Every August, Florida's county property appraisers mail out TRIM notices, the annual disclosure that tells homeowners what they'll owe once the county, the school board, and every other taxing authority finish setting their budgets. Most of the letter is predictable. Then there's a section near the bottom labeled non-ad valorem assessments, and this is where two Lake Mary homeowners who paid roughly the same price for their houses can find two very different numbers.

One of them lives in Heathrow. The other lives in a newer gated community a few miles up the corridor. Same price range, same guard gate, same Seminole County school zone. Different bill. The reason has nothing to do with the size of the house and everything to do with how each community paid to build itself.

What the TRIM notice actually separates

Florida's non-ad valorem assessments cover things your property taxes don't: the debt on the roads, drainage, and amenities inside a specific development. When a builder finances that infrastructure through a Community Development District, the CDD issues tax-exempt bonds under Chapter 190 of the Florida Statutes, then repays them by billing every property inside the district every year, forever, through the tax roll. When a builder finances the same infrastructure privately instead, that cost shows up as an HOA fee, billed directly by the association rather than the county.

Both routes pay for the same kind of thing. Only one of them appears on the TRIM notice.

Why Heathrow's tax bill doesn't have that line

Heathrow is Lake Mary's oldest and largest guard-gated address, roughly 3,500 acres built out mostly between 1988 and 2005 across villages like Coventry, Heathrow Woods, Stonebridge, Chelsea Park, and Breckenridge. It predates the era when Central Florida developers routinely reached for CDD bonds to fund gates, guardhouses, and country clubs. Heathrow built its infrastructure the older way, through the homeowners association. There is no CDD assessment on a Heathrow tax bill. The country club, the guard-gated entries, and the common areas are funded entirely through HOA and POA dues, billed quarterly through Vesta Property Services, with the master association fee bundling in Hotwire internet and cable.

That absence is worth pausing on, because it's no longer the default. A few minutes down the corridor in Sanford, the new Emerald Pointe at Beryl Landing townhome community advertises "a low HOA and no CDD" as a selling point in its own listing copy. Builders don't market the absence of a fee unless buyers have come to expect the fee. In Central Florida's growth corridors, from Lake Nona to Horizon West, CDD financing has become common enough that a community without one now calls it out.

The two-part bill hiding inside a CDD

A CDD assessment on a Central Florida tax bill isn't one number. It's two, stacked together.

The first part is debt service, the repayment of the original construction bonds. It's fixed by the bond schedule, typically runs 20 to 30 years, and eventually reaches zero when the bonds are retired.

The second part is operations and maintenance, covering landscaping, lake and stormwater management, guard staffing, and clubhouse upkeep. This part never expires. The district board sets it annually and can raise it year over year for as long as the CDD exists.

Central Florida CDD assessments commonly run in the range of $1,500 to $3,000 or more a year, which works out to roughly $150 to $350 added to a monthly housing payment on top of whatever the HOA charges separately. That's a real number for a buyer comparing two homes at the same list price, one inside a CDD and one, like a home in Heathrow, without one.

There's a second wrinkle that catches even careful buyers off guard. Early in a community's build-out, the developer's bond debt is spread across fewer completed homes, which means the per-home assessment on newly delivered phases can run higher than it will once the neighborhood fills in and the same debt is divided across more rooftops. New doesn't always mean permanently expensive. It sometimes means temporarily expensive, before the math evens out.

The disclosure gap on resale

Here's where the friction actually shows up at the closing table. Florida law requires the developer to disclose a CDD to the very first buyer of a home inside the district. It does not require every seller after that to disclose it again.

The developer is required to disclose the CDD to the initial buyer. Subsequent sellers are not required to disclose the existence of the CDD.

That means the second, third, or tenth owner of a home in a CDD community has no legal obligation to bring it up. If a buyer is relying on the listing sheet or a verbal walkthrough of "fees" instead of pulling the actual tax bill, the CDD line can sit invisible until the first November tax statement arrives in their own name.

Two more mechanics worth knowing before an offer goes in. A CDD's debt assessment can generally be prepaid in full by the property owner at any point, which occasionally shows up as a negotiating point when a seller has already paid down the bond and the home carries a lower ongoing obligation than a comparable listing next door. And the CDD line, unlike a genuine ad valorem property tax, generally isn't deductible on a federal return, because it's an assessment rather than a tax based on the home's value. Buyers who assume the entire tax bill is deductible the way a mortgage lender's estimate sometimes implies are working from the wrong number.

Reading a Lake Mary listing like it has two prices

None of this makes CDD-financed communities a worse choice. It means the HOA number quoted in a listing is only half the carrying-cost picture in communities financed that way, while in a community like Heathrow, the HOA number is closer to the whole picture. A buyer comparing a $700,000 detached home in Stonebridge or Chelsea Park inside Heathrow against a similarly priced new-build home in a CDD-financed community elsewhere in the corridor needs to run two different math problems, not one.

Heathrow's own pricing illustrates the range at stake. As of April 2026, attached product in villages like Breckenridge opens above $550,000, detached single-family in Stonebridge or Chelsea Park generally starts near $700,000, and true estate product on premium lots runs from $1.2 million past $2 million. Broader market data for Heathrow and Coventry, pulled from live MLS records as of mid-July 2026, puts the average sale price near $985,000 in 2024, with the practical 2026 range spanning the mid-$600s up past $1.6 million for the largest renovated lakefront and golf estates. None of those figures include a CDD line, because there isn't one to include.

That's the actual thesis worth carrying into a Lake Mary search: the sticker price and the HOA fee on a listing tell you what a house costs today. Whether there's a second, invisible number sitting on the tax roll depends entirely on how, and when, that particular community was built. The only way to know for certain is to ask for the actual TRIM notice or tax bill on the specific address, not the HOA disclosure alone, before making an offer.

A short FAQ

Is a CDD fee the same as an HOA fee? No. An HOA is a private association that bills directly for rules enforcement and shared amenities. A CDD is a unit of local government created under Chapter 190 that finances infrastructure through bonds and collects repayment through the county tax bill as a non-ad valorem assessment.

Does Heathrow have a CDD? No. Heathrow's guard gates, country club, and common areas are funded through master and village-level HOA and POA dues rather than a Community Development District assessment.

Can a CDD assessment go away? The debt-service portion can, once the original bonds are retired, typically after 20 to 30 years, or if the property owner prepays the balance. The operations and maintenance portion continues for as long as the district operates and can increase annually.

Will a seller tell me if their home has a CDD? Not necessarily. Florida requires the developer to disclose a CDD to the first buyer inside the district. Later sellers aren't required to bring it up again, which is why pulling the tax bill or TRIM notice on a specific address matters more than relying on a listing sheet.

If you're weighing a home in Heathrow against something newer along the same corridor, the difference between those two tax bills is exactly the kind of detail that belongs in the conversation before an offer, not after closing. The Mel Bernstein Team has spent years reading Lake Mary's fee structures village by village. Let's Connect and walk through the real math on the Lake Mary properties you're considering.