A long-awaited lakeside residential development in Winter Haven is set to begin construction later this month.

Luxer Development and The Keewin Real Property Company are the partners behind the project, which will include 667 single-family homes spread over 284 acres in the rapidly growing Polk County city. The homes will be situated directly west of Lake Fannie and to the east and south of Willowbrook Golf Course, and there is a canal at the southern edge of the golf course that separates the project into two distinct sections, Willowbrook North and Willowbrook South. The northern section of the project includes 433 home lots on 136 acres Which DRB Homes is the homebuilder for those home lots. Starlight Homes will be the homebuilder for the southern portion of the project, which includes 234 home lots spread over 148 acres. The typical home lots for both sections will be between 40-50 feet wide and 110-120 feet deep.

Starlight Homes will be the homebuilder behind another development that Luxer Development is working on, The Villages at Pelham Square in Deland. That project will include 646 residences, including 210 townhomes, 112 single-family homes, and 324 multifamily units. Starlight closed on the 322 single-family and townhome lots on April 5 for $8.1 million. A site plan of Willowbrook South, which will include 234 homes. (Site plan provided by Luxer Development)

According to Shaman Foradi, Managing Partner of Luxer Development, construction is set to begin on both the northern and southern sections by the end of the month, as there was already a pre-construction meeting conducted. The version of the Willowbrook project that is set to break ground soon represents a scaled-down version of what the previous developer originally intended. GrowthSpotter reported in 2020 that Jeff Yeager of Yeager Development Company requested that Polk County allow for the development of 739 single-family homes on the site, even though the PUD allowed for a mixture of 997 single-family detached and attached homes.

“My partner Leroy Sanchez had a friendship with Jeff Yeager, and when we approached him to see if he would sell the property, he worked out a deal with to allow us to get the project approved,” Foradi explained. “The property is adjacent to the golf course and also has lake frontage, those aspects were attractive. Plus they are nice contiguous parcels where we could actually have a larger project.”

Foradi also pointed out that Sloan Engineering, the civil engineer on the project, was instrumental in helping the developers gain approval for the development.



“We had some issues to work through with the municipalities. Since we had two entrances, we had to work through that. Also being a large project, we had to work with the Polk County School Board to make sure that there’s a capacity as far as the schools and they were very helpful in getting that done. Also going through the water management, there are some engineering tasks that normally would not appear, but they did in this case and [Sloan Engineering] helped us go through some of those issues,” he said.