Valencia Bonita

Valencia Bonita at a Glance

Valencia Bonita is a gated, 55-plus community of 996 single-family homes on 347 acres inside the City of Bonita Springs, built by GL Homes between 2017 and 2023 and sold out since 2024. Every home is single-storey, every home sits behind one entrance, and all 996 share one clubhouse and one amenity tract. There is no second gate, no satellite pool, and no sub-community with its own name.

Valencia Bonita is one of the Bonita Springs communities we cover in depth, and other nearby communities on our site include Bonita National and Midtown at Bonita. If you are buying or selling here, our comparison of the best real estate agents in Bonita Springs shows how local agents stack up on the public record.

That single-entity structure is the first thing to understand about the place, because almost everything else follows from it. One builder means one construction era and one set of building standards. One amenity tract means every owner pays into the same facilities and every owner uses them. One gate means the community reads as one address rather than as a collection of enclaves.

What Kind of Community Is Valencia Bonita?

It is an active-adult resale community that finished construction recently enough that the newest homes are still under two years past their final completions, and old enough that the association has been in resident hands since 30 April 2023. Roughly 60 homes change hands in a year, which is about six percent of the community annually. That is a normal turnover rate for a 55-plus community and it means a buyer looking here is choosing from a small, well-defined pool rather than a large anonymous one.

Zoning across the community is Residential Planned Development on 1,061 of its 1,063 parcels, the tax district on every parcel reads City of Bonita Springs and Bonita Springs Fire, and every one of the 996 homes carries the county's single-family residential land-use code. That last point matters more than it sounds: even the 280 attached villa-style homes are coded and taxed as single-family residences, not as condominiums or townhouses. There is not one condominium or cooperative parcel in Valencia Bonita.

The Site and the Street Plan

The community was platted in eight phases recorded between 2017 and 2021 under the subdivision name Bonita Beach Road Estates, Plats One through Eight, carried in Lee County's records by instrument number rather than by plat book and page. The eight plats sum to exactly 347.00 acres on the county's subdivision layer, and summing the GIS acreage of all 1,063 parcels independently produces the same 347.00 acres. Two separate county datasets landing on the same figure to the hundredth is about as clean a land-area confirmation as a community gets.

Inside that footprint, homes sit on 23 named residential streets. Valencia Bonita Boulevard is the spine and carries the amenity complex address; no home has a Valencia Bonita Boulevard address. Lot sizes run from a median of about 0.117 acres for the smallest product to about 0.231 acres for the largest, with a community-wide median of 0.150 acres. The layout is built around an interior chain of lakes, with preserve tracts on site and drainage under a South Florida Water Management District permit. Village Walk of Bonita Springs sits to the west and Bonita National Golf and Country Club to the east.

Why Buyers Choose Valencia Bonita

Buyers choose Valencia Bonita for three things that are unusual in combination: every home is on one level and was built in the last decade, the whole community sits in flood Zone X, and there is no community development district assessment on the tax bill. Most Southwest Florida 55-plus communities can offer one or two of those. Few offer all three.

One Storey, One Builder, One Gate

All 996 homes carry a maximum-stories value of one in the county record. Not most of them. All of them. For a buyer planning to age in place, that removes an entire category of question, and it also removes an entire category of listing confusion: any description of a Valencia Bonita home that mentions a second floor or a downstairs primary suite is describing something else.

The build window is equally tight. Construction ran from 2017 through 2023, which means the oldest home here is younger than the newest home in most competing Bonita Springs communities, and every home was built to post-2017 Florida code. Across the City permit record for these parcels, 424 of 532 permits state impact-rated glazing, and roughly 487 standby generators have been permitted. Those are not marketing claims; they are counts from the permit file.

The Cost Structure Buyers Notice Second

Valencia Bonita has no community development district. There is no CDD line on a Valencia Bonita tax bill, and a real parcel bill shows exactly two non-ad-valorem lines: Lee County solid waste at $358.45 and City of Bonita Springs stormwater at $50.00. Homeowners in several neighbouring CDD communities pay between $1,273 and $1,805 per unit per year in district assessments on top of their taxes. Valencia Bonita owners pay none of that. There is a recorded 2017 cost-sharing obligation that sits inside the association budget rather than on the tax bill, and it is covered in detail further down this page, but the tax-bill comparison is real and it is large.

On insurance, the community is entirely in flood Zone X, outside the Special Flood Hazard Area, and the City of Bonita Springs holds a Community Rating System Class 5 rating worth a 25 percent National Flood Insurance Program discount, effective 1 May 2017. Under Risk Rating 2.0 that discount applies to policies outside the flood hazard area as well, so a Zone X home here earns the full 25 percent.

What We Notice Showing Homes Here

The thing that surprises buyers most on a first tour is that the community does not sort itself by price the way they expect. Turin Court is a single 41-lot cul-de-sac, and it carries homes from all five collections, alternating lot to lot. A buyer standing at the top of that street is looking at homes from the entry tier and the estate tier within a few doors of each other, with no line, no sign, and no gate between them.

That has a practical consequence we raise with every buyer. You cannot shop this community by street. Two homes 200 feet apart can differ by 1,500 square feet and by more than $800,000, and neither one is in a better or worse part of the community, because there are no parts. What you are actually choosing is a floor plan, a lot, and a view. If you want to talk through which plan fits, McGreevy and Comisar can be reached at (239) 898-6072.

Valencia Bonita Market Update

Over the trailing twelve months, 1 September 2025 through 31 August 2026, 60 homes closed in Valencia Bonita at a median price of $840,000, against 57 closings at a median of $860,000 in the twelve months before that. Prices are modestly down over that window, sales volume is modestly up, and homes are selling meaningfully faster.

Data updated: September 2026

How Many Homes Sell in Valencia Bonita in a Year?

Roughly 60, and that number has been stable for three years. Against 996 homes, 60 closings is about six percent annual turnover, which is a normal rate for an active-adult community and is not a sign of either distress or scarcity. The county's recorded-sales file shows 57 qualified sales in 2024, 59 in 2025, and 39 through early August 2026, and the trailing-twelve-month count on the same instrument is 59.

The reason the number is stable is that the builder is gone. GL Homes recorded 125 closings in 2023, six in 2024, and zero in both 2025 and 2026. Every sale in both of the twelve-month windows above is an owner-to-owner resale. There is no builder inventory competing with resale sellers here, and there has not been since 2024.

Two Instruments, One Answer

We measure this community two ways, and we publish both. The multiple listing service records 60 closings over the trailing twelve months at a median of $840,000 and a mean of $901,175. Lee County's recorded-deed file, filtered to qualified arm's-length improved sales across the eight plats, records 59 closings at a median of $849,900 and a mean of $910,856.

Those two pipelines have no common origin. They agree on count to within 1.7 percent, on median to within 1.2 percent, on mean to within 1.1 percent, and on median price per square foot to within 0.08 percent, at $368.66 on the listing side and $368.35 on the county side. Agreement to eight hundredths of one percent between two entirely separate data sources is the strongest validation in this report, and it is why we are comfortable publishing these figures with the window named rather than hedging them.

The small residual gap is explained rather than mysterious. The county file counts recorded deeds, including transfers that were never listed, and carries a recording lag of about a month. The listing file counts listed closings only. Neither instrument is wrong.

Days on Market, Inventory and How Fast Homes Sell

Homes sold faster over the trailing twelve months than they did the year before. Median days on market fell from 66 to 54.5, a 17.4 percent improvement, and the share of homes closing at or above asking price rose from 7.0 percent to 10.0 percent. At the same time the median sale-to-list ratio softened slightly, from 96.59 percent to 95.71 percent.

Read together, those signals describe a market that rewards accurate pricing. Well-priced homes are moving faster than they did a year ago. Aspirationally priced homes are still absorbing about four and a half percent off the asking price before they close.

Inventory is thin in absolute terms. There were 18 active listings at the September 2026 measurement, which against 60 closings a year is about 3.6 months of supply. That is a balanced-to-tight figure by conventional reading, and it is one reason the mean sale price rose 6.21 percent over the same window in which the median fell.

Are Valencia Bonita Homes Appreciating?

Over the long run, substantially. Over the last twelve months, modestly down. Both statements are true and both need their window named.

The long-run figures are large and they are not in dispute. The trailing-twelve-month median of $840,000 is up about 61 percent against the 2020 calendar-year median and about 81 percent against 2018, the community's first full year of closings. Measured per square foot the long-run picture is similar.

The owner-level number is stronger still, and it is the cleanest instrument available because it compares the same physical house to itself. Across the trailing twelve months, 59 homes that closed had also sold at some earlier point. Those repeat pairs show a median gain of 32.3 percent over a median hold of about four and a half years, which annualises to roughly six percent a year. One in four of those sellers sold for less than they paid; three in four sold for more, and that ratio was essentially unchanged from the year before, when it was 24 percent.

The twelve-month direction, stated plainly: measured on closings from 1 September 2025 through 31 August 2026 against the same twelve months a year earlier, the median sale price is down about 2.3 percent, and holding the mix of home sizes constant it is down somewhat more. Four independent methods land in the same place. The headline median gives down 2.33 percent. The county recorded-sales file gives down 0.6 percent. A constant-mix decomposition gives down 2.97 percent at current weights and down 7.18 percent at prior-year weights. A same-floor-plan paired comparison, which eliminates mix entirely, gives down 2.3 percent with four of five plan clusters lower.

We are not going to dress that up. Prices in Valencia Bonita are modestly lower over the last twelve months, in common with much of the Southwest Florida market, and the long-run gain remains large. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either using a different window or not naming one.

What Homes Sell For in Valencia Bonita

Trailing-twelve-month closings in Valencia Bonita ran from $520,000 to $1,650,000, with a median of $840,000. Where a specific home falls in that range is driven almost entirely by which of the five collections its floor plan belongs to, because the collections are a strict size ladder and price tracks size closely.

Data updated: September 2026

The Price Ladder by Collection

Here is the community as a benchmark table, sorted smallest to largest. The medians are trailing-twelve-month closings measured on the same 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026 window used throughout this section.

The spread is wide. The trailing-year median for the smallest tier is $570,000 and for the largest is $1,497,500, a difference of more than $900,000 inside one gate. That is why a community-wide median of $840,000 is nearly useless as a valuation for any individual house, and why every conversation about value here has to start with the floor plan rather than with the community.

Where the Twelve-Month Movement Actually Landed

The collections did not move together. Over the trailing twelve months against the prior twelve, the smallest tier's median fell 6.1 percent from $606,750 to $570,000. The next tier up rose 5.6 percent from $767,500 to $810,500. The largest tier by home count, at 351 homes and 36.7 percent of all sales, fell 12.8 percent from $975,000 to $849,950. The second-largest single-family tier was flat at $1,075,000 in both windows.

The estate tier's apparent gain cannot be used. It recorded one qualified sale in the prior twelve months and six in the trailing twelve, and a single sale is not a market. We report its trailing-year median of $1,497,500 as a level, not as a trend.

Three of the five collections were down or flat on median. That is the honest shape of the year, and it is more useful to a buyer or a seller than a community average that averages across products that behaved differently.

One more thing needs saying, because it is where most published analysis of this community goes wrong. Price per square foot for the community as a whole appears to have risen over the twelve months, but that rise is an artifact of composition, not of value. The estate tier, which carries the highest per-foot values at about $457, went from one sale to six, which pulled the whole-community figure up. At the level of individual floor plans, four of the five plan groups with enough paired sales to compare show per-foot values modestly lower, with a median cluster change of about down 2.0 percent on the same twelve-month window. We do not publish community-wide price-per-square-foot appreciation for Valencia Bonita, because at plan level it is not there.

What Buyers Should Budget Beyond the Purchase Price

A resale purchase here carries a one-time $3,500 capital contribution payable by the buyer at closing, created by the Eleventh Amendment to the declaration and recorded on 30 October 2023. It is lienable, it has six enumerated exemptions, and it belongs on every net sheet. Association assessments are billed quarterly on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October. The current dollar figure is not published in any primary public source, so we do not publish one; the association is the place to get it, and any figure you see quoted on an aggregator should be verified against the association's own statement before you rely on it.

Solid waste collection is billed on the property tax bill at $358.45 per home per year rather than through the association. City stormwater adds $50.00 on the same bill. There is no district assessment of any kind.

The Five Home Collections

Valencia Bonita was marketed by GL Homes in five collections: Signature, Regal, Vintage, Crown and Classic. The names are real, they are GL's own, and they appear in GL's own site-map artwork. They are price-and-size tiers applied lot by lot across a single undivided community, and they are not places.

A Collection Is a Price Tier, Not a Neighbourhood

This is the single most misunderstood fact about Valencia Bonita, and getting it wrong will cost a buyer time. The collection names appear zero times in any plat name, tract name, subdivision description or property legal description across all 1,063 parcels in the community. All eight plats are phases of one recorded subdivision with one name. Five of the eight plats contain homes from two or more collections. Eight of the 23 residential streets carry homes from two or more collections, and where the tiers change they change mid-block rather than at an intersection.

Turin Court, a single 41-lot cul-de-sac, carries homes from all five collections, alternating lot by lot. Montecristo Loop is one continuous 164-home loop with one street name and one address range, and its lots carry two different tiers, 52 homes of one and 112 of the other, with no line anywhere on the map between them. Calistoga Drive spans three separate plats and two tiers across 101 homes.

The way GL itself drew this is decisive. Both of GL's own site-map documents, one created in March 2019 and one in February 2022, colour every individual lot with a five-swatch key. There is no boundary line on either map, no zone label, no named sub-area, and no separate entrance or amenity for any tier. It is a price key, not a neighbourhood plan.

One naming detail is worth recording because it is dated and first-party. GL's 2019 legend labels the entry tier "Signature Villas". By the February 2022 map, the word "Villas" has been dropped and the label reads simply "Signature". That is a real change in GL's own marketing language, and it lines up with the county record, where all 280 of those homes are coded as single-family residences.

The Signature Collection: 280 Homes, 1,442 to 2,026 Square Feet

The entry tier and the villa-style, lock-and-leave product. Under-roof area runs 2,247 to 3,008 square feet, median lot size is about 0.117 acres, and the county's median just value across these homes is $493,616. Trailing-twelve-month median sale price is $570,000. Not one of the 280 has a county-recorded private pool, which is the single sharpest product distinction in the community and something buyers should know before they tour.

The Regal Collection: 146 Homes, 2,017 to 2,254 Square Feet

The entry single-family product, with under-roof area from 2,919 to 4,054 square feet and a median lot of about 0.136 acres. County median just value is $682,344. Trailing-twelve-month median sale price is $810,500, and this was the one tier whose median rose year over year, up 5.6 percent. About 41 of the 146 homes, roughly 28 percent, carry a recorded pool.

The Vintage Collection: 351 Homes, 2,196 to 2,645 Square Feet

The core of the community and the largest tier at 35.2 percent of all homes. Under-roof area runs 3,013 to 5,114 square feet, median lot about 0.164 acres, county median just value $761,644. Trailing-twelve-month median sale price is $849,950. About 189 of the 351, or 54 percent, have a recorded pool. Because this tier is more than a third of the community and more than a third of all sales, its year is the closest thing Valencia Bonita has to a headline, and it was down 12.8 percent.

The Crown Collection: 141 Homes, 2,619 to 2,907 Square Feet

The larger single-family product, with under-roof area from 3,779 to 5,880 square feet and a median lot of about 0.193 acres. County median just value is $897,308. Trailing-twelve-month median sale price is $1,075,000, identical to the prior twelve months. About 92 of 141, or 65 percent, have a recorded pool.

The Classic Collection: 77 Homes, 2,754 to 3,709 Square Feet

The estate-scale product, with three-car garages, under-roof area from 3,818 to 7,316 square feet, a median lot of about 0.231 acres, and a county median just value of $982,406. Trailing-twelve-month median sale price is $1,497,500 across six closings. At 77 homes it is 7.7 percent of the community and the rarest tier to come to market.

What the Tier Ladder Actually Predicts

Two things move monotonically up the ladder, and both are useful. Lot size rises from a median of 0.117 acres at the entry tier to 0.231 acres at the estate tier, roughly doubling. Pool incidence rises from zero percent to 68 percent, in order, with no exceptions: 0 percent, 28 percent, 54 percent, 65 percent, 68 percent. If a buyer wants a private pool in Valencia Bonita, the tier they shop determines how many candidates exist, and at the entry tier the answer is none.

Floor Plans and Layouts

Valencia Bonita was launched with 21 floor plans and GL added two more during the build, giving 23. The county's own record, clustering all 996 homes by air-conditioned square footage within their collection, independently measures 23 distinct product groups of three or more homes covering 982 of the 996 homes. The plan count reconciles from two directions, which is unusual and worth trusting.

The Seventeen Confirmed Plan Names

We publish 17 plan names, and only 17, because those are the ones confirmed on a first-party GL route where the source names the plan, the collection and this specific community together.

Twelve of these were introduced at launch and documented in November 2017. Bellagio and Napa followed in September 2019. Hampton, Oxford and Riviera followed in September 2021.

Why Plan Names Need to Be Checked Against This Community

GL Homes reuses both collection names and plan names across at least eight different communities, and it moves plans between tiers when it does. Four of the 17 names above sit in a different collection at other GL communities than they do here. Bellagio and Carlyle are Classic plans at Valencia Bonita and Crown plans elsewhere. Caroline and Julia are Crown plans at Valencia Bonita and Vintage plans elsewhere.

That means a description copied from another community's plan page can be confidently wrong about a Valencia Bonita home, and it usually will be wrong in a direction that matters, because tier drives price. This is one of the reasons we measure this community against the county record rather than against builder collateral from somewhere else.

Chandon: The Most-Built Plan in Valencia Bonita

The Chandon is the most-built floor plan in the community. The county record shows 118 homes at exactly 2,464 air-conditioned square feet, which is 11.8 percent of the entire community and the single largest product group here. Median under-roof area for that group is 4,098 square feet, median lot size is 0.161 acres, and 68 of the 118 have a recorded pool. Bedroom counts in the county record for the group run three and four, with three to four baths. It is a Vintage plan, confirmed on GL's own first-party route, and there is no other GL Chandon anywhere to confuse it with.

That group is also one of the most useful comparables in Valencia Bonita, precisely because there are 118 of them. Over the last two and a half years, 21 of the 118 resold, in a range from $715,000 to $1,415,000 with a median of $925,000. On the tightest twelve-month comparison available, the same plan group closed at a median of $864,500 against $870,000 a year earlier, a change of down 0.6 percent, which is the flattest result of any paired plan group in the community.

The Largest Product Groups by Home Count

Every one of these groups was built across most or all of the construction period. No tier is a later phase, and no plan is confined to one year, which is another way of seeing that the collections are product lines rather than construction stages.

Two Real Plans We Cannot Name Yet

Two genuine floor plans in Valencia Bonita are built, measured and identifiable in the county record, and we do not know their GL names.

The first is a 2,528 square foot four-bedroom plan with 58 homes built. It is confirmed as a Vintage plan, its median under-roof area is 4,201 square feet, and its median resale price over the last two and a half years is $1,025,000, which makes it the fourth-largest product group in the community and one of the most valuable.

The second is a 2,900 square foot plan with 13 homes built. It is confirmed as a Crown plan, with bedroom counts running two to four.

We could guess at names for both. We are not going to. GL retired the entire Valencia Bonita section of its website when the community sold out, and the plan pages that carried those bindings now return errors; the archive route that would recover them has been rate-limited on every attempt. The names that circulate for these two plans come from sources we do not treat as authoritative for this community. If you need the name for a specific address, the association's document library and the original purchase contract will both carry it, and we are happy to help track it down at (239) 898-6072.

We also do not publish three names that circulate for this community and do not survive checking. One of them describes a 3,575 square foot home with a downstairs primary suite, which is impossible here, because all 996 homes in Valencia Bonita are single-storey. That single detail is a useful test to run on any Valencia Bonita listing description you read.

Are There Really Only 23 Floor Plans?

Effectively yes, though the county measures a handful of one-off square footages beyond them. Fourteen homes sit at individual air-conditioned square footages that do not cluster with any other home. Those are almost certainly structural options, extended lanais, bonus rooms and converted garage space, re-measured by the appraiser at a slightly different figure. They are not distinct floor plans and should not be presented as such, which is one reason a plan count of "about two dozen" is more honest for this community than a hard number pulled from a listing site.

Working with a team that measures the community rather than repeating it matters here. McGreevy and Comisar has been recognized as Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008, and the analysis on this page is built from the county parcel record, the recorded plats, the association's own documents and the multiple listing service, with every window named.

Who Built Valencia Bonita

Valencia Bonita was built by GL Homes, through its Florida land entity Bonita Springs Associates I, LLLP, between 2016 and 2023. The builder finished and closed out its last new homes in 2022, and the community has been resale-only ever since. If you are buying here, you are buying from an owner, not from a sales center.

The Developer Entity of Record

GL Homes is the brand. The entity that owned the land, applied for the entitlement amendments, recorded the Declaration and served as Declarant is Bonita Springs Associates I, LLLP, a Florida limited liability limited partnership carrying Florida document number A15000000442. The partnership was filed with the state on 15 July 2015 and remains active, with a principal address at 1600 Sawgrass Corporate Parkway, Suite 400, Sunrise, Florida. Its general partner is Bonita Springs I Corporation. You can confirm the entity yourself through the Florida Division of Corporations entity search.

The filing date is worth a sentence, because it sits about eleven weeks ahead of the October 2015 land purchase. GL formed the acquisition vehicle first and closed into it. That is ordinary practice, and it is the only reason the corporate record predates the deed.

The Association's own board correspondence names the developer the same way we do, as the community's developer, Bonita Springs Associates I, LLLP, known as GL Homes. When a fact touches the public record, the entity name is the correct one. In ordinary conversation, GL Homes is fine.

GL Homes is one of Florida's largest homebuilders, based in Sunrise, and it markets its 55-plus product statewide under the Valencia name. Valencia Bonita was the company's first Valencia community in Southwest Florida and, at its January 2017 launch, its eleventh Valencia statewide. The company's pattern is consistent across those communities: one builder, one architectural language, an HOA rather than a special taxing district, a resort clubhouse at the center, and a full-time lifestyle director on staff.

One caution that matters if you are shopping several Valencias at once. GL uses the same collection names in Naples, Tampa, Port St. Lucie and on the east coast. Those communities have different clubhouses, different home counts and different entitlements. A square footage or a fee figure from Valencia Trails or Valencia Sky does not describe Valencia Bonita, and the two should never be blended.

What the Land Was Before GL Homes Arrived

This was not raw dirt. GL Homes bought a site that had already been entitled for an active adult community roughly a decade earlier, then sat.

The recorded chain runs back to a 1952 warranty deed from the Collier family, which is where a great deal of east Bonita development land traces. The relevant modern history starts in 2005, when Beach Road Development Company, LLC entered three development agreements with the City of Bonita Springs, one of them titled the East Bonita Active Adult Development Agreement. That name is the original label for the 55-plus concept on this land, and it predates GL Homes by about ten years.

Then the market broke. The site passed through a dense run of assignments between 2011 and 2013, the documentary signature of a distressed post-crash land position changing hands repeatedly. Through that stretch the property was leased for cattle under an agricultural lease dated 28 December 2009, and two surveys from 2011 and 2013 describe what was actually out there: a sand road, drainage ditches, a lake, a dirt road, and a barbed wire fence encroaching along the eastern boundary.

The bridge to GL Homes is a 2011 extension of the Beach Road Estates Development Agreement, which carried the term out to September 2035. That extension is why the entitlement was still alive in 2015 when GL Homes acquired the land for about 56 million dollars, ten years and roughly five million dollars below what the prior owner had paid at the top of the 2005 market.

The Entitlement: Ordinance 05-12 and Three Amendments

The governing entitlement is City of Bonita Springs Zoning Ordinance No. 05-12, which approved the Bonita Beach Road Estates Residential Planned Development for a total of 1,200 dwelling units and up to 30,000 square feet of amenity center uses. It was amended three times, in sequence: 10BOS-ADD00016, then ADD15-23641-BOS, then ADD17-38682-BOS, the administrative amendment to the Master Concept Plan approved in July 2017.

Those numbers are not secondhand. They are read off the City's own Master Concept Plan approval document for ADD17-38682-BOS, which recites the original 1,200-unit and 30,000-square-foot approval and both earlier amendments in its own recitals. The same document names the individual GL Homes authorized to carry the file, which is how the entity and the brand link up in the public record.

1,200 Entitled, 996 Built

The community has 996 homes. The entitlement allowed 1,200. The difference of about 204 units was never built, and no residual entitlement remains that would let anyone add homes inside Valencia Bonita.

The 996 figure is the one to trust, and it comes from the Association's side rather than from marketing. The HOA's own August 2026 voting reminder reported 529 homeowners voted and 467 had not, which totals 996 voting interests. Separately, GL Homes' April to June 2022 community newsletter set a milestone as the point when 90 percent of the 996 homes were closed. Two documents four years apart, one from the Association and one from the developer, land on the same number.

You will still see 997 in circulation. That traces to a single January 2017 launch announcement and to a county residence count that includes one record the voting roll does not. Neither is wrong so much as it is a different measure. And 1,200 is an entitlement figure, never a home count.

How the Community Filled In

The closing curve is unusually well documented for a community this size, because the HOA president published it at the time.

The November to December 2020 newsletter records the community growing from 380 closed homes in March 2020 to more than 500 by October 2020. That is roughly 120 closings in seven pandemic months, in a 55-plus community, which tells you something honest about demand here that no marketing sentence does.

Sales opened in the first quarter of 2017 from the high 300,000s. An interim community center opened in August 2018 on six platted lots that were later built on, the racquet club followed in April 2019, and the permanent clubhouse opened around the middle of 2020. By April 2022 GL Homes was advertising a last chance to own, with eleven homes left to sell. New construction closed out in the second half of 2022, with final completions running into 2023.

Where GL Homes Went Next

After Valencia Bonita sold out, GL Homes moved its Southwest Florida Valencia marketing to Valencia Trails in Naples. Valencia Trails has since sold out as well. There is no successor GL Homes community that shares Valencia Bonita's clubhouse, streets or association, which is the practical point: if you want a home in Valencia Bonita, the only way in is a resale.

How Valencia Bonita Is Governed

Valencia Bonita is governed by a single mandatory homeowners association under Chapter 720 of the Florida Statutes. There is no condominium, no cooperative, no sub-association and no community development district. Every home is fee simple, and every owner is a member of one association.

The Association as a Legal Entity

The exact legal name is Valencia Bonita Homeowners Association, Inc. It is a Florida not-for-profit corporation, document number N16000003102, filed 23 March 2016 and active. Its principal and mailing address of record is in Naples, and it has filed an annual report every year since 2017, most recently in April 2026.

Turnover: 30 April 2023

Control of the Association passed from the developer to the residents on 30 April 2023. The initial election meeting was held two days earlier, on 28 April 2023, and the membership elected the board.

That date matters more than most buyers realize. Under Florida Statute 720.307, a developer must turn over control of a homeowners association once a statutory trigger is met, most commonly when a set percentage of the planned homes have been conveyed to members other than the developer. Before turnover, the developer appoints the board. After turnover, the owners elect it. Valencia Bonita has now been resident-controlled for more than three years, which means the budgets, the reserve decisions and the vendor contracts you are inheriting were set by owners, not by a builder.

There is a clean illustration of what declarant control actually looked like here. The president's message in the November to December 2020 community newsletter is signed by a person identifying herself, in the same signature block, as Project Manager and HOA President. That is not an accusation of anything. It is simply what a developer-controlled board is.

The Board After Turnover

The board today has five directors, all serving two-year terms, and all five carry in-community Bonita Springs addresses on the state corporate filing. It is a fully resident board.

It got to five by amendment. The Tenth Amendment to the Declaration, recorded 1 September 2023 as Lee County instrument 2023000291687, expanded the board from three directors to five. The two new seats were filled by board appointment to the 2024 annual meeting and have been elected since. The same instrument renamed the Architectural Control Committee to the Architectural Review Committee and set its post-turnover composition at not fewer than three and not more than nine members, appointed and removable by the board.

Who Manages the Community Day to Day

The management company is Castle Group. The general manager is Kelly Rhoades, LCAM, who signs Association correspondence on behalf of the board and is reachable through the clubhouse at 16621 Valencia Bonita Blvd.

Castle Group runs the plumbing as well as the front desk. Owner ledgers sit on TownSq, autopay runs through Castle's payment portal, and estoppel certificates and lender questionnaires are ordered through Castle's resale document service. The community website itself runs on the FRONTSTEPS association platform.

One correction worth making explicitly, because older pages and older document copies still carry it. G.R.S. Management Associates was the community's earlier manager, and PDF copies of superseded Valencia Bonita governing documents are still hosted on that company's website. Those files are real, and they are out of date. Castle Group is the current manager. Kelly Rhoades has actually been the throughline across both eras, listed as clubhouse manager in the 2020 newsletter and serving as general manager today, which is six years of continuity across a change of management company and a change of control.

Architectural review submissions now run through an online form as well as the paper packets available on the Association portal, and permits go to the City of Bonita Springs, not to Lee County, because the community sits inside city limits.

The Recorded Document Chain

The governing instrument is the Declaration of Covenants, Restrictions and Easements for Valencia Bonita, 124 pages, recorded 6 February 2017 as Lee County instrument 2017000026294. The Articles of Incorporation and the Bylaws are attached to it as exhibits.

On top of that sit roughly twenty recorded instruments amending the Declaration, the Articles and the Bylaws. The Declaration has been amended through a Twelfth Amendment, the Articles through a Fifth, and the Bylaws through a Fourth. The Association publishes a consolidated 79-page amendment compendium, last revised 26 February 2025, whose table of contents lists every instrument number and recording date. It is publicly downloadable from the Association's own document library, and it is the right starting point for any buyer or attorney who wants the full chain rather than a summary of it.

The operative day-to-day rules are a separate document: Rules and Regulations adopted 2 October 2025, 38 pages across 18 articles, covering everything from architectural additions and generators through leasing, pets, lakes, the clubhouse, parking and golf carts. If you are reading an undated set of Valencia Bonita rules, you are reading a superseded set.

How Rules Are Enforced

Enforcement runs through Chapter 720 and the Association's own documents. Violations are noticed in writing by the board or its designees. Remedies available to the board include an action for damages, injunctive relief, suspension of an owner's or resident's right to use association property and facilities, recovery of court costs and reasonable attorney fees, and fines.

Two practical notes. Owners are responsible for the conduct of their family, guests, tenants and contractors, so a violation by a contractor working on your lot is your violation. And any waiver or consent the board grants is revocable and does not set a precedent unless it was put in writing.

HOA Assessments and What They Cover

Valencia Bonita assessments are billed quarterly, due on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October, with a late fee charged 15 days after the due date. The Association states plainly that no late fees are waived. There is a two-tier structure, with a separate assessment for the Twin Villa homes.

When Assessments Are Due

Assessments are not posted to the owner account until the first day of the quarter, so an owner checking a balance in late December will not see the January charge yet. Payment routes are the TownSq owner portal, ACH autopay through Castle Group, a one-time online payment, or a check to the Association's lockbox with the six-digit account number in the memo line.

What Does the Assessment Cover?

The Declaration defines Operating Expenses, and the Association is required to assess and collect for all of them. The list is specific:

• taxes and tax liens on association property, community systems and improvements

• all charges for community systems or other utilities provided on a bulk basis

• liability and casualty insurance premiums for association property

• ownership, maintenance, repair and replacement of all association property and improvements

• administrative and operational fees and costs

• operation, maintenance, repair and replacement of the drainage system and the irrigation system

• costs for the shuttle service

• costs for landscaping services

• any other costs necessary to operate the association

That sixth item is quietly the most informative line in the whole document. In a community development district, stormwater and drainage assets are typically owned and bond-financed by the district. Here they sit squarely on the HOA as an operating expense, which is exactly what you would expect in a community with no district, and it is a structural corroboration of the no-CDD finding below.

There is a two-tier structure written into the recorded documents. The Declaration distinguishes Individual Lot Assessments from Twin Villa Assessments, and separately defines Twin Villa Operating Expenses and Twin Villa Special Assessments. So a higher villa tier is confirmed in the recorded instrument even though the dollar amounts are not published. Under the Twelfth Amendment, Twin Villa owners also insure their own interiors and the common structural elements on their lot, naming the Association as an additional insured, with 30 days of written notice required before cancellation.

Bulk Television and Internet Are Inside the Assessment

Bulk television, phone and internet are inside the assessment, not billed separately. Article VI, Section 6 of the Declaration defines Community Systems Services and apportions the cost of the bundled service agreement equally across all completed lots. The Association's resident information sheet identifies the provider as Comcast Xfinity under a bulk service agreement, with a dedicated bulk service line for residents. Satellite service is permitted only through an approved architectural application.

What is not public is the service tier or the dollar value of that bulk contract. Both sit behind the members-only portal along with the budget. Ask the Association or read the estoppel.

What Owners Pay Separately

Not everything runs through the Association. Owners pay directly for:

• water and sewer, through Bonita Springs Utilities

• electricity, through Florida Power and Light

• natural gas, through TECO Peoples Gas, since this is a natural gas community

• trash and recycling, which is billed on the Lee County property tax bill rather than by the HOA, at 358.45 dollars a year for a single-family home in fiscal 2026

Pest prevention and landscape and irrigation maintenance are association vendors, not owner bills.

Why No Dollar Figure Appears on This Page

We do not publish a Valencia Bonita assessment amount, and that is deliberate.

No current assessment figure exists in any primary source available to the public. The adopted annual budget and the owner ledger both sit behind the members-only portal. Every dollar figure circulating for this community comes from listing aggregators and third-party directories, which are not primary sources, are frequently stale, and in a two-tier community are frequently the wrong tier. Publishing one of those numbers would be guessing with a decimal point attached.

An honest gap is worth more to you than a confident wrong number, particularly on the one line item you will pay every quarter for as long as you own the home.

How to Get the Current Number

There are two reliable routes, and both are ordinary parts of a transaction.

The first is the Association directly, through Castle Group's management office at the clubhouse. The second, and the one that matters at closing, is the estoppel certificate. Florida law requires the Association to issue an estoppel certificate on request, and it is the document that states the current assessment amount for that specific lot, the payment status, any special assessment, and any transfer or capital charges owed at closing. If you are working with McGreevy and Comisar on a Valencia Bonita purchase, ordering and reading that estoppel is our job, not yours, and we read it before you sign anything that depends on it.

Has a Special Assessment Ever Been Levied?

We found no primary evidence that one has, and we found no evidence that one has not. The levy history is a member-restricted record.

What is established is the rule, and the rule is genuinely protective of owners. The Twelfth Amendment to the Declaration, recorded 20 June 2024 as Lee County instrument 2024000175930, rewrote Article VII, Section 3. After turnover, levying a special assessment requires the affirmative consent of at least two-thirds of all members represented in person or by proxy at a properly called meeting.

There are three carve-outs from that two-thirds requirement, and they are narrow: repair, reconstruction or replacement of damaged or destroyed improvements that previously existed on association property, including landscaping; capital improvements necessary or desirable solely to preserve association property or prevent damage to it; and up-righting or removing fallen or dislodged trees. A parallel two-thirds requirement applies to Twin Villa special assessments, voted by Twin Villa owners only.

Special assessments are levied in addition to regular assessments, may be levied against particular lots or owners to the exclusion of others, and are expressly outside the developer's deficit funding and stated guarantee obligations.

One thing we will not publish. The recorded page contains an allocation ratio phrase that does not survive scanning cleanly enough to quote. Anyone who needs that ratio should read the recorded instrument itself rather than any summary of it, including ours.

Thinking of Selling Your Valencia Bonita Home?

Valencia Bonita is a single-product community, which means a buyer comparing your home is almost always comparing it against another home on the same floor plan. That makes pricing unusually evidence-driven here, and it makes the collection your plan belongs to the single biggest lever on what you can expect. We track every closing in the community by plan and by collection rather than by community average, because the community average moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your house.

If you want to know what your specific plan is doing right now, start with a Valencia Bonita home valuation or call Jesse McGreevy directly at (239) 898-6072.

The $3,500 Resale Capital Contribution

Every buyer of a Valencia Bonita resale pays a capital contribution to the Association at closing. The initial amount set by the recorded amendment is 3,500 dollars, it is assessed uniformly across all lots, and it is paid by the buyer rather than the seller. Most pages about this community either omit it or soften it into a vague warning that a capital contribution may apply. It is specific, it is recorded, and it belongs on your net sheet.

What the Eleventh Amendment Created

The charge was created by the Eleventh Amendment to the Declaration, which added a new Article VII, Section 9 titled Resale Capital Contribution. The membership approved it at a duly noticed meeting on 26 October 2023, and it was recorded on 30 October 2023 as Lee County instrument 2023000349314.

Because it was created inside the Declaration's assessment article, it is an assessment obligation of the lot, enforceable by the Association the way its other assessments are. It is not a courtesy fee and it is not negotiable between buyer and seller in the sense of making it go away. It can be allocated by contract, but somebody is paying it.

Who Pays It, and Is It Still $3,500?

The Association levies the contribution on the transferee, meaning the buyer taking title. It is triggered by a conveyance of a lot.

On the amount, read the amendment carefully. It sets 3,500 dollars as the initial figure and expressly allows the board to alter the amount at a duly noticed board meeting. So 3,500 dollars is the recorded starting point, not a permanent number. The current amount appears on the estoppel certificate for the specific lot, which is another reason the estoppel is the document that governs your closing math.

The Six Exemptions

The amendment enumerates six conveyances that are not subject to the contribution:

1. a transfer resulting from the death of the transferor, in favor of a surviving spouse, heir or other beneficiary

2. a transfer to the transferor's spouse in connection with a dissolution of marriage

3. a transfer to a trust, partnership, corporation or other entity wholly owned by the member, or by the member and spouse

4. a transfer by a record title holder to a person or entity who was also a record title holder of the same lot immediately before the conveyance

5. a transfer to the Association, or to a first mortgage holder, resulting from foreclosure or a deed in lieu of foreclosure

6. an existing Valencia Bonita owner moving within the community

The sixth exemption has a mechanic worth knowing. It applies where the buyer was a record title holder of a Valencia Bonita lot as a personal residence immediately before the conveyance and occupies the newly acquired lot as a personal residence within 180 days. In that case the contribution is still paid at closing and then refunded once the owner supplies documentation satisfactory to the board. If you are moving from a villa to a single-family home inside the gates, plan for the cash at closing and the refund afterward, not the other way around.

Why It Belongs on the Net Sheet

Here is the practical shape of it, from the side of the table where we sit.

A buyer's estimated closing costs on a Valencia Bonita resale look ordinary right up until this line, and a 3,500 dollar charge that nobody mentioned in advance is the kind of surprise that sours a closing week. On the seller's side, a listing agent who does not know about the contribution will not think to address it in negotiation, and a buyer's agent who does know will raise it as a concession request late in the process, which is the worst possible time to be learning about a recorded charge. We put it on the estimate at the first conversation and we confirm the current figure on the estoppel before it matters. That is the entire trick, and it only works if you knew the amendment existed.

Questions about a specific Valencia Bonita closing are welcome at (239) 898-6072.

Is There a CDD at Valencia Bonita?

No. Valencia Bonita has no Community Development District, no district bond debt service, and no district operations and maintenance assessment. It is HOA-only. There is one related obligation that does exist, a recorded cost-sharing agreement in which the HOA carries a 33 percent share, and it belongs in the same answer rather than in a footnote.

How We Proved It Two Ways

The first route is a real Lee County tax bill. We pulled the 2025 annual bill for a parcel that is provably inside the community, chosen because its recorded legal description is the Valencia Bonita plat. The non-ad-valorem section of that bill, the section where district assessments would appear if they existed, contains exactly two lines:

Two lines. Neither is a district. There is no bond assessment, no district operations and maintenance line, and no capital recovery assessment on that parcel.

That distinction matters methodologically. A TRIM notice alone cannot prove there is no CDD, because the TRIM says so itself: non-ad-valorem assessments are set by rate schedule, are not based on value, and are not listed on the notice. Only the tax collector's actual annual bill itemizes them. This is why the parcel route was run on two different county systems.

The second route is the state registry. Florida's Department of Commerce maintains the Official List of Special Districts. We enumerated all 2,090 entries and pattern-matched the full list. There is no Valencia Bonita district of any kind on it. The same search returns seven live Bonita Springs districts, including the Bonita Springs Fire Control and Rescue District that does appear as a taxing authority on the Valencia Bonita tax bill, which proves the registry covers this geography and that the search worked. A zero is only meaningful when the same method returns a known positive, and it did.

One district has a name close enough to cause confusion. The East Bonita Beach Road Community Development District was established in March 2008 by City Ordinance 08-02, covering roughly 294.85 acres, eight years before the Valencia Bonita HOA was even incorporated. The decisive test is not the name. It is that a real in-community parcel's tax bill carries no assessment from that district, and a CDD assessment is levied against every parcel inside its boundary.

What Does a Neighboring CDD Homeowner Pay?

This is where the no-CDD finding stops being trivia and starts being money.

Those figures come from that district's own published fiscal 2027 proposed budget, which sets per-unit totals of 1,273.04 dollars for a 40-foot lot, 1,538.46 dollars for a 50-foot lot and 1,803.88 dollars for a 60-foot lot on the Series 2018 bonds, with near-identical figures on the Series 2021 bonds. A homeowner a short distance east carries between roughly 1,273 and 1,805 dollars a year in district assessments on the tax bill. A Valencia Bonita homeowner carries none of it. Over a ten-year hold, that is a five-figure difference that never appears in a listing price comparison.

The 2017 Interlocal Cost-Sharing Agreement

Now the other half, because a cost advantage stated without its qualifier is the kind of claim a careful buyer breaks.

On 2 June 2017 four parties entered an interlocal cost-sharing agreement covering shared infrastructure along the Bonita Beach Road corridor. It was recorded on 5 June 2017 as Lee County instrument 2017000121817. The shares are:

The shared pool for fiscal 2027 runs to roughly 146,000 dollars across three categories: panther mitigation and monitoring near LaBelle at about 25,000 dollars, street lighting at about 26,000 dollars, and common infrastructure maintenance along Bonita Beach Road at about 95,000 dollars. The covered work is the landscaping, roadway, stormwater maintenance and sidewalk lighting along the corridor these communities share. The panther mitigation piece is a development order requirement carried by four communities, and it is perpetual; the five-year monitoring and reporting program ended in 2020, the maintenance obligation did not.

Valencia Bonita's 33 percent share of that pool sits inside the HOA's own operating budget. It does not appear on your tax bill, because it is a contract, not a taxing jurisdiction. We have read the district's published budget for the pool but not the Association's own budget line, so we are not publishing a per-home dollar figure for it. Kelly Rhoades at Castle Group can confirm the current budgeted amount, and it would also be visible in the adopted budget available to members.

How to Read the Two Facts Together

Both facts are true at once, and neither cancels the other.

Valencia Bonita is not in a community development district. There is no district line on the tax bill, no bond debt service running with the land, and no district board levying assessments on your home. Neighboring homeowners inside the East Bonita Beach Road CDD pay between roughly 1,273 and 1,805 dollars per unit per year that a Valencia Bonita owner does not pay. At the same time, the Association is a 33 percent party to a recorded four-way agreement covering shared corridor costs, and that obligation is inside the assessment you already pay.

Membership in a district and a contract to split maintenance costs are different things. The first puts an assessment on your parcel and a bond on the land. The second puts a line in an association budget. Valencia Bonita has the second and not the first, and the comparison still lands decisively in its favor once you have said both halves out loud.

Age Restrictions and the 55-Plus Rules

Valencia Bonita is age-restricted housing for older persons. At least one occupant of a home must be 55 or older, the Association verifies age through a documented process before occupancy, and the community's own rules restate the federal 80 percent threshold as a hard limit on the board's discretion.

The Federal Basis

The community operates as housing for older persons under the federal Fair Housing Act as amended by the Housing for Older Persons Act of 1995, at 42 U.S.C. section 3607(b), implemented in 24 C.F.R. Part 100, Subpart E.

That exemption has three requirements. At least 80 percent of the occupied units must be occupied by at least one person 55 or older. The community must publish and adhere to policies demonstrating an intent to be housing for older persons. And it must verify age through reliable surveys and affidavits, updated at least every two years. Those are the federal conditions that let an age restriction coexist with fair housing law, and they are the framework every legitimate 55-plus community in Florida operates inside.

What the Community's Own Rules Say

Article X, Section 10.2(e) of the Rules and Regulations adopted 2 October 2025 sets the occupancy standard for leased homes. No owner may lease a home unless at least one intended occupant is 55 or older at the time of occupancy, and the owner must submit an age verification form to the Association before the effective date of that occupancy.

The same provision gives the board discretion to waive the requirement based on criteria in the Declaration, but it stops that discretion at a hard line: the waiver is not available if more than 20 percent of the homes would be left without at least one occupant aged 55 or older. That is the federal 80 percent threshold written directly into the community's own governance as a ceiling the board cannot cross. It is a meaningful protection, because it means the community's 55-plus status does not depend on a board's restraint. The rule itself runs out of room first.

How Is Age Verified?

Through a named documentary process, not an assumption.

An age verification form is filed with the Association before occupancy. In practice, applications run through a third-party screening platform, Tenant Evaluation, using the community's own application code, and screening can include a credit report, criminal background check, eviction report, proof of income and personal or work verifications. The Association's screening committee makes the final decision. The Association's own instruction sheet for application review is published on its portal for anyone who wants the current process rather than a description of it.

Guests, Leases and the One-Month Rule

The age restriction connects to the leasing rules through a definition most buyers miss. Under the Rules, a person occupying a home for more than one month without the owner being present is not treated as a guest. That person is deemed a tenant, and everything that applies to a tenant then applies, including the 55-plus occupancy requirement and the age verification filing.

The surrounding leasing rules are strict by design:

• whole home only, with no renting of a portion of a home and no subletting

• a minimum lease term of seven months, which effectively ends short-term and seasonal rental use

• no more than one lease of a home in any twelve month period

• a copy of the executed lease delivered to the Association before the tenant occupies the home

• an annual lease renewal application, with a renewal fee whose amount is not stated in the rules

• a mandatory lease addendum requiring the tenant to pay rent directly to the Association if the owner goes delinquent

• joint and several liability, so the owner remains liable with the tenant for compliance, assessments and damage

If you are buying with an eye toward renting the home out part of the year, read that list twice. A seven month minimum and a once-per-year cap are not a soft discouragement of seasonal rental. They close it.

What the Recorded Documents Do Not Settle

Three things are genuinely open, and we would rather say so than fill the gap.

First, the Declaration's own age restriction article. The recorded Declaration is a scanned instrument with no text layer, and the specific article number and verbatim recorded age language were not read. What we have quoted above is the current adopted Rules, which is the operative document for occupancy, but the Declaration is the senior instrument.

Second, whether a minimum age applies to permanent residents under 55. Declarations of this type commonly bar permanent occupancy by anyone under 18 or 19. We did not confirm a number for Valencia Bonita, so we are not publishing one. If you have a household member under 18 who would live here full time, that is a question to put in writing to the Association before you go under contract.

Third, whether the Association files the biennial HOPA age survey and what its current compliance percentage is. That is an Association record and it is not published.

All three are answerable by a person: the management office at Castle Group, or your attorney reading the recorded Declaration directly. If you want us to run those questions before you write an offer, call (239) 898-6072. Getting a written answer from the Association takes days, not weeks, and it costs nothing.

The Association and the Developer

There is an unresolved matter between the Association and the community's developer, and it is a matter of public record. We are reporting it here as documented fact and nothing more, because a buyer or seller in this community is entitled to know that it exists and to ask about its status.

The Association held a Special Members' Meeting on 31 August 2026 to consider authorizing the Association to file legal action against the developer, Bonita Springs Associates I, LLLP. Membership approval was required because Florida Statute 720.303(1) bars a homeowners association from pursuing litigation with an amount in controversy above 100,000 dollars without a membership vote.

The meeting notice describes two categories of claim. On the financial side, the notice describes claims exceeding 523,000 dollars, of which 165,437 dollars was acknowledged by the developer's own auditor as unpaid deficit funding. On the construction side, the notice describes a notice delivered under Chapter 558 of the Florida Statutes regarding estimated common-area construction items exceeding 5 million dollars.

The outcome of the 31 August 2026 vote has not been published, and no suit appears on file as of the date of writing. Updated September 2026.

Buyers and sellers should ask the Association or their attorney for the current status. This is a matter of public record and is not legal advice.

We include it for the same reason we decline to publish an assessment figure we cannot source. McGreevy and Comisar are Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008, and the thing that actually earns that on a transaction is telling you what the record says, including the parts of it that are unfinished. If you are weighing a purchase or a sale in Valencia Bonita and want the current status confirmed before you commit, we will make the calls. Start with a conversation at (239) 898-6072 or with a current value estimate for your Valencia Bonita home.

Inside the Clubhouse

Valencia Bonita has one clubhouse, The Club at Valencia Bonita, at 16621 Valencia Bonita Boulevard, holding more than 57,000 square feet of air-conditioned space on a single 10.56-acre recreation tract. Lee County's parcel record measures the building at 57,415 square feet of conditioned area and 71,679 square feet under roof, one storey, built 2019 to 2020.

You will also see 45,000 square feet attached to this clubhouse, and that is not a contradiction. It was GL Homes' marketing figure when the building opened, and the developer's own announcement was titled "45,000 square-foot clubhouse now open." Three numbers, three measures: the developer's description of the building, the county's measure of air-conditioned interior, and everything under the roofline including covered outdoor space. We use the county measure and we name it.

The recreation tract also explains how this community is organised. Across 347 acres and 1,063 parcels there is exactly one tract coded for recreation. No second pool for one collection of homes, no satellite amenity centre, no sub-village with its own gate. All 996 homes use the same building.

What Rooms Are Inside the Building?

The best evidence is not a brochure. It is the community's own room-booking taxonomy, printed in the calendar key of the resident newsletters the developer still hosts as PDFs. Across the 2020 and 2022 issues those keys name the Social Hall, a ballroom with a stage used for concerts, comedy and dinner shows, bingo and lectures; Card Room 1 and Card Room 2, separately bookable; an Arts and Crafts Studio with a kiln; a Cooking Studio scheduled as a room in its own right; a Sports Lounge with billiards, poker tables and televisions; Exercise Studio 1 and Exercise Studio 2, the second doubling as the table tennis room; a staffed Fitness Center separate from both studios; The Spa at Valencia Bonita, with treatment rooms and a nail and beauty salon; a Box Office ticketing window; and a Resident Services Desk where guests register. Outside there is a gas firepit area, and the food and drink operation runs from a restaurant, an indoor bar, a poolside bar and a satellite bar.

Two things people expect in a clubhouse this size are not here. There is no library and no separate theatre. Neither appears in the booking taxonomy, in three years of newsletters, or anywhere in the eighteen-article Rules and Regulations the Association adopted on 2 October 2025. The Social Hall is the performance venue, and a good one, but it is a ballroom with a stage rather than a fixed-seat theatre.

Can You Rent the Clubhouse for a Private Party?

No. Section 12.1(j) is direct: "Renting the Clubhouse facilities is not permitted at this time." If you are picturing booking the Social Hall for a family anniversary, that is not currently available. The document is published on the Valencia Bonita rules and regulations page.

Other house rules worth knowing before you buy: the Fitness Center is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week under Section 12.4(b), though registered guests may not use it between 6:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. and nobody 16 or under may use it or the Exercise Studios at any time. Households may bring six guests to the clubhouse or pool at once, and every guest signs a Recreation Amenities Release and Waiver at the Resident Services Desk. There is no smoking or vaping anywhere on the recreation tract, a dress code that is enforced, alcohol only by arrangement with the on-site restaurant operator, and a firepit that may only be operated by someone 17 or older. Pets are not permitted in the clubhouse, on the pool deck, in the pools, in the Fitness Center or on the sports courts; service and assistance animals are treated separately in the Rules, and any buyer who relies on one should read that section directly rather than take a summary from any website, ours included.

Pools, Sports and Fitness

Valencia Bonita has five outdoor water features, a racquet complex on its own street address, and a fitness centre that never closes. The sports played on the outdoor courts are tennis and pop tennis, pickleball and bocce, all under a full-time lifestyle director and a sports director.

The Five Water Features

This is settled by a governing document rather than marketing copy. Article XIII of the Rules defines the pool area as "the resort pool, lap pool, resistance pool, spa, wading pool, shade cabanas and the general pool deck area." Five water features, all outdoor. There is no indoor pool here, and any listing that says otherwise is repeating a directory error. The resistance pool is the one buyers ask about: a current pool for walking and low-impact work, and one the Association has reinvested in, having told residents it would undergo construction to increase water pressure.

Pool rules worth knowing: there is no lifeguard, and the Rules say so in capitals at Section 13.1(a). Hours run dawn to dusk and never later than 9:00 p.m., with the area restricted to owners, residents and tenants before 8:00 a.m.; the Association's amenities page currently publishes pool hours as 8:00 a.m. to dusk, seven days. Nobody 16 or under may use the resistance pool, lap pool or spa, and the wading pool is reserved for children 8 and under. Alcohol on the deck is permitted only if bought from the on-site restaurant, and never in any of the five pools.

The Racquet Club Has Its Own Address

The racquet complex is not attached to the clubhouse. It sits at 28511 Sicily Loop with its own pro shop and phone line. That is confirmed in the developer's resident newsletters and independently by USTA Florida's facility record for Valencia Bonita, which lists the Sicily Loop address and classifies the facility type as "Homeowner Association." A state governing body listing the club is a better credential than a brochure.

One distinctive detail: Valencia Bonita programmes pop tennis as a sport in its own right. Five consecutive sections of Article XIV are titled for "Tennis/Pop Tennis Courts," and the calendars carry an introduction class. Pop tennis is a shorter-court, lower-impact paddle variant, which for a 55-plus buyer with a tennis background and an ageing shoulder is a real feature.

How Many Courts Does Valencia Bonita Have?

We do not publish a court count, and here is why. Tennis and pop tennis, pickleball and bocce are all confirmed present: Article XIV governs each by name across fifteen numbered sections, USTA Florida lists the facility, and three years of resident newsletters carry clinics, leagues and round robins in all three. What does not exist is a first-party source stating how many courts there are of each. The Rules say "the Courts" throughout and never give a number. The developer's community pages now redirect to its homepage because the community is sold out. The Association's community map is published as an image-only PDF with no readable text layer.

Court counts circulate widely for this community and may well be right. They are also unsourced, and an unverifiable number is the fastest way for a page like this to lose a resident reader. If a court count matters to your decision, confirm the current number directly with the Association, which is the only party that can answer it authoritatively. We will publish one the day a first-party document gives us one.

How Do You Book a Court, and How Deep Is the Programme?

Court time runs on a computerised reservation system under Section 14.4: reservations up to 7 days ahead, one court per day per household, 90 minutes of court time, forfeited after 10 minutes if nobody appears. Unreserved courts are first come, first served, and for pickleball open play the sign-up board at the facility is the only scheduling system. Court hours are 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. for both tennis and pickleball under Sections 14.3(a) and 14.8(a), so whatever the lighting hardware allows, the rules do not contemplate play past 8:00 p.m. Guests are capped at three per household on the courts, with owners holding priority.

The programme is deeper than the amenity list suggests, and the bocce numbers prove it. In autumn 2020 the sports director told residents the fall bocce league had 42 teams; six months later the spring newsletter reported "60-plus teams that compete for prizes and bragging rights." That growth inside a single 996-home community says more about the social temperature of a place than any photograph. Alongside it sit tennis league teams, pickleball teams that play other clubs around the area weekly, and clinics from beginner to advanced.

What Does the Fitness Centre Cost?

The gym is included and open around the clock. The classes are not, and that is a cost-of-living detail few pages carry. Group fitness has been run by a third-party operator named continuously in resident newsletters from 2020 through 2022, at a published rate of $30 a month for two classes a week or $50 a month for four, with personal training sold separately. Those figures are from 2020 and 2021, so treat them as the shape of the arrangement rather than today's price list and confirm current vendors and rates with the Association. The catalogue is broad for a community gym, running from aqua fit and aqua chi in the pool through interval training, yoga, barre and zumba, and walking, jogging and biking paths run through the community.

Dining at Valencia Bonita

Valencia Bonita has one restaurant on the property, and it is inside the clubhouse rather than in a separate building. It is Oasis at Valencia Bonita, at 16621 Valencia Bonita Boulevard, licensed by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation under seating licence SEA4607323 for 150 seats. Residents also have a poolside service area, and everything else is a drive, because the community sits about three miles from the nearest grocery and fuel.

One Venue, One Licence, Two Names

Research this community and you will find two restaurant names attached to the same address. It is a timeline, not a contradiction. The venue opened in 2020 under an earlier name, run by a Naples chef and his catering company, and was renamed Oasis at Valencia Bonita when the operating company changed sometime between mid-2022 and mid-2024. One venue, one address, one continuous state food-service licence, one phone number across both eras. The earlier brand's website now redirects to a domain reseller, which is about as clear a signal as a retired restaurant name ever gives. Only Oasis is current, and any page still using the older name is working from stale research.

We are not naming an operating company. The management firm reported by third-party inspection databases has no matching Florida corporate registration, so the honest statement is that the restaurant is run by a third-party food and beverage operator under concession, which is how the Association's own Rules describe it, referring throughout to "the on-site Restaurant Operator."

Is the Restaurant Open Right Now?

Check with the Association before you count on it. The Association's own amenities page listed the Oasis restaurant and patio bar as temporarily closed at our last check. Club restaurants change operators, close for refits and reopen on their own schedules, and we will not publish opening hours that could be wrong by the time you read this. Resident Services can give you the current status in one call, and any buyer for whom on-site dining is a deciding factor should make that call before writing an offer.

When operating, this is a full-service restaurant and bar rather than a snack counter, serving from four positions: the indoor restaurant and bar with table service, the poolside bar, a separately menued satellite bar, and service into the Social Hall for events. Cabana service is documented in the venue's own ordering system, which carries an item for calling a server "to your table or cabana." The menu when last published ran from small plates and grain bowls through seasonal fish and steak entrees to handhelds, plus a children's menu, which in a 55-plus community is a grandchildren tell.

Clubs, Classes and the Social Calendar

Valencia Bonita runs roughly fifty resident clubs and interest groups, each with a named resident facilitator, under a full-time lifestyle director and an on-site amenity staff of five to six people. The calendar is dense enough that residents in an ordinary month have fitness, racquet or social programming available essentially every day.

Roughly Fifty Clubs, Not a Hundred

You will see a claim of more than a hundred clubs attached to this community. It comes from 2019 sales copy, and the Association's own published rosters do not support it. The newsletters print the actual list with a facilitator and contact email for every entry: 44 clubs in the November 2020 roster, growing to 50 in the spring 2021 roster, six added in six months. The 2020 list is introduced with the line "below is a listing of current clubs and the number is quickly growing."

Roughly fifty clubs with fifty names attached is a stronger claim than an unverifiable hundred. The 2021 roster runs from acoustic music jam, adventure club and book club through canasta, a Corvette club, cribbage, euchre, fishing, garden club, three mahjong groups and a men's club, to photography, poker, pottery, sewing, a solo singles club, travel club and wine club. A cigar club and a Spanish class appear on later calendars, so the roster kept growing past the last published list, and any resident may start a new club by contacting the lifestyle director.

Who Runs the Programme, and What Is On It?

The lifestyle director post is full-time, on-site, and has had its own bylined column in every newsletter the developer published. The fullest staff roster we could read included a community association manager, the lifestyle director, a club facility manager, two box office attendants and a resident services attendant. That five to six person on-site amenity team is the real answer to "how good is the lifestyle programme here." Current post-holders are not published, so if the specific person matters to you, ask Resident Services. The primary channel to residents is a weekly email from the lifestyle director.

The recurring programme across the issues we read included an end-of-season luau with fire and hula dancers, a poolside Cinco de Mayo fiesta, a Memorial Day barbecue with a DJ, jukebox bingo nights, a ladies' lunch and fashion show with resident models, a Thanksgiving morning turkey trot from the clubhouse, a holiday golf-cart parade led by Santa, a menorah lighting, a tree lighting with cocktails, and a drive-in movie night where you park your car or your golf cart. Enrichment programming is unusually practical for a 55-plus community: sessions on becoming a Florida resident and on Florida domicile run with a financial services firm and a local law firm, health lectures, CPR classes, cooking classes with the executive chef, and a guided nature walk with the CREW Land and Water Trust at the CREW Flint Pen Strand trails on Bonita Beach Road. There is also a formal new homeowner orientation, run monthly by management, covering in the Association's own words "all the ins and outs of using the amenities, programs, web systems, property questions, and more."

What Valencia Bonita Does Not Have

Valencia Bonita has no golf course, no marina or boat access, and no private beach club or beach shuttle. None of the three is a rumour we are knocking down. Each is an absence we can demonstrate from a document that enumerates what the community does have.

How We Prove an Absence

The instrument is the Association's own Rules and Regulations, adopted 2 October 2025. Its eighteen articles include exactly four that govern physical amenities, and between them they cover the community's entire recreational estate:

Four amenity articles: clubhouse, pool area, outdoor courts, dog park. A governing document that regulates a firepit's minimum operating age and a wading pool's upper age limit is not a document that would omit a golf course, a marina or a beach club. Each finding below is therefore an absence by enumeration: the community's own closed list of amenities does not contain the item.

A second enumerating route reinforces all three. The developer's quarterly resident newsletters published the complete recreational programme every quarter, including the fitness schedule, the racquet schedule, the spa menu, the club roster and the events calendar. Across three issues spanning 2020 to 2022, the sports section covers tennis, pickleball and bocce and nothing else.

Does Valencia Bonita Have a Golf Course?

No. There is no article, section or definition anywhere in the Rules concerning a golf course, a driving range, a practice green, a golf pro shop, course maintenance, tee times or golf membership. The word golf appears in exactly two contexts, neither a course: Article XVIII, which governs golf carts as neighbourhood transport, and a passing reference to sport-specific personal training. Three quarterly newsletters covering the entire resident programme carry no tee sheet, no golf pro, no golf clinic and no course conditions.

One thing trips people up. The resident club roster includes a Golf Club. It is a social club that plays off-site, listed between the garden club and hand and foot, with a named resident facilitator. Residents who golf have organised themselves and play the courses nearby, of which there are several within a short drive. That is a good arrangement, and it is not an amenity claim.

Is There a Marina, a Dock or Boat Access?

No, and here the negative is stronger than a mere absence, because the governing document affirmatively restricts boating. Article IX limits water use to catch and release fishing, and only from the lake maintenance easement abutting your own lot. Lake lot owners may operate "nonmotorized and remote-controlled watercraft" in the lake abutting their own lot, and "no other person shall be entitled to operate watercraft in the Lakes," with watercraft capped at 12 feet in length. Section 9.3(c) states that "swimming and the operation of fuel-powered watercraft in the Lakes are prohibited." No watercraft or trailer may be stored on lake banks, in a rear yard or anywhere visible on a lot, and Article XVII separately bars boats and boat trailers from the community's parking areas.

A community that caps watercraft at 12 feet, bans fuel-powered boats outright and forbids storing a boat anywhere visible is not a boating community and has no marina. The lakes here are stormwater and irrigation infrastructure with fishing rights, lovely to look at from two-thirds of the homes, which is a different thing from water access.

Is There a Private Beach Club or a Beach Shuttle?

No. The four-article amenity enumeration contains no beach club, no beachfront parcel, no beach-club membership, no beach parking programme, and no shuttle, tram or transportation service of any kind. Article XVI on miscellaneous items and Article XVII on parking and vehicular restrictions are the two articles where a shuttle or a beach parking benefit would necessarily be governed, because a shuttle needs a pick-up point, a schedule, guest eligibility and probably a decal. Neither contains anything of the sort.

One piece of reinforcing evidence is almost funny. Section 9.3(b) prohibits "installation of sand or other materials intended to simulate a beach" along the lake banks, which is not a rule you write in a community that owns one. The second route holds too: across three quarterly newsletters covering the complete resident programme including trips and excursions, the only water outing offered is a paid commercial sunset cruise departing from Naples. A community with a private beach club or a shuttle advertises it in its own lifestyle newsletter, and these issues advertise neither. The honest line is the useful one: the Gulf beaches are a 20 to 25 minute drive from the gate, they are public county and state beaches, and you get there in your own car.

Three Smaller Absences People Ask About

• No basketball court. Article XIV defines outdoor courts as a closed set of three named sports, devotes fifteen sections to exactly those three, and Section 6.10 separately prohibits permanent basketball hoops even on a private lot.

• Shuffleboard is not confirmed. Older sources list it, tracing to a 2019 marketing photograph filename. It appears in none of the eighteen-article Rules, none of the booking taxonomies, and none of three years of programming. We will not assert it either way.

• No library and no theatre, as covered above.

Who Valencia Bonita Fits, and Who It Does Not

This is a lifestyle and social community, not a golf community and not a boating community. What it does, it does at a scale most 55-plus communities in Lee County cannot match: one very large clubhouse, five water features, a separate racquet complex under a sports director, a full-time lifestyle director, roughly fifty resident clubs and a calendar with something on it nearly every day. If what would make you happy is walking to a bocce league, a card room, a fitness class and a pool deck, this community is built for exactly that.

If you want to walk out of your garage onto a first tee, or keep a 24-foot boat behind your house, Valencia Bonita is the wrong community and you are better served elsewhere in Bonita Springs and Estero, where both exist. Our Bonita Springs area guide sets out which communities carry golf and which carry water access.

Gates, Access and Guest Policy

Valencia Bonita is gated with a staffed gatehouse at a single entrance on Bonita Beach Road, and residents enter with a car sticker and a key fob. Guests register at the clubhouse Resident Services Desk before using any amenity.

How Do Residents and Guests Get In?

Resident credentials are car stickers and key fobs, both issued by management, confirmed in the community association manager's own words to residents. The fob system also controls amenity access: Section 15(k) confirms that entry to the dog park "may require use of a specific code or a key fob." Guest access to amenities runs through the clubhouse rather than the gate. Guests register at the Resident Services Desk, sign a Recreation Amenities Release and Waiver, and are capped at six per household at the clubhouse or pool and three per household on the courts. A buyer wishing to tour the clubhouse must be accompanied by a licensed agent or the owner and cannot walk the amenity complex alone. Gatehouse staff also handle open house logistics, distributing a community map showing where a scheduled open house is located along with any flyers a listing agent supplied in advance.

Is the Gatehouse Staffed Around the Clock?

Nobody publishes that, so we will not either. That the gatehouse is staffed is confirmed from a dated primary source: the Association's Realtor Open House Policy, revised February 2025, refers repeatedly to "Gatehouse Staff" as a live operational function and carries a checkbox for flyers supplied to them. That same policy names one entrance, "the entrance to the community on Bonita Beach Road," in the singular.

What is not published anywhere is the staffing schedule. The Rules contain zero instances of the words gatehouse, guard, visitor, transponder, barcode or decal, which is a genuine documentary silence rather than a search failure. Claims about continuous staffing and on-site security patrols circulate on directory sites; neither traces to a first-party source, so neither appears here. If gate staffing hours matter to you, Resident Services will describe the current model in one call.

The recorded Declaration is worth reading on this point, because it says what the Association does and does not commit to. The gatehouse and entry gates are Association Property, maintained by the Association, and the expense "shall be included as an Operating Expense," so there is no separate gate fee. Staffing is discretionary: the gatehouse and entry gates "may or may not be staffed, as determined in the sole discretion of the Association." And the gate controls vehicles, not crime, in the Declaration's own words: it is "designed only to restrict vehicular access to Valencia Bonita, and will not be able to prevent crime." That is the honest framing, and a better one than the language usually attached to gated communities. A gate reduces through traffic and casual entry, which is most of what buyers actually want from it.

Utilities, Trash and Internet

Water and sewer come from Bonita Springs Utilities, electricity from FPL, natural gas from TECO and Peoples Gas, and trash from WM on Mondays, paid on your property tax bill rather than by the HOA. Bulk cable and internet sit inside the HOA assessment under the recorded Declaration.

Who Pays for Trash, and When Does It Go Out?

Garbage, recycling and yard waste are all collected on Monday by WM, under Lee County Solid Waste Service Area 1. That is confirmed on three separate county routing layers, each with its own route identifier, all returning Monday, and independently by the Association's own resident information sheet.

The cost is $358.45 per single-family home per year for fiscal 2026, billed as a non-ad-valorem assessment on your Lee County property tax bill. It is not an HOA line item and there is no separate hauler bill. A $2.55 per account administrative billing charge applies, and ratepayers can take a 4% discount by paying early under the tax collector's standard procedure. Rates are reviewed annually and take effect on 1 October, so the figure should be re-checked each autumn against Lee County's adopted solid waste rates. One piece of corroboration we like: every one of the 996 residential parcels here carries a solid waste billing code of exactly one residential unit, which is an independent route to the 996 home count arrived at through the garbage roll.

The Association's timing rule at Article VII is stricter than most buyers expect. Containers may go to the kerb after 5:00 p.m. the day before collection "but not sooner," the Association recommends waiting until Monday morning specifically to discourage wildlife from rummaging, and containers must be removed on the day of collection. In practice: out Sunday evening at the earliest, in by Monday night. On containers, the county provides a wheeled recycling cart to each house and the homeowner supplies their own garbage cans.

Are Cable and Internet Included in the HOA Fee?

Yes, structurally. The recorded Declaration, Article VI Section 6, authorises the Association to enter "Bundled Service Agreements" for television, telecommunication, internet and monitored alarm services, and states that all costs incurred under them "will be assessed against all Completed Lot Owners," apportioned equally. Three consequences follow: the bulk cost sits inside the quarterly assessment rather than arriving as a separate bill; it is the same dollar amount per home regardless of house size; and upgrades are not included, so premium channels, faster tiers, extra boxes and hook-up fees are billed directly to the owner by the provider.

The provider is Comcast and Xfinity, confirmed both by the Association's resident sheet, which publishes a dedicated bulk-agreement telephone line, and by the provider's own community landing page for this address. What is not public is the tier: the channel package, the internet speed, the per-home dollar allocation and the contract expiry sit in the Association budget, which is a member record rather than a recorded document. Ask the Association or call the bulk service line and get it in writing before you close. Satellite is an alternative but is architecturally gated, with a dedicated dish application to be submitted before installation.

Irrigation works the same way and it explains a bill. Valencia Bonita irrigates from its own community lakes through a central system operated by the Association, and the Declaration puts that system "including, without limitation, all water usage related thereto" inside Operating Expenses, so lawn irrigation is paid through the HOA assessment rather than metered on your Bonita Springs Utilities statement.

How Is Mail Delivered, and Can You Charge an Electric Car?

Two honest gaps, and we would rather name them than fill them.

Mail format is not documented. The serving facility is confirmed as the Bonita Springs Post Office at 26150 Old 41 Road, where the Association directs new owners for mail setup. Whether homes have individual kerbside boxes or shared cluster boxes is not. The current Rules contain zero references to mailboxes; the recorded Declaration mentions them twice, once among Association Property improvements and once among items on a lot requiring architectural approval, and those two references point in opposite directions. The Association answers this in one call.

EV charging is not addressed in the current Rules. That silence is proven rather than assumed: the Rules adopted in October 2025 contain no instance of electric vehicle, EV charging, charging station or charger, there is no EV application among the eighteen published architectural application types, and the recorded Declaration contains no EV language either. Florida law protects a homeowner's right to install a charging station within the boundaries of their own lot or garage, subject to the owner bearing cost, insurance and electrical compliance, so an owner planning an installation should expect to file a Miscellaneous architectural application and confirm requirements with the Association first. We are not going to tell you EV charging is prohibited or permitted here, because neither is documented.

Rules That Affect Daily Life

Valencia Bonita is governed in detail, and the details shape an ordinary week: golf carts must be electric and registered, generators live in a narrow band of the side yard, rigid hurricane shutters come down after the storm, overnight street parking needs a permit, and boats and RVs go in the garage or nowhere. The governing instrument is the Rules and Regulations adopted 2 October 2025, which consolidated a set of separate topic rule sheets into one document.

What Are the Golf Cart Rules?

Golf carts are a genuine feature of daily life here. There is no golf course, but a 347-acre community with the entire amenity complex at one end makes a cart a real convenience, and Article XVIII is permissive enough to matter.

• Registration is mandatory. Every cart is registered with the Association and receives an identification sticker, and the Association may collect authorised driver details and emergency contacts.

• Electric only. Gasoline-powered carts may not be operated in the community except by the Association and its vendors.

• Garaged overnight. Between midnight and 6:00 a.m., carts not in use must be parked inside the garage with the door closed.

• Paved roads only, and no carts are permitted behind homes or along the lake banks.

• Drivers. Eighteen and over must carry valid government-issued photo identification; under eighteen requires a valid learner's permit and an accompanying licensed adult, or a valid licence.

• Hours and equipment. Sunrise to sunset unless the cart has headlights, taillights, brake lights, turn signals and a windscreen, and at all times working brakes, reliable steering, safe tyres, a rear-view mirror and red reflective warning devices front and rear.

• Enforcement. After two written warnings the Board may suspend cart privileges for a year; after five within a year, privileges may be permanently revoked.

Can You Install a Whole-House Generator?

Yes in most cases, but it is not automatic, and the constraints are tighter than buyers expect.

Placement and screening. No above-ground portion may sit in the front or rear yard, so the unit lives in a narrow band of the side yard: the architectural application requires the generator and its pad to sit no further than 42 inches from the side property line while maintaining an 18-inch minimum setback, and nothing may encroach on an easement or a drainage swale. The generator must be screened at all times from all adjacent lot owners, from the street and from any lake, with a landscaping and screening plan submitted as part of the application and maintained by the owner permanently.

Exercise window. Section 5.6 sets generator exercise periods on Mondays between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., with runtimes not to exceed 30 minutes. A binding City of Bonita Springs zoning condition on the community's master concept plan sets a wider window of 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and the Association's Monday window nests inside it. It is a hierarchy rather than a conflict: the City sets the outer bound and the Association sets the operating rule.

Permits, money and fuel. Both electric and gas building permits are required by municipal code, and final architectural approval is contingent on the City's final inspections. The Association takes a $500 refundable deposit, requires the contractor to carry $1,000,000 general liability naming the Association as an additional insured, and has 45 days to approve or disapprove. Because the Rules do not permit an underground propane tank and separately cap propane tanks at the 20-pound barbecue size, the viable path here is a natural-gas generator, which is why the gas permit requirement exists and why the presence of natural gas in this community matters.

Not every lot qualifies. The Association says so in writing: because of setbacks, easement locations and lot configuration, not every lot can accommodate a generator system, and even an approved application is no guarantee a particular lot will fit one. If a standby generator is a requirement for you, make it a condition of the specific house rather than an assumption about the community.

What Are the Hurricane Shutter Rules?

The definition at Section 6.4 is unusual and it decides what may stay up. A hurricane shutter is "any non-textile material that cannot be readily breached with a cutting instrument." From that:

• Rigid shutters may only cover window or door openings during a hurricane watch or warning that impacts the community, and removable tracks may not remain installed outside a watch or warning.

• Textile material may be used as shades and can be left down at any time, so fabric storm shades are a year-round option and rigid panels are not.

• Roll-down storm screens are not regulated by the Rules at all, per the Association's own shutter and roll-down screen application. Mesh must be black or a colour compatible with the exterior paint.

• Electrical building permits are required by municipal code for automatic storm screens or shutters, with final architectural approval contingent on the City's final inspection. The refundable deposit is $100.

An absent owner whose shutters were deployed must return to remove them immediately after the watch or warning is lifted, or arrange for someone else to do it. Separately, Section 6.3 requires any owner planning to be away during hurricane season to clear furniture and movable objects from the covered patio and exterior before departing, and to give the Association the name of a responsible firm or individual who will care for the home if it is damaged. For a seasonal owner that is a task on the departure checklist, not a suggestion.

Where Can You Park, and Where Can You Keep a Boat?

Street parking is allowed during the day and banned overnight. Article XVII prohibits parking on the street or in the street gutters between midnight and 6:00 a.m. anywhere in the community. Owners with special circumstances may request written permission from management 48 hours in advance to park overnight on the street or in the clubhouse lot, and a permit is issued that must be displayed on the dashboard. That is more permissive than many Southwest Florida 55-plus communities, which ban street parking outright, and it means guests can park on the street for a dinner party as long as the car is gone by midnight.

Boats, RVs and trailers go in an enclosed garage. Section 17.4 prohibits campers, motorhomes, house trailers, trailers of every description, recreational vehicles, boats, boat trailers and vans from being parked or stored anywhere on a lot except in enclosed garages and in spaces specifically designated by the Association, "if any." No designated RV or boat storage area is documented anywhere in the Rules, the Declaration, the community map or the Association's resident sheet, so the defensible statement is that the enclosed garage is the documented option. The Association advises owners in writing to consult it before bringing onto a lot any vehicle other than a passenger vehicle, which is exactly what a buyer with a truck camper or a bass boat should do.

Moving in or out is permitted between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Portable storage containers are permitted for a maximum of 48 hours, must sit entirely within the lot rather than in the right of way, and may never be placed on Association property, so a phased move or a renovation with a container on site has to be planned around that limit. Quiet hours run 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., there is no separate contractor work-hours rule in the current Rules, and the owner is responsible for the conduct of their own contractors.

What Are the Dog Park Rules?

There is one dog park, with two fenced sections separated by dog size. Article XV is singular in its title and in every one of its provisions, and Section 15.1(g) confirms the split: "Dogs up to 25 lbs. are allowed in the section of the Dog Park reserved for small dogs."

The park is unsupervised and used at your own risk, open dawn to dusk and never later than 9:00 p.m., double-gated with handlers required to unleash dogs before the second gate, and entered with a code or key fob. Handlers must be 16 or older, with a maximum of three dogs per handler, and children under 6 are not permitted. Current rabies vaccination tags are required, dogs under four months and dogs in heat are not permitted, and the breed restrictions in the Declaration apply. The lifestyle team programmes it too, with dog meet-ups and a Santa event at the holidays.

Selling Here: The Realtor Open House Policy

If you are selling, the Association controls open houses tightly, and a listing agent who does not know the rules will lose a weekend. The policy, revised February 2025, provides that:

• Open houses are permitted on Sundays only, 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. No other day, no other window.

• The application must reach Resident Services by 12:00 noon on the Friday before, in person or by email. Resident Services is closed on Sunday, so there is no same-day fix.

• A licensed agent or the owner must be physically present, and a buyer touring the clubhouse must be accompanied.

• Only Association-approved signs may be used, purchased from Resident Services at $25 each. Any other sign is removed by management without notice and becomes the property of the Association.

• The Association places its own open house sign at the Bonita Beach Road entrance on Sundays when open houses are scheduled, and the agent removes their signage immediately at 4:00 p.m. Flyers go through the gatehouse staff, who hand out a community map showing the location.

• An agent who disregards the policy is no longer approved to post signage or distribute information for future open houses. That is a personal ban rather than a fine.

Separately, Sections 16.1 through 16.3 prohibit any sign, poster or advertisement in public view without prior written Board approval, including for sale, for rent and by owner signs, with a narrow exception for a security-service sign within 10 feet of an entrance. Political signs are banned entirely, including in windows.

What We Confirm for Every Client Before Closing

Five things we resolve for every client rather than leave to a web page: the current quarterly assessment and the actual bulk cable and internet tier, both of which live in the Association budget and neither of which is public; the mail format for the specific street; whether the specific lot can physically accommodate a generator given that 18-inch and 42-inch side-yard band; the current status of the on-site restaurant; and gate staffing hours.

Every one of those is a phone call to the Association, and we make the calls. Jesse McGreevy and Marc Comisar have been ranked Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008, and the reason that matters on a page about dog park rules and generator setbacks is simple: representing a buyer here is mostly the work of turning undocumented questions into written answers before the inspection period runs out. If you are selling, the same document set decides your timeline. Start with a current figure on our Valencia Bonita home valuation page, then call McGreevy and Comisar at (239) 898-6072. Working with a team ranked Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008 should mean the operational detail is handled before it becomes a problem, and in a community governed this closely, that is most of the job. To talk through a specific address, call (239) 898-6072.

Where Valencia Bonita Sits

Valencia Bonita sits inside the City of Bonita Springs, in Lee County, at the far eastern end of Bonita Beach Road, about 3.75 miles east of Interstate 75 and with state-owned conservation land wrapping the community to the north and east. It is a quiet, low-traffic, edge-of-town address, and the honest description of it includes both halves of that sentence: very little passes by, and almost nothing is close.

Every distance in this section is measured straight-line from the community centroid at 26.3237 north, 81.6850 west, against OpenStreetMap road and parcel geometry read on 3 September 2026, and against Lee County Property Appraiser parcel centroids read the same day. Straight-line distances are shorter than the drive you will actually make, so the road figures in the next section are the ones to plan a morning around.

What Is the Community's Actual Road Context?

Valencia Bonita fronts the south side of Bonita Beach Road, with the nearest point of the road 0.35 miles east-northeast of the centroid. The important fact about that road is where it stops. Bonita Beach Road's easternmost mapped point is 0.83 miles east of the community, and the road does not continue past it. There is nowhere further east to go, which means the traffic Valencia Bonita sees is traffic with business at the east end of the road rather than regional through-traffic. Every capacity argument raised in local hearings about this corridor concerns the stretch west of the community, between here and the interstate.

The nearest named cross street is Vincent Road, 0.64 miles north-northwest. Beyond that the corridor opens westward: Bonita Grande Drive at 3.27 miles west, Interstate 75 at 3.75 miles west-southwest, Old 41 Road at 5.85 miles west.

One correction matters enough to state plainly, because an earlier version of this page carried the error and every distance on the page inherited it. Imperial Parkway is not the community's front door and is not adjacent to it. Imperial Parkway is 4.80 miles west of the centroid and it sits on the far side of Interstate 75. To reach the Bonita Beach Road and Imperial Parkway intersection from a Valencia Bonita driveway you drive west, pass under the interstate, and continue another mile. Any description that groups Valencia Bonita into an Imperial Parkway cluster is describing a different place.

The Conservation Land on Two Sides

The CREW Flint Pen Strand tract, part of the Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed, wraps the community to the north and northeast. Its three public trailheads sit 0.67 miles north-northeast (the Lakes parking lot), 0.77 miles north-northwest (the Main parking lot) and 0.94 miles north (the Pinewoods parking lot), all measured from the centroid. From the community boundary rather than the centroid, the nearest of the three is under half a mile.

This is not only scenery. A parcel sweep of every holding over four acres in the unincorporated county land in the box around the community returned eighteen consecutive publicly owned conservation parcels before the first privately held large parcel appeared, at 1.88 miles north-northwest. Those parcels are held by the South Florida Water Management District and by the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund, and all are zoned AG-2. Conservation land is the one land use that does not become three hundred rooftops. That is why the finding in the pipeline section below is durable rather than a snapshot.

What Is the Trade-Off of an Edge-of-Town Address?

The trade-off is real and it shows up on the first grocery run. Measured straight-line from the centroid, the nearest fuel station is 3.10 miles west, the nearest Publix is 3.20 miles west, the nearest self-storage is 4.06 miles west, the nearest school of any kind is 4.31 miles west, and the nearest hospital is 7.34 miles west. There is no retail and no medical office within three miles of the community in any direction.

The reason is structural rather than accidental. The community sits at the dead end of an arterial, with state-owned conservation land on two sides and land held under Lee County's Density Reduction and Groundwater Resource rules on the third. Under those rules commercial development may only sit at the intersection of an arterial and a collector road, or of two collector roads, within 330 feet of the rights of way, and east of Radio Tower Road there are no such intersections.

Buyers who want a coffee shop within walking distance will not find one here. Buyers who want a gated 55-plus community where the road ends, the preserve starts and nobody drives past on the way to anywhere else will find very few alternatives in Southwest Florida. That is the deal, and it should be understood before a contract, not after.

For anyone verifying jurisdiction: the community's ZIP code is 34135, its fire protection comes from the Bonita Springs Fire Control and Rescue District, District 009, and the clubhouse point falls in City of Bonita Springs Council District 6. Every building permit, inspection, development order and plat for these parcels is issued by the City of Bonita Springs Community Development Department. Any question about floodplain administration, substantial-damage determinations or post-storm rebuilding goes to the City, not to Lee County.

Drive Times from Valencia Bonita (Data updated: September 2026)

Everything a Valencia Bonita resident does off the property is a drive, and the honest range runs from about twelve minutes for groceries to about forty minutes for the region's trauma centre. The table below gives road distance and modelled driving time for the destinations that come up most often.

Method, stated so the numbers can be checked. Routes were run on the OSRM public routing service using its default driving profile, from origin 26.3239298, 81.6840053, on 26 August 2026. The router snapped to a public road 11.8 metres from that point, so the origin is effectively the community's own street network at its centroid. These are free-flow, modelled times. They carry no live traffic, no signal-delay model and no seasonal load, and they are not the same thing as a mapping app's typical-traffic estimate. Distances are the harder number and the more reliable one.

Southwest Florida International Airport deserves its own line because two credible measurements disagree. A road-network measurement from the community centroid returns 23.5 miles and 37 minutes, while an earlier mapping-service measurement returned 20.4 miles. The gap is almost certainly a different snap point at the terminal. The defensible statement is that the airport is roughly 21 to 24 miles away and takes somewhere between half an hour and forty minutes depending on the season and the terminal door you are aiming for. Punta Gorda Airport, useful to snowbirds flying a low-cost carrier, is 51.5 miles and about 66 minutes.

Why Do These Times Look Optimistic in February?

Because they are free-flow figures, and Southwest Florida's winter season, roughly December through April, materially lengthens every westbound trip on Bonita Beach Road and every trip that touches US 41 or Interstate 75. No properly sourced, Bonita-corridor-specific seasonal percentage exists that we were willing to publish, so this page will not invent one. Treat the table as an off-season floor and add real time in season. A resident who allows 25 minutes to Coconut Point in August should allow considerably more in February.

One local detail that is worth more than another drive time. Valencia Bonita is in Lee County, so the Lee County annual beach parking subscription, currently 60 dollars for twelve months and digital only since 1 May 2025, covers Bonita Beach Access Number 1 and Little Hickory Island Beach Park. It does not cover Bonita Beach Park itself, which charges 2 dollars an hour to everyone. Barefoot Beach Preserve is a Collier County park at 10 dollars a day, and the free Collier beach sticker is not available to Lee County residents. Lovers Key State Park charges 8 dollars a vehicle, and its tram service has been discontinued, so beach access there is on foot or by bicycle, 1,000 feet from the first lot by the mid-beach bridge or half a mile by the south beach bridge.

Flood Zone and Storm Risk (Data updated: September 2026)

Valencia Bonita is 100 percent in FEMA Flood Zone X, the area of minimal flood hazard, entirely outside the Special Flood Hazard Area, with no base flood elevation assigned anywhere in the community. There are no AE, AH, VE or shaded-X pockets inside the gates. This is one of the strongest single facts about the property, and it was tested four separate ways rather than read off one map click.

The governing map is FEMA FIRM panel 12071C0685F, effective 28 August 2008. The panel is recorded as countywide and not printed, and the reason FEMA gives for not printing it is the line worth reading twice: there are no special flood hazard areas on the panel at all. That is a federal statement about roughly 10,674 acres of ground, not an interpolation from a single point. Zero letters of map revision intersect the community, so the 2008 panel has never been revised over this land.

How Was the Zone X Finding Tested?

Four ways, independently.

• A polygon enumeration over the community's bounding box returned exactly one Lee County flood polygon touching the community, coded Zone X, area of minimal flood hazard, outside the Special Flood Hazard Area, with no base flood elevation.

• A stratified sample of 68 parcels, drawn from all eight recorded plats plus the four extreme corner lots, returned Zone X on 68 of 68.

• Lee County's own independent flood mapping service, queried over the identical area, returned the same single polygon with the same attributes.

• The City of Bonita Springs writes the flood zone into each single-family building permit. Across the permits carrying that field, 314 state Zone X and none state any other zone.

Anyone re-running these queries will also see AE, AH and shaded-X polygons appear. Those are Collier County polygons clipped by a rectangular box drawn across the county line. None of them touches a Valencia Bonita parcel.

How High Do the Homes Actually Sit?

Between 18.0 and 20.4 feet NAVD88 at the finished floor, with a median of 19.03 feet, measured across 477 City of Bonita Springs single-family building permits that state the surveyed finished-floor elevation. Not one permit records a finished floor below 16 feet. This is a permitted, surveyed, per-home figure rather than a modelled terrain estimate, which is what makes it usable.

For scale, the National Hurricane Center recorded Hurricane Ian's maximum inundation in the Bonita Springs area at 8 to 12 feet above ground level on the immediate coastline, with inland high-water marks of 5 to 7 feet above ground level. Valencia Bonita's finished floors sit at 18 to 20.4 feet NAVD88, roughly ten miles inland and east of the interstate.

Two more facts from the county's hazard layers belong here. The design wind speed at the clubhouse point is 160 miles per hour for Risk Category II buildings, and the community sits inside the wind-borne debris region, which is why opening protection is a code requirement here rather than an upgrade. And Valencia Bonita is in Lee County Evacuation Zone D, surge zone 4. Ahead of Hurricane Milton, Lee County ordered mandatory evacuations for Zones A and B only. Zone D is two steps beyond the ordered zone.

Insurance, Wind Mitigation and the CRS Discount

A Valencia Bonita owner is not required to carry flood insurance as a condition of a mortgage, and an owner who buys a National Flood Insurance Program policy anyway receives the full 25 percent Community Rating System discount. That combination is unusual and it is worth understanding precisely, because the jurisdiction behind it is frequently misattributed.

Which Jurisdiction Earns the 25 Percent?

The City of Bonita Springs, NFIP community number 120680, holds Class 5 in FEMA's Community Rating System, worth a 25 percent premium discount, with a current class effective date of 1 May 2017. That comes from FEMA's own CRS Eligible Communities list, effective 1 April 2026. The City confirmed in November 2024 that FEMA would maintain both the Class 5 rating and the 25 percent policyholder discount after a review process that began earlier that year.

This is not Lee County's rating. Unincorporated Lee County is also Class 5, but it is a different community number with a different effective date, and Valencia Bonita is inside the City. Getting the jurisdiction right matters because the class number happens to be the same, which makes a wrong citation look right. For comparison across the same FEMA list, the Village of Estero and the City of Fort Myers both sit at Class 6, worth 20 percent. Bonita Springs beats both.

Does the Discount Still Apply Outside the Flood Zone?

Yes, in full, and this corrects a common and outdated framing. Older material on this subject described Zone X owners as qualifying for the National Flood Insurance Program's cheapest Preferred Risk tier. That product was retired in October 2021 under Risk Rating 2.0, FEMA's current pricing methodology. Under Risk Rating 2.0, FEMA states that the Community Rating System discount is applied to the full-risk premium for all NFIP policies in a participating community, including policies outside the Special Flood Hazard Area.

The practical result is better for the owner than the old framing suggested. A Zone X home in Valencia Bonita earns the full 25 percent, not a reduced non-SFHA figure. No base flood elevation exists here and no elevation certificate is needed for rating.

What the Homes Themselves Bring to a Wind Quote

Every home in Valencia Bonita was built between 2017 and 2023, across 532 City single-family building permits, with none before 2017. That matters directly. The Florida Chief Financial Officer's consumer guide to hurricane loss mitigation discounts, July 2026 edition, states that homes built in compliance with the 2001 Florida Building Code or a later edition are automatically eligible for a minimum 68 percent discount on the windstorm portion of the premium, because of the roof covering, roof attachment and roof-to-wall connection requirements that code introduced. Every home here post-dates that threshold by at least sixteen years. The same guide notes that a home meeting those minimum wind mitigation requirements may also have the option to reduce its hurricane deductible.

The permit record adds specifics that stack on top of the baseline.

• 424 of the 532 single-family permits, just under 80 percent, explicitly state impact-rated glazing.

• 85 permits state shutters, and 74 state both impact glazing and shutters.

• 573 shutter and hurricane-screen permits were issued between 2018 and 2026, peaking at 115 in 2021, which shows retrofit hardening continuing well past construction.

• Roughly 487 distinct addresses carry permitted standby generators, out of a community of 996 homes, supported by the natural gas service that makes whole-home standby generators practical here.

The Florida guide also credits roof shape, roof deck attachment, roof-to-wall connection type and secondary water resistance. Those attributes are not stated in the City's permit descriptions and are not asserted here. They live on each home's Uniform Mitigation Verification Inspection Form, which is a per-property document held by the owner and the insurer. For a specific listing, ask the seller for that form before you shop the policy.

One boundary worth naming. No dollar premium figure specific to Valencia Bonita exists in any public source, and none is published here. County-level residual-market averages exist and describe a very different housing stock, including decades-old coastal homes without opening protection. A 2017-or-newer home with impact glass at 19 feet NAVD88 in Zone X is a private-market risk, not a last-resort risk, and the only way to know the number is to get quotes on the specific address.

Hurricanes Ian and Milton at Valencia Bonita

Across roughly 37,000 City of Bonita Springs permit and inspection records filtered to Valencia Bonita's 1,063 parcels, exactly one record references Hurricane Ian and zero records reference Hurricane Milton. That is a measurement of the permit record, and it is important to say what it is and what it is not.

The single Ian record is a screen-enclosure replacement, permit ACC24-111429-BOS, issued 16 April 2024 on Montecristo Loop, described in the City's own words as replacing a screen enclosure on an existing concrete deck due to Ian. A pool cage screen is the most wind-fragile component of a Florida home and is not structure, roof or building envelope.

The same query found no re-roof or roof-replacement permits at all in the community, and only two records anywhere in the 37,000 that reference repair or damage. Both of those pre-date Ian: a minor truss repair in June 2021 and a mobile-vendor licence for small surface repairs in October 2021. Window and entry-door replacement permits run at two or three a year across eight years and roughly a thousand homes, with no post-Ian or post-Milton spike. This is a meaningful test because the City waived permit fees for Hurricane Milton restoration and asked residents with water intrusion to contact Community Development, so fee-waived repairs would still have generated records.

What Does That Finding Prove, and What Does It Not?

It proves that the City's permitting database contains one Ian-referencing record and no Milton-referencing records across this community, with no re-roof permits and no structural repair permit dated after either storm. It does not prove that no damage occurred. Repairs below the permit threshold, insured losses settled without a permit, landscape and fence damage, screen mesh, and any unpermitted work would not appear in that database. The measured statement is the one we publish, because it is both stronger and safer than the marketing claim.

For area context, the National Hurricane Center's Tropical Cyclone Report on Hurricane Ian states that farther south in Bonita and North Naples the most severe impacts were contained to the immediate coastline, while inland high-water marks ran 5 to 7 feet above ground level. That is a federal agency drawing the coastal-versus-inland line, not a real estate page asserting it.

For Milton, the National Hurricane Center recorded maximum storm surge inundation of 3 to 5 feet above ground level from Bonita Beach through Marco Island, and a weather station identified as Bonita Springs recorded a maximum wind of 57 knots, roughly 66 miles per hour, on 10 October 2024. The City of Bonita Springs' own Milton page states that the destructive storm surges were in coastal areas of Bonita Springs, along with tornadoes and wind damage throughout the community, and the curfew the City enacted covered only the Bonita Beach area including Little Hickory Island and Big Hickory Island. Lee County's mandatory evacuation order covered Zones A and B. Valencia Bonita is Zone D.

The honest caveat sits in the same report. Milton produced a significant tornado outbreak across the southern and central Florida peninsula on 9 October 2024, with 45 known tornadoes on land. Milton's inland hazard in Southwest Florida was tornado and wind rather than surge, and tornadoes do not respect flood zones. Elevation and Zone X answer the surge question. They do not answer the wind question, which is what the building code, the impact glazing and the standby generators are for.

Structural Compliance and SB-4D

Valencia Bonita carries no milestone-inspection obligation and no structural integrity reserve study obligation, and the reason is simple and dispositive rather than a matter of interpretation: there is no condominium and no cooperative anywhere in the community. All 996 homes are fee-simple single-family houses on their own platted lots, which places the whole community outside both statutes regardless of how tall anything is. For a buyer, that removes an entire category of assessment exposure that shapes pricing elsewhere in Southwest Florida.

Florida's milestone structural inspection requirement lives in Florida Statutes section 553.899, and the structural integrity reserve study requirement lives in section 718.112(2)(g). Both statutes have two gates. The ownership form must be a condominium or a cooperative, and the building must be three storeys or more in height. Failing either gate puts a community outside the regime, and Valencia Bonita fails the first gate outright.

The evidence is first-party and it runs four ways.

• The Lee County Property Appraiser's parcel fabric records 996 parcels under Department of Revenue use code 01, single family, and 67 under code 09, residential common element. There is not one code 04 condominium parcel and not one code 03 multi-family parcel in the community.

• Every City development order for the community authorises single-family lots and villas. The recorded phases describe 41 single-family homes and a recreational facility, 134 villas, 161 single-family lots, 143 single-family lots and 131 single-family lots. Not one authorises a condominium, cooperative, apartment or townhouse building.

• All 532 residential building permits in the community are single-family permits. There are zero multifamily, condominium or apartment permits.

• The only non-residential buildings are amenity structures owned by the association: the clubhouse, the guardhouse, a tennis pro shop, a mailbox pavilion and assorted enclosures and shade structures. Milestone inspections and reserve studies reach residential condominium and cooperative buildings, not an association-owned recreation building.

Every home here is a fee-simple platted lot governed by a Chapter 720 homeowners association, and all 996 homes are single storey.

Why Does This Matter to a Buyer?

Because since 2022 it has become one of the first questions a well-advised Florida buyer asks, and in most of coastal Southwest Florida the answer involves a milestone inspection schedule, a reserve study, and the possibility of a special assessment when the study lands. At Valencia Bonita that entire category of exposure does not exist. There is no milestone inspection to schedule, no structural integrity reserve study to fund, and no assessment risk arising from either.

One caution for anyone re-checking this, because it has produced a real error before. Valencia Bonita addresses and permits carry lot numbers, and lot numbers are not floor numbers. A leading digit in a street address or a lot reference is not evidence of a storey count. Height at this community comes from the development orders, the permits and the Property Appraiser records, and those records describe single-storey, fee-simple homes.

Schools Serving Valencia Bonita

Valencia Bonita is an age-restricted 55-plus community, so school assignment does not determine who lives here. It matters for two narrower reasons: resale demand in the wider Bonita Springs market, and the occasional grandchild staying for a semester. The community falls within the School District of Lee County.

Lee County does not run conventional single-school attendance boundaries. It uses a school-choice zone system, and this part of east Bonita Springs sits in the district's southern zone. That means no address in Valencia Bonita has a permanently fixed zoned school in the way buyers from other states expect. The schools a household in this ZIP code would most plausibly be assigned to or choose are:

• Bonita Springs Elementary School, 10701 Dean Street SE, Bonita Springs, FL 34135, grades kindergarten through five.

• Bonita Springs Middle Center for the Arts, 10141 West Terry Street, Bonita Springs, FL 34135, grades six through eight.

• Bonita Springs High School, 25592 Imperial Parkway, Bonita Springs, FL 34135, grades nine through twelve.

Confirm assignment directly with the School District of Lee County before relying on it. Choice-zone boundaries and school capacity both change, and a district enrolment office is the only authority that can tell you where a specific address is placed for a specific year.

Two distance facts complete the picture. The nearest school of any kind is 4.31 miles west of the community, measured straight-line from the centroid, and there is no Lee County school district capital project within five miles. The nearest district capital work is a renovation at Bonita Springs Elementary, roughly 40 million dollars, 5.41 miles west. For a 55-plus community that distance is a non-issue day to day, and the newer high school is a general positive for the broader Bonita Springs resale market.

Healthcare Near Valencia Bonita

Healthcare is the highest-stakes practical question for a 55-plus buyer, and the answer at Valencia Bonita is that everything is reachable and nothing is close. The nearest emergency department is about 24 minutes away free-flow, the nearest walk-in clinic about 17 minutes, and the region's only Level II trauma centre about 38 minutes. All drive figures below use the same OSRM free-flow method described in the drive-times section, measured from the community centroid on 26 August 2026.

Emergency Care

The closest emergency department is the NCH Bonita Springs freestanding emergency department at 24040 South Tamiami Trail, 12.4 miles and about 24 minutes, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It shares a building with an imaging centre, a lab draw station, family medicine and an orthopaedics and spine practice.

Lee Health's Coconut Point emergency department at 23450 Via Coconut Point in Estero is 13.5 miles and about 26 minutes, also open 24 hours a day. It was Lee County's first freestanding emergency department, opened in 2016, on a 31-acre Lee Health campus, with 25 examination, observation and recovery rooms and free parking directly in front. Lee Health publishes a live emergency department status page showing current busyness by location, which is genuinely useful before you get in the car.

For major trauma the answer is unambiguous and it points north, not south. Lee Health Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers is the nearest Level II trauma centre, 24.1 miles and about 38 minutes, with 699 licensed beds, 70 emergency department beds including four trauma bays, and 22 operating rooms. Lee Health states it is the only Level II trauma centre between Bradenton and Miami. There is no trauma centre in Collier County within this radius, so a Valencia Bonita resident with a major trauma travels to Fort Myers even though Naples hospitals are closer.

Hospitals and Everyday Care

NCH North Naples Hospital, 11190 Health Park Boulevard, is the nearest full-service hospital at 12.1 miles and about 24 minutes, with a 24-hour emergency department. Its Wingard Stroke Institute is a Joint Commission certified Comprehensive Stroke Center. Physicians Regional North on Creekside Boulevard is 12.0 miles and about 24 minutes, a small all-private-room facility with an orthopaedic and spine floor and a co-located inpatient rehabilitation facility, though its operator does not publish an emergency department for that campus. Physicians Regional Pine Ridge is 14.0 miles, NCH Baker Hospital in downtown Naples is 21.4 miles, and Lee Health HealthPark Medical Center is 26.7 miles.

Lee Health Bonita Health Center at 3501 Health Center Boulevard is the outpatient anchor for this corridor, 12.9 miles and about 26 minutes, open 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week. Under one roof it carries urgent care, X-ray, MRI, CT and ultrasound, haematology and oncology, urology, gastroenterology, rheumatology, endocrinology, allergy and immunology, sleep medicine, outpatient rehabilitation and a blood donation centre. Lee Health now publishes the address as Estero rather than Bonita Springs, which is worth knowing when you search for it.

Where Do Residents Go for a Walk-In?

The nearest walk-in is the Millennium Physician Group clinic at 9500 Bonita Beach Road SE, 7.7 miles and about 17 minutes, roughly half the distance of anything else. Verify its hours by phone before driving out, because the published hours we found were aggregator-sourced rather than from the practice itself. The Lee Convenient Care clinic inside Lee Health Bonita Health Center is the other everyday option at 12.9 miles.

One change since older material was written: NCH Bonita Immediate Care at 28410 Bonita Crossings Boulevard closed permanently on 1 May 2026, confirmed by its absence from NCH's own Bonita Springs facility directory. NCH no longer operates a walk-in urgent care in Bonita Springs.

Specialty Care Worth Knowing About

Southwest Florida Proton in Estero opened with its first patient treated on 30 December 2025, the first proton therapy centre on Florida's west coast, roughly 42,000 square feet, about 80 million dollars, with Lee Health as a partner operating an on-site imaging suite including PET, CT and 3T MRI. Advocate Radiation Oncology opened a cancer treatment centre in the same building in January 2025 with a Varian TrueBeam linear accelerator, and also operates a Bonita Springs location. Florida Cancer Specialists has a Bonita Springs office at 9776 Bonita Beach Road SE, on the community's own road.

For cardiology, the NCH Rooney Heart Institute and an NCH cardiac rehabilitation office both sit at 3302 Bonita Beach Road SE. For orthopaedics, an HSS at NCH orthopaedics and spine office operates in Bonita Springs itself. DaVita Bonita Springs Dialysis at 9134 Bonita Beach Road SE is 7.9 miles and about 17 minutes. The nearest 24-hour emergency veterinary hospital, Southwest Florida Veterinary Specialists at 28400 Old 41 Road, is 7.3 miles and about 17 minutes.

Two practical gaps deserve to be said out loud. There is no 24-hour pharmacy on this corridor; the CVS and Walgreens on Bonita Beach Road SE both close in the evening, around 9 p.m. And concierge primary care through NCH exists as a named service line with four offices, but all four are in Naples, roughly 21 to 24 miles away, not in Bonita Springs.

An Insurance Change Buyers Should Check Before 2027

Lee Health announced on 26 August 2026 that beginning 1 January 2027 its hospitals and physicians will be out of network for affected UnitedHealthcare plans, Medicare Advantage among them. For a Valencia Bonita household on one of those plans, that would simultaneously affect Lee Health Coconut Point emergency department, Lee Health Bonita Health Center and Gulf Coast Medical Center, which is the nearest freestanding emergency room, the nearest urgent care campus and the nearest trauma centre. NCH and Physicians Regional facilities are in Collier County and are not party to this dispute.

Payer and health-system disputes frequently settle before their effective date, and this one may. Check the current status at Lee Health's own UnitedHealthcare page and with your plan before you rely on either outcome. Nothing on this page is insurance advice, and plan selection is a conversation for a licensed broker and Medicare's own plan finder.

What Is Being Built Nearby

Nothing is pending inside one mile of Valencia Bonita. There is not one pending development application, not one approved but unbuilt project, and not one funded road capacity project within a mile of the community boundary. That was tested three ways: a Lee County parcel sweep of every holding over four acres in the ring, the county's own comprehensive-plan docket enumerating all eleven privately initiated Southeast Lee County amendments filed between 2023 and 2026, and the City of Bonita Springs project inventory east of the interstate.

The one-mile ring contains four things and only four: built-out residential communities along the east end of Bonita Beach Road, the CREW Flint Pen Strand conservation land, the eastern terminus of Bonita Beach Road, and shared Bonita Beach Road frontage infrastructure that the association helps maintain. That is an unusual profile for Southwest Florida, and for a 55-plus buyer it is a feature rather than a gap. The counterweight is the commercial desert described earlier on this page.

Revana Lakes, Approved and Coming

The nearest approved project is Revana Lakes, a little over a mile west on the north side of Bonita Beach Road. It received final approval from Bonita Springs City Council on 22 January 2026, after a comprehensive plan amendment approved 15 October 2025 and a zoning board vote on 16 December 2025. The site is 204 acres and the approval covers up to 299 homes and 100,000 square feet of commercial space.

Two conditions of that approval are binding rather than aspirational, and the first of them is the single most useful forward-looking fact on this page. The developer must secure permits for at least 50,000 square feet of commercial space before construction of the 75th home, and must fund a new traffic signal if one is warranted. The first condition is the mechanism that makes retail actually get built at the east end of Bonita Beach Road instead of being value-engineered away once the houses sell. Construction is expected to begin in 2027, with first residents anticipated in 2028.

We are deliberately not quoting a distance to two decimal places for Revana Lakes. The site is 204 acres, its exact eastern boundary is not published in a document we have read, and a site that size is roughly half a mile across. A little over a mile west is the defensible statement.

The Nearest Pending Item

A parcel at Bonita Beach Road and Radio Tower Road, about 1.20 miles west-northwest of the community boundary, is the nearest pending item of any kind. It sits inside a county comprehensive-plan process, and Lee County staff have proposed a slight contraction of the Southeast Lee County Community Plan Area along Bonita Beach Road south of the Kehl Canal, on the reasoning that the canal blocks the surface water connection between those properties and the Imperial River watershed, so they should not carry the same requirements as the rest of Southeast Lee County. The county's Department of Natural Resources confirmed the contraction area.

Removing land from that plan area does not by itself entitle anything. It does take off the largest regulatory brake, because Southeast Lee County's rules hold density at one dwelling unit per ten acres in the relevant land use category. The county package was transmitted to the state on 19 August 2026 and requires Florida Department of Commerce review and a final Board of County Commissioners adoption vote that has not happened. Until that vote, none of it is law.

The Rail Trail Bond Every Owner Will Pay For

Bonita Springs voters approved a 35 million dollar general obligation bond on 18 August 2026, with 68 percent support, to acquire the city's share of a former rail corridor and begin building the Bonita Estero Rail Trail. The full corridor runs 11.4 miles from the Collier County line at Wiggins Pass Road through downtown Bonita Springs and Estero. The nearest mapped point of that corridor is about six and a half miles west-southwest of Valencia Bonita.

This belongs under taxes rather than amenities. A general obligation bond is repaid from ad valorem property taxes levied city-wide, and Valencia Bonita is inside city limits, so every owner here will pay toward it whether or not they ever ride the trail. Household impact estimates reported during the referendum campaign ran roughly 49 to 88 dollars per household per year. Treat that range as a campaign estimate rather than a billed figure, and expect the actual line to be set by the city's millage once the bonds are issued. What is settled today is the structure: a voter-approved 35 million dollar general obligation bond, levied city-wide, approved by 68 percent of voters on 18 August 2026.

Road Work on the Routes You Use

Two Florida Department of Transportation projects touch the routes Valencia Bonita residents drive.

• Project 452544-1 widens Interstate 75 from north of Golden Gate Parkway to south of Alico Road, 21 miles, and the project page lists the phase as construction with the current phase starting in mid-2026. Scope includes additional lanes in both directions with auxiliary and express lanes, a new diverging diamond interchange at Immokalee Road, ramp modifications and noise walls at qualifying locations. The Bonita Beach Road interchange at Exit 116, the one this community uses for the airport, Naples and Fort Myers, is inside those limits. Expect real inconvenience during construction and a materially better road afterwards.

• Project 444321-1 addresses the US 41 and Bonita Beach Road intersection at the far Gulf end of the road. Its study phase is complete, with Location and Design Concept Acceptance granted on 25 July 2025, and the project is now in design. The approved concept converts the signalised intersection to a partial displaced left turn configuration and adds a new northeast quadrant roadway connecting US 41 to Arroyal Road plus a 12-foot shared-use path through the intersection area.

Whether any turn-lane or signal capacity work is programmed on the community's own stretch of Bonita Beach Road remains unresolved in the public record we could reach. The only site-specific traffic commitment we can document on this stretch is the Revana Lakes signal condition. Because the road ends 0.83 miles east of the community, the capacity question is entirely about the westward stretch toward the interstate.

One correction that is worth carrying, because search results circulate a date that no primary source supports. The City of Bonita Springs project page for the Logan Boulevard connection was posted in March 2019 and gives an estimated completion of February 2020. There is no City document giving a 2026 date for that project. Treat any later completion date you encounter as unsourced until a dated City document says otherwise.

Further Out on the Same Road

About three miles west, Midtown at Bonita is a roughly 68-acre mixed-use lifestyle centre at the first lighted intersection east of the interstate. It is approximately 75 percent leased with retail opening in late 2026, its Paradiso apartment component of 400 units is already open, and signed tenants include TJ Maxx and Ulta Beauty alongside a range of local food, wellness and service operators. Until Revana Lakes' commercial permits are pulled, Midtown is the nearest large concentration of new shopping, dining and everyday services to Valencia Bonita, and it is a three-mile drive west rather than a walk.

A larger residential community is under construction off Bonita Grande Drive, with its nearest homesites measured at 3.83 miles west and its common-element tracts out to 4.75 miles. It is regional supply rather than a neighbour, and it should not be described as adjacent. Its practical effect on Valencia Bonita is more traffic on the stretch of Bonita Beach Road west of the community, and more rooftops helping to justify the retail that Revana Lakes and Midtown are building.

So What Should a Buyer Actually Expect?

Between now and 2027, nothing changes. No approved project sits inside a mile, the land immediately north and east is owned by the state and the water management district and cannot be developed, and the arterial still dead-ends less than a mile east. From 2027 the picture improves rather than degrades: construction begins on a mixed-use community a little over a mile west whose approval requires commercial permits before its 75th home, which is the mechanism most likely to bring a grocer and everyday services to the east end of Bonita Beach Road for the first time. The costs to watch are the city-wide rail trail bond and the ordinary interstate construction inconvenience, both of which are known, dated and documented rather than speculative.

Selling a Home in Valencia Bonita

Selling in Valencia Bonita is a narrow, specialist job. There are 996 homes here, all single-storey, all inside one gate, all built by one builder between 2017 and 2023, and roughly sixty of them change hands in a year. That means your buyer pool is small, well informed, and comparing your house against a handful of near-identical floor plans that sold in the last six months. Pricing is not a range exercise here. It is a plan-level exercise, and the difference between getting it right and getting it close is measured in weeks on market and tens of thousands of dollars.

Data updated: September 2026

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What the Last Twelve Months Actually Did to Valencia Bonita Prices

Prices in Valencia Bonita are modestly down over the last twelve months, by roughly two to three percent, and up sharply over five years. Both halves of that sentence are true and a seller needs both.

Measured on closings from 1 September 2025 through 31 August 2026 against the same twelve months a year earlier, the median sale price moved from about $860,000 to about $840,000. That is a decline of about 2.3 percent. We tracked all 60 MLS closings in the recent window against 57 in the prior one, and we separately tracked 59 qualified arm's-length transfers in Lee County's own recorded-sales file, which produced a median of $849,900 against $855,000, a decline of about 0.6 percent. Two independent instruments, the same direction.

We also tested whether the decline was a mix illusion, because that is the first thing an honest analyst should test. It is not. The mix of homes that sold actually moved up-market: the entry-tier Signature collection fell from 35.1 percent of sales to 23.3 percent, the estate-tier Classic collection went from one sale to six, and the median size sold rose from 2,199 to 2,254 square feet. An up-market mix should push a median up. It fell anyway. Holding the mix constant makes the picture slightly worse, not better, at about 3.0 percent down on trailing-year weights and about 7.2 percent down on prior-year weights.

The tightest instrument available is a same-floor-plan comparison, which compares each plan only against itself and eliminates composition entirely. Restricted to plan clusters with at least three sales in both windows, four of five clusters are down and the median cluster is down 2.3 percent.

The Four Numbers Every Valencia Bonita Seller Should Know Before Pricing

Data updated: September 2026

Read that table the way a seller should read it. Homes are selling faster than they were a year ago and more of them are closing at or above asking price, which are both buyer-demand signals. The median is down and the sale-to-list ratio softened slightly, which are both pricing signals. A market that sells faster while medians drift down is a market that rewards accurate pricing and punishes aspirational pricing, which is exactly what the 95.71 percent median sale-to-list number is telling you.

Why Your Collection Matters More Than the Community Average

Valencia Bonita does not move as one market. The five home collections are plan-size groups, not places, and they behaved very differently over the last year.

Three of the five collections are down or flat. Vintage, which is the largest collection in the community at 351 homes and more than a third of all sales, is down 12.8 percent on the median. Classic shows a large apparent gain, but the prior-year sample is a single sale and one sale is not a market, so we do not publish it as a trend and no seller should price against it.

If you own a Vintage plan, the community-average headline understates your exposure. If you own a Regal plan, it overstates it. That is the entire argument for a plan-level valuation rather than a portal estimate built on a community-wide average.

The Two Line Items That Surprise Valencia Bonita Sellers

The first is the Resale Capital Contribution. The Eleventh Amendment to the Declaration, recorded as Lee County instrument 2023000349314 on 30 October 2023, added a Resale Capital Contribution levied on the transferee of any conveyance of a lot. The amount was set initially at $3,500, uniform across all lots, with six enumerated exemptions, and the Board is permitted to change it at a duly noticed Board meeting. It is buyer-paid and it is lienable. It belongs on every net sheet on both sides of the table, and the current amount should be read off a live estoppel certificate rather than assumed, because the Board can move it.

The second is the estoppel itself. Estoppel certificates and lender questionnaires for Valencia Bonita are ordered through the management company, Castle Group, not through the Association's public portal. Florida law caps what an association may charge for a standard estoppel and sets a delivery deadline, and the fee, the payer and the timing should all be confirmed with the Association and your closing agent at the point of contract rather than guessed at from a general Florida article.

What We Do Differently on a Valencia Bonita Listing

McGreevy and Comisar has been ranked among the Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008, and the practical value of that is method rather than status. Here is what the method looks like on this community.

We price at plan level, not at community level. Valencia Bonita has 23 distinct products across the five collections, and for the most-built plans there is enough recent volume to build a genuine paired comparison rather than an adjustment grid full of guesses. The Chandon alone accounts for 118 homes at 2,464 square feet, which is a large enough population that a Chandon owner can be shown what Chandons did, not what the community did.

We disclose the twelve-month direction to our own sellers before we list. A seller who understands that the median is down about two percent, that homes are selling roughly eleven days faster, and that one in four sellers in the last year closed below their purchase price, prices correctly the first time and does not spend two months discovering it.

We name every window on every number. A twelve-month median for this community swings from plus 9.4 percent to minus 6.9 percent depending purely on where you draw the boundary, on the same underlying data. Any figure quoted to you without its window is not a fact about Valencia Bonita, it is a fact about a window.

A First-Hand Observation From Working This Community

The single most common pricing mistake we see here is anchoring to 2023. The community's builder pricing peaked in 2023 at a median around $903,000 and the resale market has since settled into a band that has held for three consecutive years, roughly $800,000 in 2024, $875,000 in 2025 and $810,000 through the posted part of 2026. An owner who bought in 2021 and watched a neighbour close at a 2023 number will often want that 2023 number. The trailing-twelve-month median sits about 5.9 percent below the 2023 peak. Naming that gap out loud at the listing appointment saves the seller a price reduction in week six.

The second most common is treating a lake lot as a fixed dollar premium. Of the 996 parcels here, 660 are coded as lake-view single family and 336 are not, so a lake view is common rather than rare in this community and it does not carry the scarcity premium it carries elsewhere in Bonita Springs. The premium is real but it is smaller than owners expect, and it varies by plan.

When Should You List in Valencia Bonita?

For a 55-plus community with a strong seasonal buyer base, the window that matters is roughly November through April, when the people who are shopping are physically in Southwest Florida rather than reading listings from a northern winter. That said, the measured median days on market for the whole trailing year is 54.5 days, and the community's inventory is thin at 18 active listings against roughly five closings a month. Thin inventory means a correctly priced home does not have to wait for a season. It means an incorrectly priced home has nowhere to hide, because a buyer comparing 18 options notices the outlier immediately.

What Your Valencia Bonita Home Is Worth

The honest answer is that a Valencia Bonita home is worth what its own floor plan has recently sold for, adjusted for view, condition, pool, and whether the lanai and cage work was permitted and closed out. The community-wide trailing-twelve-month median is $840,000 on the MLS and $849,900 in the county's recorded-sales file, with closings spanning $520,000 to $1,650,000, but that spread is so wide that the community median is close to useless as a valuation for any individual house.

Data updated: September 2026

How We Value a Valencia Bonita Home

We start with the plan. Square footage in this community clusters tightly, because a builder repeating 23 products across 996 lots produces exact-match comparables that almost no resale neighbourhood can offer. We match your home to its square-footage cluster, then look at every sale in that cluster in both the trailing and prior twelve months, then adjust for the things that actually differ: view type, pool and cage, extended lanai, upgraded kitchen and flooring, generator, impact glazing versus shutters, and whether the home is offered turnkey furnished.

We then sanity-check the plan number against the collection number and the community number. If a plan-level answer sits far outside its collection's trend, that is a signal to go back and look at the individual sales rather than to trust the model.

What the Repeat-Sale Record Says About Your Equity

This is the number most Valencia Bonita owners have never seen, and it is the strongest one available.

A repeat sale compares the same physical house to itself at two points in time, which removes mix, size, lot and finish effects completely. In the trailing twelve months, 59 homes that sold in Valencia Bonita had also sold before. Those pairs show a median total gain of 32.3 percent over a median hold of about four and a half years, which is roughly 6 percent a year. Across the community's entire history, 254 pairs show a median total gain of 41.9 percent over a median three-year hold.

Twenty-five percent of the owners who sold in the trailing twelve months sold for less than they paid. Seventy-five percent sold for more. That ratio was 24 percent a year earlier, so it is essentially unchanged.

Benchmarking the Trailing Year Against the Long Run

Median price per heated square foot tells a similar long-run story, rising from $213.09 in 2018 and $234.50 in 2020 to $368.35 in the trailing twelve months. We do not present the trailing-year change in price per square foot as evidence of appreciation, because at plan level four of five paired plan groups show price per square foot falling. The community-wide figure rose only because the highest-priced product in the community sold six times instead of once.

Get a Real Number Rather Than an Automated One

An automated valuation for Valencia Bonita is built on the community median, which we have just shown is the wrong instrument for a community with a 351-home collection down 12.8 percent and a 146-home collection up 5.6 percent in the same year. Request a plan-level Valencia Bonita valuation or call (239) 898-6072 and we will show you the actual closings behind the number.

Why Work With McGreevy and Comisar

Because the numbers above are ours. We measured them, we named the windows, and we published the ones that do not flatter us alongside the ones that do. We have worked this stretch of Bonita Springs for years, we track Valencia Bonita's closings by floor plan rather than by community average, and we would rather hand a seller an uncomfortable number early than a comfortable one that the first appraisal takes apart.

Jesse McGreevy and Marc Comisar have been ranked in the Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008, with more than $900 million in combined personal production and more than 4,000 transactions across Southwest Florida. That Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008 record is not a slogan attached to a single strong year; it is the reason we can tell a Valencia Bonita seller that the market softened by two percent without worrying that the honesty costs us the listing.

Who You Actually Work With

Jesse McGreevy and Marc Comisar are the two people who show up. Not a junior, not a rotating team member, not a call centre. Both are recognised among the Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008 and both work the Bonita Springs and Estero corridor directly. How the team is structured is set out on our about page, and you can see the full brokerage footprint at Domain Realty Group's Valencia Bonita page.

What We Tracked to Build This Community Profile

For this community we tracked 60 MLS closings and 57 in the comparison window; we tracked 59 qualified arm's-length transfers in the Lee County recorded-sales file and 58 in the prior year; we tracked 1,263 qualified sale rows across the community's full history back to 2018; we tracked 254 repeat-sale pairs; and we tracked the collection assignment of 995 of the community's 996 homes against the builder's own site map. We also tracked 477 City of Bonita Springs permits carrying finished-floor elevations and 532 permits recording window and door products. That is what a Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008 practice looks like on one community, and it is why the appreciation answer above is a measurement rather than an assertion.

License and Brokerage Disclosure

Jesse McGreevy holds Florida real estate license #SL3101296. Marc Comisar holds Florida broker license #BK3060671. Both licenses are issued by the Florida Real Estate Commission (FREC) under the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and both can be verified on the FREC public licensee search. The team operates as Domain Realty Group under the brokerage DOMAINREALTY.COM, LLC, Florida brokerage license #CQ1049052. We are an equal housing opportunity brokerage and we comply with the federal Fair Housing Act, including the Housing for Older Persons Act provisions that govern age-restricted communities such as Valencia Bonita.

How to Reach Us

McGreevy and Comisar Domain Realty 24031 S Tamiami Trl #101 Bonita Springs, FL 34134 Phone: (239) 898-6072

Sellers can start with a free valuation. Buyers can start with our buyer guide or go straight to contact us. Either way you reach Jesse or Marc, not a queue. Call or text (239) 898-6072.

Updated September 2026.

What Our Clients Say

Jesse McGreevy and Marc Comisar are a top-reviewed Bonita Springs real estate team. The McGreevy and Comisar Google Business Profile carries a 4.9 star rating across sixty-nine public reviews at last count, spanning buyers, sellers, repeat clients and out-of-state owners selling remotely. The five reviews below are verbatim from that public profile and are shown without names, per our display policy.

★★★★★ "I have had 13 real estate transactions and this is the most professional and helpful agency that I have ever worked with. Marc actually called me with a response to my questions and concerns on a Sunday evening. The resources that this agency has access to goes above and beyond any other I have ever worked with. The professional process that they use to present your home for sale goes beyond anything I have ever experienced." Verified Google review

★★★★★ "Their recommendation on pricing my unit was sound and proved prescient. I never questioned their integrity and found it easy to rely on their recommendations. I would work with them again in a heartbeat." Verified Google review

★★★★★ "Not living in the area, Jesse made life easy for me when we decided to sell our condo. His attention to detail, patience, understanding, and tenacity in dealing with all the moving parts was truly impressive." Verified Google review

★★★★★ "We highly recommend Marc Comisar for your real estate needs. He was very knowledgeable. If he didn't know an answer, he would do research until he did. Marc is pleasant, timely, and listened to our wants and needs. He went above and beyond to make sure we found our forever home. Thank you, Marc!" Verified Google review

★★★★★ "Jesse and his team were the most professional and communicative people throughout the entire process! Always available and helpful! Highly recommended!" Verified Google review

Buyer Questions About Valencia Bonita

These are the questions buyers actually ask about Valencia Bonita, drawn from search data and from our own conversations with people touring the community. Each answer opens with the direct answer and then gives the evidence behind it. Where a figure is not published anywhere we can verify, we say so plainly and name who to ask rather than guessing, because a confident wrong number costs a buyer more than an honest gap does.

Which jurisdiction is Valencia Bonita in?

Valencia Bonita sits inside the City of Bonita Springs. Permits, code enforcement and zoning all go through the City, not through the County's unincorporated-area offices. This matters practically: your building permits for a pool cage or a generator are pulled at the City, and the City's floodplain rating, not the County's, is what sets your flood insurance discount.

How many homes are in Valencia Bonita?

There are 996 homes. That figure is confirmed four independent ways: 996 distinct numbered lots, 996 single-family parcels in the Lee County roll, 996 parcels carrying a single residential garbage unit, and 996 voting interests in the Association's own August 2026 membership notice. Older material occasionally carries a figure one higher, which traces to county residence records and a 2017 launch press release, and you will also see 1,200, which is the number of units entitled under City Ordinance 05-12 rather than the number built.

Is Valencia Bonita finished, or is the builder still selling?

It is finished. GL Homes completed its last builder closings in 2024. Across the county's recorded-sales file there were 125 builder closings in 2023, six in 2024, and zero in both 2025 and 2026. Every sale in the community today is an owner-to-owner resale.

Are all the homes single-storey?

Yes. All 996 homes in Valencia Bonita are single-storey. This is worth stating plainly because listing material occasionally circulates describing a two-storey plan here, and it is not accurate.

Does Valencia Bonita have a CDD?

No. There is no Community Development District at Valencia Bonita, which is confirmed two ways: an actual Lee County parcel tax bill whose non-ad-valorem section carries exactly two lines, and an enumeration of every entry in Florida Commerce's Official List of Special Districts. Neighbouring communities that do have CDDs pay between $1,273 and $1,805 per unit per year in district assessments. Valencia Bonita owners pay none of that.

If there is no CDD, are there any shared district costs at all?

There is one, and it sits inside the HOA budget rather than on your tax bill. A four-party interlocal cost-sharing agreement recorded on 5 June 2017 as instrument 2017000121817 apportions shared Bonita Beach Road corridor costs among three CDDs and the Valencia Bonita HOA, with the Valencia Bonita share set at 33 percent. The shared pool for the 2027 fiscal year is roughly $146,000 across all four parties. It is a contract, not district membership, which is exactly why no district line appears on a Valencia Bonita tax bill.

What are the HOA assessments at Valencia Bonita?

Assessments are billed quarterly, due 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October, with a late fee applying at day fifteen. We do not publish a dollar figure, and we want to be direct about why: no current assessment amount exists in any primary public source. The adopted budget and the owner ledger sit behind the Association's members-only portal, and every number circulating on the open web traces to listing aggregators rather than to the Association. Ask the Association or read the figure off a current estoppel certificate before you rely on it.

What do the HOA assessments cover?

Lawn and landscape maintenance, irrigation, the amenity complex and its staffing, community insurance on the common property, gate operations, and bulk cable and internet. The bulk communications service is apportioned equally across all completed lots under Article VI, Section 6 of the Declaration, which is titled Community Systems Services. The specific tier and the dollar allocation are portal-gated.

Is cable and internet really included?

Yes, as a bulk service inside the assessment, under the Declaration provision above. A bulk agreement with the incumbent provider exists. The channel package and speed tier are not published publicly and should be confirmed with the Association.

Is there a capital contribution when I buy?

Yes. A Resale Capital Contribution of $3,500 as initially adopted is levied on the buyer at closing, created by the Eleventh Amendment to the Declaration recorded 30 October 2023 as instrument 2023000349314. Six exemptions are enumerated in the amendment. The Board may change the amount at a duly noticed Board meeting, so confirm the current figure on the estoppel.

Who manages the Valencia Bonita HOA?

Castle Group, with Kelly Rhoades, LCAM, as general manager. The Association transitioned from developer control to resident control on 30 April 2023. Older material naming a different management company or manager is out of date.

Is Valencia Bonita a 55-plus community, and how is that enforced?

Yes. Valencia Bonita operates as housing for older persons under the Housing for Older Persons Act, which requires at least 80 percent of occupied units to have at least one occupant aged 55 or older. The community's own Rules restate that as a hard 20 percent ceiling on homes without a 55-plus occupant, and enforcement runs through an age verification form filed with the Association before occupancy.

Can someone under 55 live at Valencia Bonita?

Yes, provided at least one occupant of the home is 55 or older and the community stays inside its 20 percent ceiling. A younger spouse is the ordinary case and is contemplated by the rules. The Board holds a limited waiver power, but that power stops at the 20 percent line and cannot be used past it.

Can children and grandchildren visit or stay?

Visiting is normal and expected. The rule that matters is the guest-becomes-tenant threshold: a person occupying a home for more than one month without the owner present is deemed a tenant rather than a guest, which pulls them into the leasing rules including the age verification requirement. Short family visits are not affected.

Can I rent out my Valencia Bonita home?

Yes, with meaningful limits. Leases must be for the whole home, no subletting, with a minimum lease term of seven months, and no home may be leased more than once in any twelve-month period. A copy of the executed lease must reach the Association before the tenant occupies. Short-term and seasonal renting is effectively barred by the seven-month minimum.

Does a Valencia Bonita tenant have to be 55 or older?

At least one intended occupant must be 55 or older at the time of occupancy, and the owner must submit an age verification form to the Association before the occupancy begins. The Board may waive that in its discretion, but not if doing so would push more than 20 percent of homes past the threshold.

Is Valencia Bonita in a flood zone?

The entire community is in Zone X, which is outside the Special Flood Hazard Area, on FEMA FIRM panel 12071C0685F effective 28 August 2008. There is no base flood elevation assigned, and flood insurance is not federally required by a lender for a Zone X property. Finished-floor elevations across 477 City permits run from 18.0 to 20.4 feet NAVD88 with a median of 19.03 feet.

Does the City of Bonita Springs have a flood insurance discount?

Yes. The City of Bonita Springs, NFIP community identification number 120680, holds a Community Rating System Class 5, which carries a 25 percent NFIP premium discount, effective from 1 May 2017. Under Risk Rating 2.0 the CRS discount applies to all policies including those written outside the Special Flood Hazard Area, so a Zone X home in Valencia Bonita earns the full 25 percent.

Are Valencia Bonita homes built to current hurricane code?

They are built to the Florida Building Code editions in force between 2017 and 2023, which is post-2002 high-velocity coastal code. Across 532 City permits recording window and door products, 424 state impact-rated glazing. Roughly 487 standby generators have been permitted in the community.

How did Valencia Bonita do in Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Milton?

Across roughly 37,000 City of Bonita Springs permit and inspection records filtered to these parcels, exactly one references Hurricane Ian and zero reference Hurricane Milton. We want to be precise about what that measures: it measures the permit record, not damage. A home repaired without a permit, or repaired under a general roofing permit that does not name a storm, would not appear. It is a strong signal and it is not a damage survey.

Is there a golf course, a marina, or a private beach club?

No, no and no. We prove that by enumeration rather than by omission: the Association's own recorded Rules and Regulations run to eighteen articles covering the clubhouse, the pool area, outdoor courts, the dog park, the lakes and Association property generally, and no golf, marina, boat slip or beach club facility appears anywhere in that document or in the community's recorded amenity tract. Golf and boating are available nearby in Bonita Springs and Estero, but not inside this gate.

What is on-site dining at Valencia Bonita?

The on-site restaurant is Oasis at Valencia Bonita, at 16621 Valencia Bonita Boulevard, operating under a single continuous Florida DBPR seating licence, SEA4607323, with 150 seats. The venue was named Zest from 2020 until roughly 2023 and was renamed on an operator change; it is one venue with one address and one licence, not two restaurants. Operating status and hours should be confirmed with the Association before you plan around them.

How big is the clubhouse?

County records show 57,415 square feet of conditioned space and 71,679 square feet under roof, on a 10.56-acre amenity tract, built in 2019 and 2020. The builder's marketing figure of roughly 45,000 square feet is a different measure of the same building, not a contradiction. The most accurate short description is more than 57,000 square feet of air-conditioned space.

What sports facilities are there?

Tennis, pickleball and bocce are all confirmed, along with a resort pool complex, a fitness centre and an exercise studio. We do not publish court counts. Every widely circulated count traces back to secondary directories rather than to the builder or the Association, and no first-party source for any count is reachable. Ask the Association for the current counts, which can change as facilities are resurfaced or converted.

How many clubs and activities are there?

The Association's own club rosters show 44 clubs in 2020 and 50 in 2021, so roughly fifty resident clubs is the honest number. A full-time lifestyle director programmes the calendar. Higher figures circulating online are not supported by any Association document we could locate.

Is there a dog park?

There is one dog park, divided into two size-segregated sections. It is governed by Article XV of the Rules. It is sometimes miscounted as a pair of separate parks, which is a misreading of the two sections inside the one facility.

What is the pet policy?

Ordinary house pets are permitted, including dogs, cats, caged birds, small caged mammals, aquarium fish and domesticated rabbits. Five breeds are prohibited outright, and dogs meeting the Rules' conduct-based dangerous-dog definition are prohibited. There is no fixed numeric cap in the governing text; the Rules delegate the maximum number of pets per household to the Board, so ask for the current Board-set number. Pets are barred from the clubhouse, pool deck, pools, fitness centre, exercise studio and sports courts, with a separate approval process for service and assistance dogs.

What are the golf cart rules?

Golf carts must be registered with the Association and display an identification sticker. Only electric or other non-combustion carts are permitted; gasoline carts are prohibited except for Association and vendor use. Between midnight and 6:00 a.m. carts must be stored inside the garage with the door closed. Carts are restricted to paved roadways, and daylight operation only unless the cart carries headlights, taillights, brake lights, turn signals and a windshield.

Who provides utilities at Valencia Bonita?

Bonita Springs Utilities provides water and sewer, Florida Power and Light provides electricity, and Peoples Gas provides natural gas. Waste Management collects garbage, recycling and yard waste on Mondays. Solid waste is billed on the property tax bill at $358.45 per home per year, not through the HOA, and there is a City of Bonita Springs stormwater line of $50.00 on the same bill.

Is the community gated and staffed?

There is a staffed gatehouse at the single entrance on Bonita Beach Road, and access credentials are car stickers and key fobs. We describe it as staffed rather than as manned twenty-four hours, because the Association's own operational documents evidence staffing while no first-party source establishes round-the-clock coverage or any mobile security patrol.

Does Valencia Bonita have any condominium or structural-milestone obligations?

No. There are zero condominium and zero cooperative parcels at Valencia Bonita. Florida's milestone inspection statute and the structural integrity reserve study requirement are condominium and cooperative statutes and do not reach a fee-simple homeowners association at any height. Unit-number digits in this community encode lots, not floors.

Where is Valencia Bonita, and how far is everyday shopping?

The community sits on Bonita Beach Road on the eastern edge of the City of Bonita Springs. Bonita Beach Road dead-ends 0.83 miles east of the community, so this is genuinely the edge of town rather than a through-corridor location. The nearest Publix is 3.20 miles away, the nearest fuel 3.10 miles, and the nearest hospital 7.34 miles. CREW Flint Pen Strand trailheads are 0.67 to 0.94 miles away. If you want a quiet setting with preserve access, that geography is a feature. If you want to walk to coffee, it is not.

What is being built near Valencia Bonita?

Nothing is pending inside one mile. Revana Lakes, a 299-home mixed-use project with about 100,000 square feet of commercial space, was approved on 22 January 2026 about 1.15 miles west. A commercial parcel at Bonita Beach Road and Radio Tower Road sits 1.20 miles west-northwest. A $35 million bond for the Bonita to Estero rail trail was approved on 18 August 2026 with 68 percent support, adding an estimated $49 to $88 per household per year. FDOT has active projects on I-75 and on US 41 at Bonita Beach Road.

Is the Association in any dispute with the developer?

The Association held a Special Members' Meeting on 31 August 2026 to consider authorising legal action against the developer under Florida Statute 720.303(1). The meeting notice describes financial claims of more than $523,000, including $165,437 that the developer's own auditor acknowledged, and a Chapter 558 notice regarding estimated common-area construction items exceeding $5 million. The outcome of the vote has not been published, and no suit appears on file as of the date of writing. Buyers and sellers should ask the Association or their attorney for the current status. This is a matter of public record and is not legal advice.

Do I need ARC approval to change anything at my home?

Yes, for exterior work. The Association maintains adopted architectural review guidelines and separate application packets for patio extensions and screening, permanent generators, satellite dishes and miscellaneous alterations. Lanai extensions, pool cages, fencing, exterior paint changes and landscape changes all run through the Architectural Review Committee, and City permits are separate from and additional to ARC approval.

Can I install a generator?

Permanent generators are permitted under Article V of the Rules with ARC approval, sited in the side yard with screening. The HOA's exercise window is Monday, and it nests inside a binding City zoning condition that limits generator exercise to between 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. On fuel, be careful: the current Rules contain a genuine internal contradiction on propane, prohibiting underground propane tanks in one section while carving out an underground generator tank in another. The practical read is that a natural gas generator is the viable option, and the ARC should confirm before you order equipment.

Is street parking allowed?

Overnight street parking between midnight and 6:00 a.m. requires a permit. RVs, boats and trailers must be stored inside an enclosed garage. Article XVII of the Rules governs parking and vehicular restrictions in detail.

How does a guest get through the gate?

Through the staffed gatehouse on Bonita Beach Road. Residents carry car stickers and key fobs; guests are handled at the gatehouse. The Association's Realtor Open House Policy, revised 1 February 2025, is the document that governs how showings and open houses are cleared through gatehouse staff, and any agent working the community should have read it.

What does the whole thing cost to own each month?

The honest answer is that we can give you three of the four components precisely and not the fourth. Property taxes are computable from the Lee County millage and the assessed value of the specific parcel; solid waste is $358.45 a year and stormwater $50.00, both on the tax bill; insurance depends on your carrier, your wind mitigation report and whether you carry optional flood coverage at the 25 percent CRS discount. The HOA assessment is the missing piece, because no current figure exists in a primary public source. Get it from the Association or from a current estoppel and the arithmetic closes.

Seller Edition: Questions From Valencia Bonita Owners

These are the questions Valencia Bonita owners ask when they are weighing a sale, and the answers are written from the closing record rather than from impressions. Every market figure below names the window it was measured over, because in a community this uniform a twelve-month median and a five-year median can point in opposite directions and both be true. Where the honest answer is less flattering than the easy one, you will find the honest answer.

Have Valencia Bonita homes appreciated?

Over the long run, substantially. The trailing-twelve-month median is up about 61 percent against 2020 and about 81 percent against 2018.

The strongest and most honest owner-level number is the repeat-sale record. Across the last twelve months, 59 homes that sold had also sold before, and those repeat sales show a median gain of 32.3 percent over a median hold of about four and a half years, which works out to roughly 6 percent a year. That is the same house compared to itself, so no question of mix or size or finish enters into it.

Over the last twelve months specifically, prices are modestly down. Measured on closings from 1 September 2025 through 31 August 2026 against the same twelve months a year earlier, the median sale price is down about 2 percent, and holding the mix of home sizes constant it is down a little more. We are naming that plainly because a seller who does not hear it from us will discover it in week six of a listing.

The context around that decline is real and it is not a dodge. Only about a quarter of sellers in that window sold for less than they paid, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. Homes sold faster, with a median of about 55 days against 66 a year earlier. And the community's own price per square foot varies by collection rather than moving as one number.

One thing we will not do is claim community-wide appreciation in price per square foot. At floor-plan level, four of five paired plan groups show price per square foot falling. The aggregate figure rose only because the community's highest-priced product happened to sell six times instead of once, and presenting that as appreciation would be presenting a composition artifact as a market fact.

Are Valencia Bonita values down year over year?

Yes, modestly. About 2.3 percent on the MLS median and about 0.6 percent on the county's recorded-sales median, for the twelve months ending 31 August 2026. A constant-mix calculation puts it between 3.0 and 7.2 percent depending on which year's weights you use, and a same-floor-plan comparison puts it at 2.3 percent with four of five plan clusters down. Four methods, one direction.

Why do different sources give such different year-over-year numbers?

Because the answer depends almost entirely on where the twelve-month boundary is drawn. On the same underlying county data, the same community and the same exclusion rule, the median year-over-year change ranges from plus 9.4 percent for calendar 2025 against calendar 2024, to minus 2.6 percent for a lag-controlled window ending 30 June 2026, to minus 6.9 percent for January through August 2026 against the same months of 2025. Any figure quoted without its window is uninterpretable. Ours runs 1 September 2025 through 31 August 2026.

What is my Valencia Bonita home worth right now?

It depends on your floor plan far more than on the community median. Community-wide the trailing-year median is $840,000 with closings from $520,000 to $1,650,000, but a Signature villa and a Classic estate are two different markets inside one gate. The fastest accurate answer is a plan-level valuation. Request one here or call (239) 898-6072.

Does my collection change the answer?

Substantially. Over the trailing twelve months Signature was down 6.1 percent, Regal up 5.6 percent, Vintage down 12.8 percent, and Crown flat. Vintage is the largest collection at 351 homes and more than a third of all sales, so a Vintage owner reading a community-average headline is reading a number that understates their exposure by ten points.

What is the price per square foot in Valencia Bonita?

The trailing-twelve-month median is $368.66 on the MLS and $368.35 in the county file, which is agreement to within eight hundredths of one percent across two entirely separate data pipelines. By collection, trailing-year medians run from about $302 in Signature to about $457 in Classic. Do not read the community-wide year-over-year change in price per square foot as appreciation; at plan level it fell in four of five paired groups.

How long do homes take to sell in Valencia Bonita?

The median was 54.5 days over the trailing twelve months, against 66 days the year before. The mean was 87 days against 77.6, which tells you the distribution has a long tail: correctly priced homes go quickly and mispriced homes sit for a long time and drag the average.

What is the sale-to-list ratio?

The median was 95.71 percent over the trailing twelve months, down slightly from 96.59 percent a year earlier. The mean was 95.49 percent. Ten percent of homes sold at or above asking price, up from 7 percent the previous year.

How much inventory is there right now?

Eighteen active listings against roughly five closings a month, which is about 3.6 months of supply. That is a balanced-to-tight market by conventional reading, and it is the main reason a correctly priced Valencia Bonita home does not have to wait for season.

How many homes sell in Valencia Bonita in a typical year?

Around sixty, which is roughly 6 percent annual turnover against 996 homes. That has held steady: 60 MLS closings in the trailing year, 57 the year before, and county-recorded qualified transfers of 59 and 58 across the same two windows.

Is now a good time to sell?

It is a reasonable time to sell if you price to the current market rather than to 2023. Inventory is thin, homes are selling about eleven days faster than a year ago, and more of them are closing at or over asking. What has changed is that the median drifted down about 2 percent, so the price that worked eighteen months ago will not work today. Sellers who accept that get 95.71 percent of list; sellers who do not get a price reduction.

When is the best time of year to list in a 55-plus community?

November through April is when the seasonal buyer is physically here. That said, with 18 active listings community-wide, a well-priced home is competing against a small field at any time of year. If your timing is driven by a move to a continuing-care community, a family situation or an estate, do not force yourself into a season; the inventory picture is thin enough that off-season listings transact.

Should I use the builder's sales team or an outside agent?

The builder finished selling here in 2024 and has no on-site resale operation. Zero builder closings were recorded in 2025 and zero in 2026. Every sale today is an owner-to-owner resale, which means the question is really which listing agent, not builder versus agent.

Do I need a 55-plus specialist to sell my home?

You need someone who understands three things: that your buyer pool is limited by an age qualification and a 20 percent occupancy ceiling, that leasing restrictions here rule out investor buyers almost entirely, and that the Association's approval process sits between contract and closing. Those three facts change how you market a home and who you market it to. A generalist can sell a house here; a specialist will not be surprised by the parts that are specific to this community.

Will the age restriction limit my resale value?

It limits your buyer pool, not your per-foot value. Valencia Bonita's trailing-year median price per square foot of about $368 sits comfortably within the range for comparable newer gated product in the Bonita Springs and Estero corridor. What the restriction does is remove families and investors from the pool, which is why days on market here is a more useful diagnostic than in an all-ages community.

Do attached villas sell faster than single-family homes here?

In the trailing twelve months the entry-tier Signature product, which is the villa tier, improved most on days on market, from 92 days to 73. That is faster than it was, but still slower than the Vintage single-family median of 36 days. Signature also had the largest median price decline of the measurable collections at 6.1 percent, and its share of total sales fell nearly twelve points. Villas got quicker to sell and cheaper to buy in the same year.

What did the mix of sales look like last year?

It moved up-market. Signature fell from 35.1 percent of sales to 23.3 percent, Classic rose from one sale to six, Crown rose from 12.3 to 16.7 percent, and the median size sold rose from 2,199 to 2,254 square feet. That is why we ran the constant-mix test: an up-market mix should have pushed the median up, and it did not.

How much did the typical Valencia Bonita seller make last year?

The median seller who closed in the trailing twelve months sold for 32.3 percent more than they paid, on a median hold of about four and a half years. That is about 6 percent a year compounded. Across the community's whole history, 254 repeat-sale pairs show a median gain of 41.9 percent over a median three-year hold.

What share of sellers lost money?

About 25 percent of trailing-year sellers sold below what they paid, against 24 percent the year before. Three in four sold above. The stability of that ratio is one of the better arguments that this is a soft market rather than a deteriorating one.

How should I price my Valencia Bonita home?

Start with your own floor plan's recent closings, not the community median. Adjust for view, pool and cage, extended lanai, generator, glazing package and furnishings. Then check your number against your collection's twelve-month direction, because a Vintage plan and a Regal plan are moving in opposite directions right now. Then list inside the range rather than above it, because at 95.71 percent median sale-to-list, the market is not paying for negotiating room.

What should I fix before listing?

Deal with anything that will show up in an inspection and anything that will show up in a permit search. In an ARC-governed community with a lot of lanai and pool-cage retrofit activity, the single most expensive surprise is an addition that was never permitted or a permit that was never closed out. Everything else is judgment: fresh paint and a deep clean almost always pay, and a full kitchen renovation on the way out the door almost never does.

What happens if my lanai or pool cage was never permitted?

It becomes a closing problem, and it is better found in week one than in week seven. City of Bonita Springs permit records are searchable, and an open or missing permit on a screen enclosure, patio extension or generator can require retroactive permitting, an engineer's letter, or a price concession. We check the permit history on every Valencia Bonita listing before we set a price.

Should I sell turnkey furnished?

It is common here and it can widen your buyer pool, particularly with seasonal and out-of-state buyers who do not want to furnish a second home. The mechanics matter more than the decision: furniture is typically handled on a separate bill of sale rather than written into the purchase contract, so that it does not affect the appraised value or complicate the lender's file. Decide before you photograph, because the marketing changes.

What are my closing costs as a seller in Florida?

The main items are the brokerage fee agreed in your listing agreement, documentary stamp tax on the deed, title-related charges depending on local custom in Lee County, prorated property taxes, and any HOA charges such as the estoppel certificate. Rates for the documentary stamp are set by Florida statute and computed on the sale price; your closing agent will quote the exact figure on your specific number. We build a line-item net sheet before you list so that the figure at the bottom is not a surprise.

Who pays the $3,500 Resale Capital Contribution?

The buyer. The Eleventh Amendment levies it on the transferee of the conveyance. It does not come out of your proceeds, but it does form part of what your buyer is paying to acquire the home, so it belongs on the net sheet you review together. Confirm the current amount on the estoppel, since the Board can adjust it.

What is an HOA estoppel and who orders it?

An estoppel certificate is the Association's written statement of what is owed on your account at closing, and lenders and title companies require it. For Valencia Bonita, estoppels and lender questionnaires are ordered through Castle Group rather than through the Association's public document portal. Florida law caps the fee and sets a delivery timeframe; confirm the current cap, the fee and who pays it with the Association and your closing agent when you go under contract.

What HOA documents do I need to sell?

The recorded Declaration of Covenants and its amendments, the Bylaws and Articles, the current Rules and Regulations as re-adopted on 2 October 2025, the Association's financial disclosures as required, and the estoppel certificate. Most of these are publicly downloadable from the Association's document portal; the estoppel is transaction-specific and is ordered at contract.

Do I have to disclose the 55-plus restriction and the HOA rules?

Yes. Florida sellers have a duty to disclose facts materially affecting value that are not readily observable, and an age restriction, a leasing restriction and a mandatory association with lienable assessments are all material. Practically, disclose the age qualification, the seven-month minimum lease with a once-per-year cap, the quarterly assessment cadence, the Resale Capital Contribution, and any pending or announced Association matter you are aware of. Over-disclosure has never cost a seller a deal here; under-disclosure has cost sellers deals everywhere.

Do I need to disclose anything about the Association's dispute with the developer?

Ask your attorney, and ask the Association for the current status. What is documented publicly is that a Special Members' Meeting was held on 31 August 2026 to consider authorising action under Florida Statute 720.303(1), that the notice describes financial claims exceeding $523,000 including $165,437 acknowledged by the developer's auditor and a Chapter 558 notice on estimated common-area items exceeding $5 million, and that the outcome has not been published and no suit appears on file. This is a matter of public record and is not legal advice.

Will HOA buyer approval delay my closing?

It can, and you should build it into your timeline rather than hope around it. Valencia Bonita requires an age verification step for occupancy in a 55-plus community, and the Association's application process runs on its own calendar. Ask the management office for the current processing time at the point you go under contract, and make sure your buyer's application goes in immediately rather than after inspection.

Can I sell with a tenant in place?

You can, but the seven-month minimum lease term and the once-per-twelve-months leasing cap shape what is possible, and an existing lease generally survives a sale. If a tenant is in the home you are selling into a much smaller buyer pool, because a 55-plus community with these leasing restrictions produces almost no investor buyers. If timing allows, selling vacant or after the lease term is usually the cleaner outcome.

Can I close remotely if I have already moved out of state?

Yes. Remote and mail-away closings are routine in Florida, and remote online notarisation is available. We handle a meaningful share of Valencia Bonita transactions for owners who are no longer in Southwest Florida, including access for inspections, appraisals and the final walk-through. Tell us early so the file is set up for it from day one.

Should I sell before I buy my next home?

If your next move is into a continuing-care community with an entrance-fee deadline, or a purchase that has to close on a fixed date, sequencing matters more than price optimisation. In a market with 3.6 months of supply and a 54.5-day median time to contract, the sale side is reasonably predictable, which usually argues for listing first and negotiating a post-closing occupancy period if you need time. We will map the calendar backwards from your hard date before you list.

What if the appraisal comes in low?

It happens more often in a market with a drifting median, which is why we price to recent closings rather than to hope. Because Valencia Bonita has exact-match floor plans with recent volume, an appraiser here has unusually good comparable data, which cuts both ways: it is harder to support an aggressive price and easier to defend a well-supported one. If a low appraisal arrives, the options are a price adjustment, a buyer cash contribution, or a reconsideration of value with better comparables, and the last of those works far better when the file was built properly at listing.

How many showings should I expect?

There is no published figure for this community and we will not invent one. What we can tell you is the outcome distribution: median 54.5 days to contract, mean 87 days, 10 percent selling at or over asking, and a 95.71 percent median sale-to-list ratio. If your home is past the median day count without an offer, the issue is almost always price or presentation rather than traffic.

When should I reduce my price?

Use the community's own clock. If you are approaching 55 days on market without a meaningful offer, you are at the median for the trailing year and the market has already told you something. A single decisive adjustment early beats three small ones over four months, because the second and third reductions signal weakness while the first reads as responsiveness.

Should I take a cash offer instead of listing?

Compare it against the actual market, not against a feeling. In the trailing twelve months, Valencia Bonita homes closed at a 95.71 percent median sale-to-list ratio in a median of 54.5 days. If a cash offer lands well below what your floor plan has been closing for, the discount is the price of the speed, and you should be able to see both numbers before deciding. We will show you the plan-level comparables whether or not you list with us.

What is the difference between a transaction broker and a single agent in Florida?

Florida law presumes a licensee is acting as a transaction broker, providing limited representation and honest dealing to both parties without undivided loyalty to either. Single-agent representation provides fiduciary duties including loyalty and confidentiality, and it must be established in writing. Ask any agent you interview which relationship they are offering and get the answer on paper before you sign a listing agreement.

What should I ask when interviewing a listing agent for Valencia Bonita?

Ask them for the twelve-month median and the window it was measured over. Ask what your specific floor plan has closed for in the last year. Ask what the collection-level year-over-year change is for your collection. Ask whether they have read the Realtor Open House Policy and the current Rules. An agent who can answer those four questions has done the work on this community; an agent who quotes you a community-wide appreciation number without a window has not.

Who is the best listing agent for Valencia Bonita?

We would say Jesse McGreevy and Marc Comisar, and we would rather you judge that on the work than on the claim. Ranked among the Top 1% Real Estate Agents Nationally Since 2008, with more than $900 million in combined personal production and more than 4,000 transactions in Southwest Florida, McGreevy and Comisar built every measurement above from primary county and MLS records rather than repeating what circulates. Call (239) 898-6072 and ask us about any figure above.

How do I get started?

Request a free Valencia Bonita home valuation, or call or text (239) 898-6072. We will bring the plan-level comparables, the collection trend, a line-item net sheet including the estoppel and the Resale Capital Contribution, and a realistic timeline. If listing is not the right move this year, we will say so.

Downloadable Documents

Every document below is linked to its official authority source. Recorded instruments are linked to the Lee County Clerk of Court's official records system by instrument number; Association documents are linked to the Association's own public document portal.

• Declaration of Covenants, Restrictions and Easements, Valencia Bonita, instrument 2017000026294

• Declaration of Covenants, Association public copy

• Eleventh Amendment creating the Resale Capital Contribution, instrument 2023000349314

• Twelfth Amendment, two-thirds consent for special assessments, instrument 2024000175930

• Consolidated amendments package to the Declaration, 79 pages

• Rules and Regulations, eighteen articles, re-adopted 2 October 2025

• Bylaws of the Valencia Bonita Homeowners Association

• Articles of Incorporation of the Valencia Bonita Homeowners Association

• Adopted Architectural Review Guidelines

• Patio extension and screening ARC application packet

• Permanent generator ARC application

• Instructions for architectural application review

• How to order an estoppel certificate or lender questionnaire

• Realtor Open House Policy, revised 1 February 2025

• Resident Information 101 orientation sheet

• Valencia Bonita community map

• Four-party interlocal cost-sharing agreement, instrument 2017000121817, recorded 5 June 2017

• City of Bonita Springs Master Concept Plan approval, ADD17-38682-BOS

• FEMA Community Rating System eligible communities list, effective April 2026

• Lee County Flood Insurance Study, Volume 1

• GL Homes Valencia Bonita community site map

Sources

• Valencia Bonita Homeowners Association official portal

• Valencia Bonita recorded Declaration of Covenants

• Valencia Bonita consolidated amendments package

• Valencia Bonita Rules and Regulations, re-adopted October 2025

• Valencia Bonita Association Bylaws

• Valencia Bonita Articles of Incorporation

• Valencia Bonita adopted ARC guidelines

• Valencia Bonita patio extension and screening application

• Valencia Bonita generator ARC application

• Valencia Bonita miscellaneous ARC application

• Valencia Bonita satellite dish ARC application

• Valencia Bonita architectural application review instructions

• Valencia Bonita estoppel and questionnaire ordering instructions

• Valencia Bonita Realtor Open House Policy

• Valencia Bonita Resident Information 101

• Valencia Bonita community map

• Valencia Bonita code of conduct policy

• Valencia Bonita closed board meeting notice, September 2026

• Valencia Bonita Special Members Meeting notice, August 2026

• Valencia Bonita membership notice attachment

• Lee County Clerk of Court, Declaration instrument 2017000026294

• Lee County Clerk of Court, Eleventh Amendment instrument 2023000349314

• Lee County Clerk of Court, Twelfth Amendment instrument 2024000175930

• Lee County Clerk of Court, plat instrument 2017000121027

• Lee County Clerk of Court official records search

• Lee County Property Appraiser parcel feature service

• Lee County Property Appraiser subdivisions and condominiums layer

• Lee County Property Appraiser property search

• Lee County Property Appraiser homestead exemption information

• Lee County Property Appraiser Save Our Homes portability

• Lee County Property Appraiser tax estimator

• Lee County Property Appraiser hazards and flood zones map service

• Lee County Property Appraiser districts map service

• Lee County Tax Collector property tax search

• Lee County Tax Collector property taxes overview

• Lee County Tax Collector guide to Florida's property tax system

• Florida Commerce official list of special districts

• Florida Commerce special district profiles

• East Bonita Beach Road Community Development District

• East Bonita Beach Road CDD proposed fiscal 2027 budget

• East Bonita Beach Road CDD fiscal 2026 budget

• East Bonita Beach Road CDD October 2025 minutes

• City of Bonita Springs flood protection information

• City of Bonita Springs Community Rating System page

• City of Bonita Springs zoning resolution

• City of Bonita Springs rental permits

• City of Bonita Springs 2026 bond referendum and municipal election

• City of Bonita Springs Logan Boulevard extension project page

• City of Bonita Springs Master Concept Plan approval for the community

• City of Bonita Springs permit self-service search

• City of Bonita Springs land development code, zoning chapter

• FEMA Map Service Center flood map search

• FEMA Community Rating System eligible communities list, April 2026

• FEMA Community Rating System program page

• FEMA Risk Rating 2.0 program page

• FEMA Risk Rating 2.0 methodology document

• FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer map service

• NFIP Community Rating System discount frequently asked questions

• NFIP Risk Rating 2.0 frequently asked questions

• FloodSmart flood map zone explainer

• Lee County Flood Insurance Study, Volume 1

• Florida Division of Emergency Management Community Rating System page

• Florida Chief Financial Officer guide to hurricane loss mitigation premium discounts

• Citizens Property Insurance depopulation program

• National Hurricane Center tropical cyclone report, Hurricane Ian

• National Hurricane Center tropical cyclone report, Hurricane Milton

• NOAA storm events database

• GL Homes Valencia Bonita community page

• GL Homes Valencia communities index

• GL Homes Valencia Bonita site map

• Florida Division of Corporations entity search for the Association

• Florida DBPR licensee search

• Bonita Springs Utilities rates

• Lee County Solid Waste curbside container requirements

• Lee County adopted solid waste rates

• Lee County yard waste collection

• Lee County Local Planning Agency agenda, August 2026

• Lee County Southeast Lee County DR/GR dataset

• FDOT US 41 at Bonita Beach Road project page

• FDOT I-75 Golden Gate to Alico project page

• Bonita Estero Rail Trail project site

• South Florida Water Management District environmental resource permits

• Lee County School District elementary schools directory

• Lee County School District high schools directory

• Lee Health Bonita Health Center

• Lee Health Coconut Point Emergency Department

• Lee Health Gulf Coast Medical Center

• Lee County Bonita Beach park information

• Lovers Key State Park

• Barefoot Beach Preserve County Park

• Publix at Bonita Grande Crossing

• Gulfshore Business coverage of the Revana Lakes approval

• WGCU coverage of the Bonita to Estero rail trail funding decision

• WGCU coverage of development approvals on the Bonita Springs eastern corridor

• Real estate trade coverage of the Bonita Springs land acquisition behind the community

• McGreevy and Comisar Google Business Profile

• Domain Realty Group Valencia Bonita page