When someone buys a new home in Wildlight straight from a builder, Florida law requires a specific warning in bold type inside the contract: a district has the authority to levy taxes or assessments on the property, on top of everything the county already charges. That warning is not optional. Florida Statute 190.048 requires it for the initial sale of any parcel inside a Community Development District.
What the law does not require is a second warning. Once that first buyer closes and eventually resells, the obligation to disclose in that same boldface, contract-level way does not automatically follow the house to the next owner. The charge itself keeps riding along on the property tax bill either way. The heads-up that made it obvious does not.
That gap matters more in Yulee this year than it has in the past, because so much of what is selling right now, from Wildlight's Town District to the new Garden District sections opening later in 2026, sits inside some form of special district. Understanding how that charge is built, and where the paper trail can go quiet, changes how two houses with an identical price tag actually compare.
What the Boldface Warning Is Actually Protecting You From
Wildlight sits inside the East Nassau Stewardship District, a special-purpose government entity the Florida Legislature created and Governor Rick Scott signed into law on June 6, 2017, to fund infrastructure across the roughly 24,000-acre East Nassau Community Planning Area. The District does not build things for free. It issues bonds to pay for the roads, stormwater systems, and amenities up front, then recovers that money from every property inside its boundary through an annual assessment.
That assessment is what the boldface disclosure is warning a first buyer about. The setup is structural, not deceptive. The law was written to protect the buyer taking on a brand-new obligation for the first time, not the third or fourth owner down the line, so the paperwork protection is strongest at the moment a builder's own sales team is standing right there to walk through it.
Two Numbers Living Inside One Line
A Stewardship District or CDD assessment is not one flat number. It is two separate charges bundled into a single line on the Nassau County tax bill.
One part pays down the debt the district took on to build the neighborhood. The other pays to keep it running.
The debt-service portion retires on a schedule, typically 20 to 30 years, and eventually disappears once the bonds behind it are paid off. The operations and maintenance portion covers the ongoing cost of keeping parks, ponds, and shared infrastructure functioning, and it does not go away. A home in an older section of a district that has already worked through much of its bond term can carry a noticeably lighter annual charge than a nearly identical home in a section that just broke ground, even if both list at the same price today.
What Actually Shows Up on a Wildlight Bill
Beyond the Stewardship District line itself, Wildlight layers on several named charges, documented in its own fee disclosure sheet, that a buyer comparing sticker prices across Yulee neighborhoods would not see on a listing sheet:
- A benefited assessment for garbage and recycling service, listed at $37.38 a month, or $448.56 a year, per closed home.
- An additional service area fee for townhome owners specifically, covering landscape maintenance and exterior repairs, at $357 a month, or $4,284 a year.
- A transfer fee paid to the Wildlight Community Foundation on resale, equal to half a percent of the gross sale price, capped at $2,500.
- A portion of the annual master assessment, historically estimated at roughly a sixth of the total, collected directly from the buyer at the closing of the initial home purchase from the builder.
None of those figures are secret. They are published in Wildlight's own fee sheets and in the East Nassau Stewardship District's adopted budgets. They simply do not travel with the list price the way a square footage number does, so a buyer stacking Wildlight against an older, non-district neighborhood in Yulee on price alone is comparing two different kinds of numbers without realizing it.
A New Section Is Already Testing the Math
Bellflower, the Toll Brothers community opening inside Wildlight's Garden District with sales expected in fall 2026, is a clean example of how this plays out on paper. Homes are priced from the low $500,000s, and the community carries both a Stewardship District assessment and separate homeowners association dues, a combination Toll Brothers discloses directly to buyers before they sign. A buyer weighing Bellflower against a similarly priced resale elsewhere in Yulee is not just weighing square footage and finish level. They are weighing a brand-new bond schedule just getting started against a resale where debt service might already be years into retirement.
This Isn't Only a Wildlight Story
Wildlight is the most visible example because it is the community selling the most new construction in Yulee right now, but the structure is not unique to it. Nassau County used the same bond-and-assessment model in other communities, including Amelia National, Amelia Walk, and Amelia Concourse, well before the East Nassau Stewardship District existed.
The pattern is growing statewide, not shrinking. Florida had more than 1,067 active Community Development Districts in 2026, a figure that has grown more than 50 percent since 2020. Typical annual assessments statewide run from roughly $1,000 to $3,500, though some higher-amenity communities charge upward of $6,300 a year. Buyers moving to Yulee from outside Florida are less likely to have encountered this kind of financing anywhere else, which is exactly why a disclosure requirement that only fires once deserves more attention than it usually gets.
What to Actually Ask Before You Compare Two Yulee Homes
The county's non-ad valorem assessment roll lists the district charge by parcel and is worth checking directly rather than relying on a listing description. For a resale, requesting a current estoppel letter from the district manager, who for Wildlight and the surrounding Stewardship District is Wrathell Hunt & Associates, confirms the outstanding bond balance rather than just the current year's line item. Because Florida collects these assessments alongside property taxes rather than through a separately recorded lien, the balance will not always surface in a routine title search the way a mortgage or judgment would.
The single most useful question when comparing two Yulee homes at similar prices is simple: how far along is the debt service, and what does the non-ad valorem line look like once it retires. That answer changes what the house actually costs to hold, long after the closing table.
A Few Common Questions
Does every new construction home in Yulee carry a CDD or Stewardship District charge? No. The charge applies to communities built inside a formed district, which covers a large share of new construction in the area but not all of it. Older, established Yulee neighborhoods built before these districts existed generally do not carry one.
Does the assessment ever disappear completely? The debt-service portion can, once the underlying bonds are paid off, typically over 20 to 30 years. The operations and maintenance portion continues for as long as the district maintains shared infrastructure and amenities.
If I buy a resale, does the seller have to tell me about the assessment? The specific boldface, contract-level disclosure required under Florida law applies to initial sales from the developer, not resales. A seller and their agent still have a general obligation to disclose known material facts, but the paper trail is far less standardized than it is at the very first sale, which is why checking the county's non-ad valorem roll directly is worth the extra step.
Working Through This With Someone Who Tracks It Locally
Comparing a Wildlight new build to a resale across town, or one Yulee section to another, is one of those decisions where the sticker price is only half the picture. Shannon Moore has spent years working buyers through exactly this kind of comparison across Amelia Island, Fernandina Beach, and Yulee, matching what a home costs on paper to what it actually costs to hold. If you are weighing new construction against resale in Yulee, or trying to figure out what a specific assessment schedule means for your monthly budget, let's connect.
