Portico

Portico is about 1,400 homes off Buckingham Road, gated, in unincorporated Lee County. The addresses say Fort Myers, which is right for the mail and misleading on a map. The community sits well east of the city, south off Palm Beach Boulevard, which is the road back west toward I-75, and its oldest houses date from 2017.

Portico holds two different kinds of home, and the one a buyer picks changes nearly everything. The detached houses run from the $280,000s, and that band tops out around $650,000. The 160 townhouses run from the $210,000s to around $300,000. Those are two markets rather than one range. The middle of a combined span is mostly empty, so a single Portico price isn't a number worth carrying into a search.

What are the detached houses like?

Mostly single-story, from about 1,700 to about 3,450 square feet, with 3 to 6 bedrooms, and about a quarter of them have a private pool. Lennar drew every plan here, and no second builder worked a piece of the community, so the elevations repeat down each street. That uniformity is the trade, and a buyer who wants a one-off house will not find one in Portico.

What are the townhouses like?

There are 160, and they sit together on one street instead of scattered among the houses. They are all two-story and all three-bedroom, and their sizes barely move, from about 1,400 to about 1,450 square feet, with no private pool on any of them.

Each townhouse stands on a lot of its own, so the deed is to the ground and to the building on it. Nothing in Portico is a condominium, the townhouse street included. Elsewhere a townhouse can be a unit inside a condominium building, and that is a different thing to own.

Do the homes back onto water?

Roughly two thirds of the detached homesites do. Portico is laid out around a chain of lakes and preserved wetland, so water isn't a premium handful of lots tucked in one corner. It runs through the middle of the layout, and the streets are drawn around it. The lakes are landscape and drainage water, and what a water lot buys is the view and the open ground behind the house.

What is on the clubhouse site?

One building of about 8,600 square feet, finished in 2019, on a 9.5-acre site near the entrance. That one site is the whole of it: there's no second clubhouse anywhere in Portico, and no golf course.

Lennar, the community's builder, describes it this way. "Enjoy a community that offers scenic water views and provides several amenities, such as a swimming pool, fitness center, playground and tennis court."

Take the "such as" literally. Four things are named and the sentence stops short of a full list, which means anything beyond those four has to be established rather than assumed. If a particular court, room or path is part of why you are buying, ask the association whether it is there before you offer.

What should a buyer pin down before offering?

Four answers to get in writing:

• What the association bills on that exact address. Ask for the amount and the billing period together, and ask about the specific home rather than about Portico in general.
• Leasing. The minimum term, and any limit on how often a home may be let, if letting it out matters to the purchase.
• Any facility past the four the builder names. Get the association to put in writing that it is on the site.
• The governing documents for the home in question. Read them before an offer, not after.

A gated entrance off Buckingham Road, one clubhouse finished in 2019, one builder's set of plans, and 160 townhouses on a street of their own.