• Wesley Chapel, FL
• Everything's New
• Great Place to Build a Community
• Masterplan All-In-One Concept
• Real Estate Affordability
• High Development Ceiling

Wesley Chapel, FL

I'm going to hop into point number one in no particular order. But I don't want to assume that you are familiar with Wesley Chapel at all, which this video would've no context if you're not.

So food for thought. Wesley Chapel sits north of the downtown Tampa City Center by about 24 miles. So realistically, you're a 30 to 40-minute commute one way, and this is one of the directions you can go to in Tampa Bay to get suburban advantages. Some are going to be on this list, but it's an outskirt, I guess, not in the heart of the city. And the other directions obviously are east, west, and south because we're inland here, so you're not right on the Gulf of Mexico.

The number one point is everything is simply new. When I moved there in 2015 from St. Pete, I like being by the stuff, especially when I was younger by all the cool things the city has going on. But I'm not romantic about the charm of an individual house or the age and keeping all that intact.

Those advantages to other people were disadvantages to me. Wood rot and crawl spaces and mice and everything's kind of smaller because back in the day everything was smaller. The closets and the floor plans were choppier. I like traditional Florida-style homes. If there's charm, I want it brand new and to be built like there's a charm in it. I just like the new stuff. And Wesley Chapel, everything feels new. When you go to a regular shopping center with a Target and a Publix when they're built brand new, just everything's new, it's all fresh. The aesthetics are blended, it's clean, and all of Wesley Chapel still to this day feels like it's new. Just the newness of the neighborhoods and the commercial amenities I feel like are just gleaming from it. And that's something that appealed to me. So that's a big, big point where the density of new everything you have to go to somewhere where there was land and it was built. And typically that's not in the heart of the city because it's been mature for too long. With comes with that? Some advantages if you view them that way.
For instance, if you're looking at new construction homes that you want to buy, there are 50 plus communities when I ran this video, 50 plus new communities in a 10 to 15-mile radius of Wesley Chapel. So you're either going in this direction or you're going southeast to the Brandon, Riverview, Apollo Beach area.

It's usually one of the two in Tampa Bay where all of the construction clusters. So think about the affordability that comes with being on the outskirt. Think about the density of the volume of new construction of them competing with each other, which gives you a variety. You could like Wesley Chapel and not have two communities to pick from. And then the average age of the home that was sold in the entire last year, 2,300 homes were sold in the last year in MLS. Over 90% of them were built in the year 2000 or newer. So even if you're buying a resale in Meadow Pointe or Seven Oaks or something like that, your chance of finding this here is one of the best equations to me in general of you loving a city and not getting pushed out of that city because some criteria in your home buying or lifestyle process don't work out. So by having a high volume of everything being new, I think that's for number one in this video, that's a big advantage.

Number two, I am simply calling, this is a great place to build a community. When I moved to Wesley Chapel, I was in my late twenties, maybe 28, 29, or something like that. And I had no kids at the time, but that was kind of on the horizon. So we're going new construction home, getting a little bit more space, and we were in the process of private adoption of my first son. And I found it very easy to build a community there. I had a community in St. Pete and Downtown Tampa too, but a little bit harder to get your head around, especially if you move from a state of where to build this community because you go to your job and you can physically seek out activities beyond that.



But trying to hone down once you're out of school trying to say, "Look, where are all the people my age," and the demographics in general, when you move, no one's going to say that stuff to you. It's a big no-no to be age or any of that kind of stuff. No one's going to get into a demographic conversation. But the thing with the suburbs is there's good and bad to this idea, but in my mind, the appeal to the suburbs creates defined categories of like-minded people and they're more aligned in life stages. You have a lot more gated communities than you do in house-to-house neighborhood boroughs as you do in the urban districts. Then you start to hone into price point and school districts and the density of churches and kids sports and all these kinds of things. It creates built-in demographic control if you will. Kids going to schools that are based inside communities very close to just a few neighborhoods, create a lot of people that will have similar age kids. And a lot of times that's going to also align with life stages. Churches are another thing that through all the different natural ways to get involved in the church communities through small groups and all these kinds of outreach things, a lot of what's happening in Wesley Chapel. Kids' sports are another one. It controls the age of the kid, which a lot of times aligns with the age of the parents. And then as a finisher for this one, the intentionality of people moving from out of state. I mentioned this a lot, but I've always thought it was interesting and that someone described it to me on my team here that was like, "It's like your first day of school or college your freshman year, where all of these people, the commonality between them are that all of them are new." And a lot of times they're from the same five states.

So they're interested in seeking out the community because they don't know anyone, but a lot of times they're so excited to be there, they have that in common. And a lot of people that relocate, they're either relocating for economic reasons, so they're maybe similar in that facet or they're relocating for end-of-work-life reasons. So they're similar ages for that reason. So just the intentionality and the way new construction suburbs are built I think does give you a little easier way to find yourself, I hate this term, it's a cliche, but find your tribe, I guess, for lack of a better word, I'm blanking at the moment, but I do think Wesley Chapel's a great place to build a community overall.

Number three, a great appeal to Wesley Chapel is the master plan all-in-one concepts. Again, this is good for some people and the opposite of what other people want. So two-headed monster here, but the thing with going to an area where 10 years ago was all farmland and they constructed the idea of a deserted effort to make this an attractive suburb, that intentionality allows them to do way more inclusive concepts, seamless concepts than if they patched together an area where a lot of it already existed and they're plugging in infill housing because don't have the control of this kind of thing.

So Wesley Chapel's an area like a Lakewood ranch in a lot of ways where a lot of the land was owned by just a couple of families. So when they sold it off, they tied strings to what they wanted to happen with it. So if a developer took this land, they couldn't just kind of bulldoze the idea of what these families kind of wanted to happen. And what came of that was a lot of really all-in-one concepts. So for instance, Wiregrass is a great example where they take this huge parcel of land. And they say, "Yeah, we can build 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 neighborhoods there, but we need to have something for everyone. We need to have a 55 and up community with resort sale amenities. We need to have a couple of entry-level points where some rental stuff, but also some entry-level price points that aren't just tiny homes because affordability and family need more size for less and we need to have a step-up home. You want from one kid to three, we need to have a luxurious element. We need to have a mother-in-law or retirement, no frills element like villas and that kind of thing. We need to build schools here and parks here. If we're going to be in a suburb that's 50 minutes from the beach and 40 minutes to commute to work, and a lot of people may be independent or just one spouse commutes, what we need to have is we need to have more..." Gone are the days where people value, just "My one neighborhood has a nice pool and a couple of these things."

Now they want more when they leave their community. They want communal amenities. They want a little town square that they can walk to. When you have multiple kids and if anyone watching this video has multiple kids like I do, you don't have seven hours to kind of go out, you're in between nap times and get home from work and you have five to 7:30 PM before the kids go to bed. You're looking for little things around that don't require this big path of most resistance if you will. And Wesley Chapel has done a great job with that. You have, I have some notes here so I can remember, but for some of the older ones, you have Seven Oaks and you have Meadow Pointe. Seven Oaks is one where you drive into a concept of a bunch of different neighborhoods, some gated, some not, that come together for communal amenities throughout the community and just beautifully landscaped, but you go in your neighborhood.

But Seven Oaks is the concept. Meadow Pointe has like Meadow Pointe one, two, three, blah, blah, blah. And it's kind of like a whole area, doesn't feel as inclusive as Seven Oaks. Wiregrass is a newer version of all of that built. Epperson Lagoon with Crystal Water lagoons, which they have multiple around now Marada, and there's South Shore Bay or something down in Riverview. But Metro Place is this developer who also built Union Park over Meadow Point. They built kind of that everything but the beach concept where they gave you a water recreational crystal water lagoon, and they build neighborhoods around it. So master plan, all-in-one concepts, they need the land and they need who owns the land to be kind of planned at one time and then they can build a whole kind of area that just makes more sense, the streets the way they run.

They have a plan of what to do with this when it gets busier and all these people move in. So I think number three, master plan concepts are a big perk to Wesley Chapel over pretty much all the rest of Tampa Bay as far as a competitive factor.

Number four on the list, I'm calling relative real estate affordability. And I want to frame this a little bit because nothing's perfect, but I don't want people to be like, "Oh, must be nice," or "Yeah, must be nice living in southwest Florida and that's affordable to you." But let me frame how to look at it where this would make more sense.

The one stat here is over the last 12 months in the Westley Chapel area, this is the median home that sold four bedrooms, three baths, and 2,000 square feet. So not the biggest in the world, but the bedroom, bathroom, you can kind of see the model there. 2,007 square feet, $410,000 was the median price. So half of that number is below 410,000. And you could say that's not that affordable, but typically the way you'd work through the idea of ending up in Tampa, one you'd started saying, "Is Tampa right for me?" And if you're looking at Southwest Florida, you're comparing Tampa Bay versus Sarasota versus Naples because beyond that's coastal, Southwest Florida, those are the three areas. Sarasota and Naples are far more expensive for the same house almost 100% of the time than Wesley Chapel would be. So that's one way you would really, if you're looking at Lakewood Ranch versus Wesley Chapel, which are similar suburbs to their town, not even a question, $410,000 would not scratch the surface of a 1,400 square foot villa in Lakewood Ranch. So that's one way to look at where 410 is, that's why I'm saying it's relative affordability. And the other thing you need to look at, which is the main thing about Tampa Bay is the juxtaposition for you and your family and where you're at in the life stage of do you want to go in the urban districts versus Wesley Chapel. And that would be the other way because this is like most towns, but if you're looking at Westley Chapel versus just to give you some key terms, Hyde Park, Riverside Heights, Ballast Point, Seminole Heights, Tampa Heights, you're going to go into that kind of housing where you're you're paying for the location.



So it's going to be more than this price on average for a lot less house, an older house, nothing perfect. It's not as turnkey. St. Petersburg is going to be similar. St. Petersburg almost has zero new construction as far as neighborhoods. So it's those two Tampa Bay to the state and Wesley Chapel as a suburb versus your other alternatives within the Tampa Bay region as a whole. And I think there is still room and still advantages to going north.

My fifth and final point for this video on why Wesley Chapel, Florida is possibly our number one overall suburb in the Tampa Bay, Florida area is its high development ceiling. There's always this pattern of stuff that hits a new area that developers find in Vogue at the time that typically is the writing on the wall of its pre-explosion. And Wesley Chapel is one of those areas where you're seeing things go into them where you're like, "Ah, this is probably a sign."



And if you haven't seen it already beyond the Riverside District in the downtown Tampa area, Wesley Chapel has been the one that's picked where all this stuff's kind of popping up. You saw the shops at Wiregrass, the outdoor mall that's already there. If you've been there, you've seen this beautiful open-air outdoor area of shops and restaurants and boutiques and all this kind of stuff. You see the Emerson Lagoon, and the Crystal Lagoons, the first place they went is Wesley Chapel, the Tampa Premium outlets, which is like a sister to the Orlando Outlet Mall, but way more lovely, in my opinion, way cleaner and walkable, not as frenzied Florida Avenue Brewery from the northern downtown Tampa areas out there. You saw the Grove area do the pod's container village of restaurants and boutiques, which is the only other place they're really in is the Sparkman Wharf, which is the main area where the Tampa Bay Lightning Play channel side.

And then what I saw is, if you've heard of Popstroke, so Popstroke is that Tiger Woods is an investor, but it's like a bar restaurant and bougie put golf kind of concept. And they just came to Sarasota, Florida. But that's one where when I saw that hit, I was like, "Oh, that's interesting that that's the next place they go," because where they're in Sarasota is in University Town Center, which is the suburb of the suburbs below Lakewood Ranch. I'm kind of riffing here, but Saddle Saddlebrook, the Gulf Resort, which I would say would probably be one of the main things that were developed in Westley Chapel. One of the main things that people even knew where Westley Chapel was, Saddlebrook. their expansion's going to be big up on, I think they're on State Road 54. And then new roads are being built for easy access to the interstate. And then Cooper's Hawk Brewery restaurant, which is also in Sarasota, is now in Westley Chapel. And where I am mainly based in Lakewood Ranch, Florida these days, which is the number one master plan suburb in the United States of America.

I just named four things on this list, their second location is up in Wesley Chapel and it just seems like a mirror. For the last five years, it seems like a mirror. Everything I experienced in Wesley Chapel, Lakewood Ranch did before. So I think if you're nervous about going to a suburb and being like, "Every time I want a non-chain restaurant or every time I want a date night or everything's far and I save on the house, but everything's far." I do think this suburb will be able to stand on its own and give you everything you need beyond the Gulf of Mexico. And it, I still think is in its infancy. So if you think that in the last couple of years, all the equity opportunities are gone or all the cool things already happened in the market, I don't even think we've broached the topic.

It's a big area and you have Zephyr Hills and you have Lutz and you have Land O Lakes and you have a bunch of things that make up this entire region. And I think the high development ceiling is one of the correlations to me that this place is on the brink of being pretty, pretty interesting.