it seams to Oviedo and I have seen affordable large size lots not in HOAs.

Plus we would be close the beach, still could access the theme parks in a day trip, and have the benefit of Hagerty high school and the other high rated schools in Seminole.

I want to build on a nice size lot and plan to build a 2500-3000 square ft house with a refonforced concrete shelter/mother in law / garage on site that will serve as an evacuation spot during severe storms and for our family to visit to. We would need to build this for under $500k including lot and lot prep.

Low crime, good schools, available non HOA lots, high and dry area not near rivers or other flooding bodies, not extremely far from food and groceries, and within an hour to the east coast beaches. Let me know if I’m being unreasonable .

[Jennahamm]

Did you ever find an answer to this? Looking for the same exact thing