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DiVosta plans 457 homes in Wiregrass area

VillageWalk at Wiregrass would occupy 230 acres opposite the Seven Oaks neighborhood on Bruce B. Downs Boulevard.

By JAMES THORNER
Published March 20, 2005

WESLEY CHAPEL - The Tampa Bay area's top-ranked home builder is riding into Wesley Chapel's Wiregrass Ranch with plans for 457 homes northeast of Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and State Road 56.

DiVosta Homes, a subsidiary of national building giant Pulte Homes, is known for its "VillageWalk" communities in such South Florida locales as Palm Beach, Naples and Sarasota. Along with Del Webb, a branch of Pulte that builds homes for the 55-and-older crowd, DiVosta is pushing north into Pasco County, developing chunks of the 5,000-acre Wiregrass Ranch.

DiVosta's VillageWalk at Wiregrass would occupy 230 acres opposite the Seven Oaks neighborhood on Bruce B. Downs. Its main access route would be a not-yet-built extension of Chancey Road from Morris Bridge Road to Bruce B. Downs.

As the neighborhood is laid out in construction plans, streets are named with an Italian flair. They include Modena, Salerno and Sarducci.

Providing the connectivity dear to the VillageWalk concept would be bicycle and pedestrian paths. DiVosta estimates that its first phase will attract about 1,010 residents, 151 of them schoolchildren.

DiVosta, based in Palm Beach County, builds single-family houses and townhomes costing about $250,000 to $500,000.

The four models listed on construction plans for Wiregrass - Capri, Oakmont, Carlyle and Cayman - range from about 2,121 to 3,408 square feet. They have three or four bedrooms and two or three baths.

In the nearest VillageWalk neighborhood, in Sarasota, those four models cost between $302,900 and $490,490. In the current housing boom fueled by low interest rates, expect those prices to rise.

According to Pulte, state and county permitting being what it is, Wiregrass sales probably won't start until early 2006.

In a J.D. Power and Associates new-home builder survey released last year, DiVosta ranked first in customer satisfaction in the Tampa Bay area. Pulte, the nation's No. 2 home builder, added DiVosta to its stable in 1997.

Pulte and its subsidiaries have dibs on all of Wiregrass Ranch's proposed residential tracts. The property was rezoned last year for 1,999 homes, though the ranch's owners have requested permission to build up to 12,000 more.

[Last modified March 19, 2005, 08:39:05]