PulteGroup

What's on the record

PulteGroup appears in the corpus through Aquarama, its short-term-rental resort community in Davenport.

Aquarama (Parcel 8), Davenport — March 16, 2026: 288 acres at US-17/92 and Ernie Caldwell Boulevard, acquired for $51.8M cash. The program is roughly 1,050 units — about 355 single-family homes on 50-foot lots, 349 on 40-foot lots, and ~350 townhomes — built five-to-ten bedrooms with private pools on every unit. The Davenport board recommended approval unanimously. Robert Allen of Deer Run Estates delivered the corpus's most structured water-and-disclosure objection at the hearing — groundwater recharge, Lake Wales Ridge sinkhole susceptibility, well-failure liability, and Florida real-estate disclosure law — and Commissioner Fellows agreed from the dais ("with all the issues with water... he couldn't see how it was approved") while warning against the setback-amendment slippery slope the pools-on-every-unit product forces. The board approved anyway.

The product (web-verified): Aquarama is Pulte's fifth regional resort community, in the lineage of Windsor Cay (Clermont) and Windsor Island (Davenport). Units sell fee-simple to investors under a deed restriction that runs with title: short-term rental only, no homestead exemption, no resident mail. Pulte's representative stated on the record that the zoning carries short-term rental as "simply an allowable use" rather than a lock-in, preserving the firm's optionality between STR-resort and conventional residential build-out. Build-out is projected for early 2027. (GrowthSpotter, October 2024; Homes.com; jome.com.)

Note on entity scope: this dossier covers PulteGroup's investor-STR resort product line; the firm's institutional-scale 55+ Del Webb communities in Leesburg and Minneola are catalogued separately at /entities/pulte-homes.

Why this matters for the corpus

Aquarama makes the corridor's capital shift legible by species. The applicant is not a local owner; it is a national builder developing rental inventory for investors, not housing for households — deed-restricted STR, no homestead, the restriction running with the title. The city is amending its own setback code to fit the product, because pools on every unit force the line-to-water variances. This is the quiet-revolution-highway-27 thesis stratified into a distinct phase: non-local capital arriving as a product class the local market did not generate. It is also the cardinal large-votes-small-crowds exhibit of the cycle — a ~1,050-unit PUD that drew one neighbor and cleared 4-0, with the best argument in the room (Allen's water testimony) losing despite a commissioner agreeing with it from the dais. The room is empty because the entitlement was negotiated upstream; voice exists, leverage does not. And the project sits squarely on the constraint handoff the June cycle reads at corridor scale: Aquarama is entitled ahead of the water that will serve it, in a county where the upper Floridan aquifer has reached its sustainable pumping limit and the Polk Regional Water Cooperative's brackish reverse-osmosis supply does not deliver until mid-2028. The investor-STR resort and the water gate 60 miles north are the same arc seen at two moments — the corridor rubber-stamping today's privatized growth while building its first wall against tomorrow's.