Taylor Morrison has paid $60 million for roughly 437 acres in northwest St. Johns County, land the homebuilder plans to turn into a nearly 900-home, age-restricted community called Esplanade at Pinewalk. The company expects to open sales in late summer 2027, betting that the fast-growing county still has room for another resort-style neighborhood built for residents 55 and older.
According to the Jacksonville Daily Record, Taylor Morrison of Florida Inc. closed on the land July 31 through Greenbriar Property Holdings LLC, buying it from Darien, Connecticut-based Westport Capital Partners, with the deed recorded August 5. The property will serve as the sole age-restricted community within Fort Lauderdale-based BTI Partners' larger Pinewalk master plan, occupying nearly half of that development's total acreage, per Homes.com News. Existing development approvals require the Esplanade community to be age restricted, and Taylor Morrison has approved construction plans in hand.
Jeremy Hampson, who joined Taylor Morrison in May as president of its Jacksonville division, told the Daily Record the land had been under contract for nine months to a year before he arrived. Hampson spent nearly 11 years at Toll Brothers in Jacksonville in a land acquisition role before making the jump, and he says the appeal of this particular site was straightforward: land with redevelopment approval already in place and major infrastructure investment already underway nearby.
What Buyers Will Get
Homes at Esplanade at Pinewalk will range from 1,684 to 3,730 square feet with two to four bedrooms, according to the same Homes.com report, with prices starting in the low $400,000s and climbing past $1 million. The community will include paired villas across three lot sizes and amenities such as a pool and spa with a bar, a culinary center, a wellness center and pickleball courts. Construction will proceed in phases.
The project isn't Taylor Morrison's only foothold in the Jacksonville market. The builder also operates Sabal Terrace and Coopers Meadow in northwest Jacksonville, with Sabal Terrace nearing closeout and Coopers Meadow, a single-family detached community, carrying roughly two years of development remaining. Together with the newly opened Esplanade at St. Marys near the Florida-Georgia line, which Hoodline reported Hampson helped launch this summer, the company says it is targeting entry-level, move-up and resort-lifestyle buyers across multiple price points as it expands throughout northeast Florida.
Roads Catching Up To Rooftops
The 437-acre purchase sits inside the Greenbriar Community Development District, a financing structure St. Johns County commissioners established in January 2024 across nearly 1,248 acres to fund public infrastructure for up to 1,993 planned residential units. The seller had already completed infrastructure work benefiting the county, the Daily Record reported, one of the factors that made the site attractive.
Two road segments are being widened near the Taylor Morrison site: Longleaf Pine Parkway and Greenbriar Road. St. Johns County held a public open house in April for a project to widen a 1.5-mile gap of Greenbriar Road to four lanes, connecting two existing developer-led road expansions into a continuous corridor near Longleaf Pine Parkway, according to St. Johns County Government.
Hampson called the First Coast Expressway a game changer for the region. The $1.8 billion, 46-mile toll road is designed to connect Interstate 10 in west Jacksonville to Interstate 95 in St. Johns County, running through Clay County along the way, and it remains partially completed. Florida's Department of Transportation opened an 18-mile stretch from Blanding Boulevard to U.S. 17 in Green Cove Springs ahead of schedule in August 2025, as News4JAX reported at the time, with the full tollway targeted for completion by 2030. Taylor Morrison expects commercial development, healthcare and other services to follow housing as access improves.
Chasing Growth South From Silverleaf
Hampson has identified a halfback migration pattern pulling people toward Jacksonville from Georgia or the Carolinas, and he points to Jacksonville's mix of Florida access with a geography and culture closer to the Southeast as part of the draw. Taylor Morrison is monitoring growth moving south from the Silverleaf area and is seeking entitled land elsewhere in northeast Florida's growth corridors, though the company is not committing to specific future acquisitions in St. Johns County. Company officials say they would like to establish another Esplanade community farther south if growth supports it, and are actively looking for sites that could support additional projects in the brand.
St. Johns County's population has been swelling for years, adding 11,400 residents between July 2024 and July 2025 to reach 346,328 — nearly triple its year-2000 population of 123,135 — even as annual growth rates have moderated, according to the St. Johns Citizen. That combination of continued demand and increasingly scarce entitled land is part of why Hampson says he favors healthy growth rather than forced growth, even as the county's supply of ready-to-build parcels grows tighter.
Taylor Morrison's Northeast Florida push comes with heavyweight financial backing. Builder Magazine ranked the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company as the nation's sixth-largest homebuilder in its 2026 Builder 100 list after it delivered 12,997 homes and posted $7.755 billion in gross revenues in 2025. In June, Berkshire Hathaway announced an agreement to acquire Taylor Morrison for $6.8 billion in cash, an $8.5 billion enterprise value deal aimed at unifying Berkshire's site-built homebuilding operations into one national platform, according to Reuters coverage of the announcement.
Elsewhere in the region, Taylor Morrison's Headwaters at Lofton Creek in Nassau County offers homes priced around $700,000 with floor plans reaching about 4,000 square feet, another example of the builder's push to serve resort-lifestyle buyers alongside its age-restricted Esplanade product. The company says it plans to continue Esplanade growth and execution across the Jacksonville market as infrastructure projects like the First Coast Expressway and the Greenbriar Road widening continue to open up formerly rural stretches of the county to development.
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