Two houses closed in Town of Tioga less than eight months apart. One, on SW 129th Terrace, sold in December 2025 for $882,500, a 3,907-square-foot home that worked out to $225.88 a square foot. The other, on SW 131st Street, sold in August 2026 for $1,390,485, a smaller 2,984-square-foot home at $465.98 a square foot. Same neighborhood. Same zip code. More than double the price per square foot.
If you've been watching Town of Tioga from the outside, you've probably seen the median sale price quoted somewhere around $706,000, based on a snapshot of MLS activity through late June 2026. That number is accurate. It's also not telling you much, because it's averaging homes that were built a quarter-century apart inside a community that has never stopped building.
A community designed to keep growing, not finish
Most subdivisions get built out in a few years and then sit still. Town of Tioga wasn't designed that way. It broke ground in 1996 under Julio Diaz, a second-generation Gainesville builder who modeled the 500-acre plan on the walkable, human-scaled streets of Gainesville's Duckpond neighborhood and on New Urbanist towns like Seaside and Celebration. Current listing data shows homes in the community dating from 1999 through active new construction still being permitted today. Tioga Realty LLC and Advanced Building Concepts are both active builders in the community's newer phases as of 2026, continuing a build-out that earlier included local builders like Barry Bullard, Tommy Waters, Warring Homes, Pridgen Homes, and Dibros Design & Construction working the phases toward the south end near SW 8th Avenue and Parker Road.
That's the mechanism behind the price spread. A 1999 or early-2000s home near the original town square was built to a different cost basis, on a different lot size, with different materials, than a home a current builder is finishing this year. Both wear the same "Town of Tioga" name on the listing sheet. Neither is more or less part of the neighborhood. They're just from different construction eras, and construction era is doing most of the work in that per-square-foot number.
Reading a listing by era, not by average
If you're comparing Town of Tioga to another Newberry-area community, or comparing two Tioga listings to each other, the median doesn't help you much. What helps is knowing roughly where a specific address falls in the community's build-out.
| What to check | Why it matters here |
|---|---|
| Section and street | Original streets near the town square date to the late 1990s and 2000s. Newer sections toward the south end are still under active construction. |
| Builder of record | Current phase builders (Tioga Realty LLC, Advanced Building Concepts, and others) are producing new inventory at today's construction costs, which shows up in a materially higher price per square foot than legacy sections. |
| HOA dues for that section | Dues on current listings range from about $165 to $425 a month across the community, not a single flat figure. |
| Recent closed comps on that specific street | Not the neighborhood-wide median. A comp two streets over, built in a different decade, tells you less than it looks like it does. |
None of this shows up in a single median number, and it's a big part of why the same neighborhood produces sales that differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars for homes of similar size.
The HOA gap that catches buyers mid-transaction
The dues spread is worth sitting with for a second. A $165-a-month HOA fee and a $425-a-month HOA fee are not a rounding error. Over the life of a mortgage, that's a real difference in carrying cost, and it's the kind of detail that tends to surface during underwriting rather than during the first showing, when a buyer has already fallen for a specific street or floor plan.
Property tax bills follow a similar pattern. Current listing data across the community shows an average annual bill in the neighborhood of $7,580, but that average sits on top of the same wide range in home values, so a buyer comparing two Tioga addresses should ask for the actual tax bill on the specific parcel rather than assume a community-wide figure applies.
None of this is a red flag. It's simply what happens when a 500-acre master plan gets built in phases over three decades under different builders, different construction costs, and different HOA amendments along the way. The friction isn't that Town of Tioga is inconsistent. It's that "Town of Tioga" on a listing sheet is doing the work of multiple sub-markets at once, and the address itself won't tell you which one you're looking at until you check.
What doesn't change from section to section
Here's the part of the story that actually simplifies things. While the housing product varies enormously by build era, the neighborhood amenity that buyers are really paying for, walkable access to Tioga Town Center, doesn't change much regardless of which decade a specific home came from.
Every section of Town of Tioga is a short walk or golf cart ride from a town center that has grown since Pennsylvania-based Hankin Group acquired it in 2017, now home to more than 30 businesses including Local Provisions (from the team behind The Swamp Restaurant), Cilantro Tacos, Blue Highway Pizzeria, World of Beer, Northwest Seafood, Dave's New York Deli, Patticakes coffee and desserts, and Tinker Latin Restaurant. An 18-hole public golf course sits just across Newberry Road. Schools zone consistently across the community to Meadowbrook Elementary, Kanapaha Middle, and Buchholz High.
That consistency matters for how you should think about the price gap. You're not paying more for a better location when you buy in the newer phases. You're paying more for newer construction inside the same location. Separating those two things, the neighborhood premium and the construction-era premium, is the actual skill in shopping this market, and it's also why Town of Tioga has picked up recognition over the years, including a Best Smart Growth Community award from the National Home Builders Association and Professional Builder magazine, Best Community in Florida from the Florida Realtors group, and a Best Neighborhood award from Keep Alachua County Beautiful. The recognition is for the plan as a whole, not for any single build era within it.
Questions worth asking before you compare a Tioga listing to the median
- When was this specific home built, and which builder constructed it?
- What section is it in, and how does that section compare to the community's original build-out near the town square?
- What's the actual HOA due for this parcel, not the community-wide range?
- What did the closest comparable homes on this same street, not the whole neighborhood, sell for in the past six to twelve months?
- Is the seller's asking price built around recent construction costs, or around a legacy comp from an older section?
A few questions worth answering directly
Is Town of Tioga one HOA or several? It operates under a single community HOA structure, but dues vary by section and home type, which is why the range runs from roughly $165 to $425 a month rather than a flat fee.
Are all sections zoned for the same schools? Current listings across the community show consistent zoning to Meadowbrook Elementary, Kanapaha Middle, and Buchholz High, regardless of which section or build era a home falls in.
Is new construction still happening? Yes. Current listing data shows active new construction in the community, with several builders working on homes toward the south end near SW 8th Avenue and Parker Road, alongside resales in the original 1999-era sections.
Why does the per-square-foot price vary so much within one neighborhood? Because the community has been built in phases over roughly three decades rather than in one continuous build-out, so any given listing reflects the construction costs and standards of whatever year it was actually built, not the neighborhood's current median.
If you're weighing a specific Town of Tioga address against what you've seen on a portal, the address matters more than the average. Guidelight Realty can walk through the section, the build era, and the actual comps for the street you're considering, not just the neighborhood-wide number. Schedule a consultation and we'll go through it together.
