- November 6, 2025
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After more than a decade in the pipeline, a 1,175-acre site in southwest Bradenton is sprouting with new homes as a master-planned community called SeaFlower comes to life. For more than 80 years, the land operated as a flower farm, so its name pays tribute its history as well as its proximity to Sarasota Bay.
The developer behind the project — Ed Hill, principal at Lake Flores Land Co. — has been working on the project for over 10 years. Proving that large-scale development isn't for those seeking a quick buck, he has been engaged in a lengthy, complex process in that time including obtaining permits and entitlements, undergoing rezoning and holding some 25 meetings with neighborhood groups.
“The challenge has been what do we do here to be a complement to what else is surrounding us in the county, while embracing the uniqueness of the property and its proximity to to the coastal area," Hill says, adding the site is a few miles from Anna Maria Island.
“We're kind of hole in the donut,” Hill says, referring to the expanse of undeveloped land where SeaFlower is being built — south of Cortez Road between 86th Street and IMG Academy.
At full buildout, SeaFlower is planned to have 4,000 homes; 600 apartments; 250 hotel rooms; and 350,000 square feet of office and retail space. Master-planned communities like Lakewood Ranch to the east and Wellen Park to the south are considerably bigger. But in west Bradenton, the more built-out and developed side of Manatee County, a project like this — Hill says SeaFlower will be the first "new master-planned community on this side of town for 20 years" — is something of a rarity.
"We’ve seen a lot of growth in other parts of our county," says Manatee County Commissioner Tal Siddique, mentioning Parrish and Lakewood Ranch. (Siddique represents District 3, which is where SeaFlower is.) With the addition of SeaFlower, "you're also seeing economic revitalization happening" in the western part of the county. SeaFlower has "brought new people, revenue and attention," he says. "In general, I think it's going to uplift ... west county in particular."
On the flip side, Siddique adds: "There are certainly concerns I have about traffic," with the addition of 4,000 homes. "The traffic impact is not lost on me. That is a shared responsibility between state, county and developer."
The developer says he has been working with the county to "cut down on automobile traffic," in part through traffic calming measures and by creating a mixed-use community connected to amenities inside.
The first phase of development at SeaFlower spans 400 acres south of Cortez Road and west of 75th Street, centered around a manmade body of water called Lake Flores.
SeaFlower is designed to have the feel of an old Florida coastal town, providing the sense of being "connected to the water," Hill says. "If you're around the water, you feel like you're in Florida."
When complete, the initial phase will include more than 1,000 homes, hundreds of apartments, up to 250 hotel rooms and a Publix-anchored shopping center.
In September, the first homeowners began moving in, according to Hill. Approximately 110 homes have sold since sales began in May, he says, giving the Business Observer a late October tour of the site.
“There was interest even before we broke ground," says Hill, noting groundbreaking on the first homes that were not models occurred in February. “The five builders that we have are very happy.”
Cardel Homes, David Weekley Homes, Issa Homes, Pulte Homes and M/I Homes are the builders.
Home styles will include coastal, Craftsman, West Indies and transitional farmhouse designs as well as townhouses and villas. The first phase of SeaFlower will include 905 detached single-family homes and 158 attached single-family homes, Hill says.
SeaFlower’s architectural style and design guidelines seek to create a “coastal theme,” he says, with houses in white or light pastels.
The guidelines also “emphasize pedestrians over automobiles,” Hill says, noting there are cutouts for on-street parking designed as a traffic calming device that protects pedestrians and cyclists.
About 65 homes are under construction at the moment, Hill says.
A variety of model homes showcasing the builders' offerings are located within walking distance of Lake Flores, and so is the site's Welcome Center.
A 2.5-mile multimodal trail for pedestrians and cyclists is being constructed around Lake Flores that will connect the shopping center and the Garden Club, which is an amenity campus with a fitness center, pool, meeting rooms, children’s area and pickleball courts that broke ground in July. It is expected to be complete in fall 2026.
While residents and construction vehicles signal new life coming into the community, the concept of SeaFlower was a seed planted in Manatee County years before.
The family that used to own the flower farm, called Manatee Fruit Co., approached Hill more than a decade ago about what to do with their property, he recalls. Founded in 1892, the business started out selling citrus and eventually evolved to farming flowers.
The Preston family, which owned Manatee Fruit Co. for four generations, “contacted me for advice,” says Hill, who has been a Florida developer for decades and is a former division president with the St. Joe Co., once one of the largest landowners in Florida.
Around 2012, Manatee County was the subject of of a couple of planning studies that revealed “this piece of property” could represent “a tremendous opportunity to help the southwest district,” Hill says. The area around the farm already had infrastructure around it like first responders, roads and under-enrolled schools, yet “all of the growth in the county was occurring east of I-75,” Hill says, referring to Lakewood Ranch and the surrounding area.
Manatee County came to the Prestons “knocking on the door saying, ‘Hey, your land could be a catalyst to helping us revive the southwest district of our community,’” Hill says.
At the same time, the flower farm was stricken by a disease that was killing off its gladiolus (a perennial flowering plant), he recalls, so it seemed the agricultural days for the land were numbered. The only way to root out the disease was to kill all the crops, he says.
Manatee County “put great effort into discussing the opportunity with the family, which is when I came into the picture,” Hill says. “The family then said, ‘Well, how do we go about transitioning from farming to real estate development?’ And that was the process that took place over the next several years, in securing the zoning, the permits for the environmental, the engineering, so on and so forth.”
In 2014, the Business Observer reported Manatee County planners had begun reviewing the proposal for a master-planned community there.
“The vision for this property was to manage the development of it in such a way that it was complementary to the already existing homeowners and residents on this side of town,” Hill says. “You can do that in a master-planned community. It's very difficult to do that in a series of subdivisions.”
Hill declines to disclose how much he paid for the property, saying: “It’s a very complex transaction. The actual price won’t be determined until the property is fully developed.”
Chicago real estate investment firm Lamb Properties has partnered with Lake Flores Land Company in developing SeaFlower.
Once they purchased the land, the first thing developers had to do was to clear Australian pines and Brazilian peppers that were on the site, which had been used by the farm to keep the wind away from its crops. Hill says this was done by permit and notes the trees have since been replaced with plants native to Florida.
"The practice of sustainability [is] something that we embrace and are doing our best to capture," Hill says.
After years of going through planning, zoning and permitting, Hill says the first real development on the site was in 2022 with the creation of a western wetland mitigation area. It is designed "to provide the wildlife capture that 1,200 acres of land would need," Hill says.
Next, in 2023, developers started creating Lake Flores, which Hill describes as "our major amenity."
Then in late 2024, builders began creating the model homes before residential home construction for the initial phase of development commenced in February 2025.
SeaFlower will be built out in three phases, each encompassing 400 acres.
Timing for the second phase of SeaFlower will be “based on the success of phase one,” Hill says.
“If we had to guess, I’d say it’s probably two years away before we’d start working on phase two, based on the pace of sales,” Hill says.
So far, Hill says: “The response has been overwhelmingly positive.”
