Your client says they're moving to Venice. Here's what you'll be asked next.

"The Venice area" is not one market

This is the single most useful thing on the page. Your client has probably said Venice, or Sarasota, or just Florida. Within a twenty minute drive the median resale price of a detached single family home runs from $305,000 to $745,000.

Per square foot the spread is just as wide. North Port resold at a median $198 a square foot over that period, Venice $250, Englewood $267, Nokomis $286, Osprey $310 and Sarasota $316.

What a budget actually buys

If your client has a number in mind, this is the table that tells you where to point them. These are the 20th percentile, median and 80th percentile recorded resale prices for detached single family homes in the same twelve months.

A client with $350,000 is looking at North Port, or the lower half of Venice. A client with $350,000 who has decided on Osprey is looking at a condominium, because only one in five Osprey single family resales closed under $550,000.

Wellen Park is not a city. It's a large master planned development inside Venice and North Port ZIP codes, containing separate communities with their own price levels and their own assessments. If your client says Wellen Park, ask which community.

Villa, townhome and condominium mean specific things on the deed

These three words get used loosely in conversation and they describe different products with different ownership forms, different buyer pools and price gaps of $100,000 or more. The county records the difference in a use code, and the use code is what I go by.

The practical consequence: in Venice a median townhome resale over the last twelve months was $337,000 and a median villa or condo duplex resale was $249,000, an $88,000 difference between two things your client may be describing with the same word. Ask to see the recorded use code before you set an expectation.

Community Development District assessments

If one item on this page saves your client money, it's this one. A CDD assessment repays the bonds that funded a community's roads, drainage, gates and amenities. It appears on the annual tax bill as a non-ad valorem line, and it is separate from property tax and separate from the HOA fee. It does not go down when values go down.

The amount varies enormously by community, and inside a single community it varies by build phase, because each phase carries its own bond series. Sarasota County does not publish non-ad valorem data, so the only reliable source is an individual parcel's own tax notice. These are figures pulled from real 2026 notices.

All three Palmera parcels and the Gran Paradiso and IslandWalk parcels sit in the same West Villages district. The difference is bond series by phase, and Palmera carries the newest debt. A client comparing two Wellen Park communities on list price alone can be off by $3,800 a year in a line item they never saw.

Millage differs too, and it follows the taxing district rather than the postal address. Palmero, in Nokomis, sits in unincorporated Sarasota County at a non-school millage of 5.3787. Palmera at Wellen Park sits in a City of North Port district at 8.4154, while carrying a Venice mailing address in ZIP 34293. Same county, same drive to the beach, very different tax bill.

What a pool is worth here, and the number's honest limits

This comes up with every Florida buyer. I measured it across 204 size matched single family resales in eight Sarasota County communities over the twelve months to 3 August 2026, using a 24 month window for Sunrise Preserve and Palmero because they trade too slowly for twelve.

Homes with a pool sold for a median $99,550 more than homes of the same size without one, a gap of 17%. Every one of the eight communities was positive. Each community was narrowed to a single 500 square foot size band containing at least four sales on each side, so the gap cannot be explained by pool homes simply being bigger. Builder closings were excluded throughout.

Pool homes do sit on larger lots, by 6% to 25% depending on the community, so I re-ran it holding lot size constant as well, keeping only homes whose lots fall within 0.02 acres of each other. Across those 150 sales the gap was $86,275, or 15%, and it held in all eight communities. Lot size accounts for roughly $13,000 of the difference. It's real, and it isn't the explanation.

Attached homes almost never have a pool here

Across six of those communities there are 1,082 villas and attached homes, and six of them have a pool. Not 6%. Six homes.

So a community wide pool statistic means nothing to a client looking at attached homes in these six communities. If your client wants a private pool and also wants a villa or a townhome, in these communities those two wishes are close to mutually exclusive, and it's better to know that before the flight than during it. Attached homes in some other Sarasota County communities do have pools, so this finding belongs to the six named above and not to the county.

The full study, with every community's figure and the method written out, is at floridahomevalueai.com/market-report.

Spring is the peak, and summer is not the dead season

Recorded closings in Sarasota County are highest in spring. Over the twenty-four months to 2 September 2026, counting qualified resales, April and March were the two strongest months and June recorded more closings than either January or February.

Because a Florida sale typically closes 30 to 45 days after contract, those spring closings were negotiated from late winter onward, while seasonal residents were in the area. That's the mechanism behind the peak, and it's why a listing decision made in January is aimed at an April closing.

One caveat on the recent end of that count. Sales are recorded after they close, so the most recent two months in any county extract are incomplete and read artificially low. I've left them in rather than trimming the window, and they should be read as partial.

Flood zones are decided lot by lot, not community by community

Two houses on the same street in the same community can sit in different flood zones, and the designation drives an insurance premium your client will carry for as long as they own the house. It's a lot level question and it cannot be answered at the community level.

• Zone X is outside the 100 year floodplain. Lenders don't require flood insurance here. Many owners carry it anyway, usually at a much lower premium.
• Zone AE is inside the 100 year floodplain with a base flood elevation established. Flood insurance is required by federally backed lenders, and the premium depends heavily on how the elevation certificate reads against that base flood elevation.
• Zone VE adds wave action, and is coastal. Premiums are materially higher again.
• Zone AH and AO are shallow flooding designations that appear inland in this county.

Two practical points for a buyer's agent working from out of state. First, ask for the elevation certificate rather than the zone letter, because within Zone AE the premium range is very wide. Second, a community built after its district's drainage was engineered can sit largely in Zone X while an older neighborhood a mile away sits in AE, so newer is not a reliable proxy for either answer.

What the designations mean here in more detail, including how they interact with Sarasota County's own drainage districts, is at floridahomevalueai.com/flood-zones.

The attributes that actually separate them

I'm deliberately not going to tell you which community suits which kind of buyer. That's your client's call and yours, and a page that sorts communities by who should live in them is a page doing something it shouldn't. What I can give you is the factual attributes that differ, so you can ask your client the right questions.

• Gated or not. Most of the newer master planned communities here are gated. Much of Venice, Nokomis and North Port proper is not.
• Age restricted or not. Some Sarasota County communities are 55 and over under federal housing law and most are not. This is a recorded restriction, so confirm it against the community's own documents rather than a listing description.
• Golf or not, and whether membership is mandatory. Mandatory golf membership is a recurring cost of the same order as a CDD assessment, and it's separate from both the HOA fee and the assessment.
• Still building, or finished. This changes everything about how you price. In a community the builder is still selling, your client is competing with new inventory and incentives. In a finished community they're not.
• CDD or no CDD, and which phase. Covered above. Get the parcel's own tax notice.
• HOA fee and what it includes. Lawn care, cable and internet are bundled in some communities and not others, which makes headline fee comparisons useless without the inclusions list.

Common questions