They Didn't Leave — They Moved Up: 1 in 11 Lee County Golf Sales Is an Owner Trading Up Inside Their Own Club

Ask anyone who lives in a Lee County golf community whether they love it, and you will get a smile. But smiles are not data. So we went looking for proof — the kind you can only find by doing the hard work of reading the county's own records, one deed at a time.

Here is what we found: over the past year, about 1 in 11 home sales in Lee County's bundled and private golf communities was an existing owner selling one home and buying another inside the very same community. And 80% of them moved up.

They did not leave. They doubled down.

The headline numbers

For deeds recorded between mid-October 2025 and October 21, 2026, across 36 Lee County bundled and private golf communities (roughly 38,000 homes):

• 227 owners sold one Lee golf-community home and bought another Lee golf-community home.
• 200 of them (88%) stayed in the same community they already lived in.
• 161 of those 200 (80%) bought a more expensive home.
• The typical move went from about a $450,000 home to about an $800,000 home.
• About 80% closed on the new home before, or on the same day as, selling the old one.
• Same-community moves made up 8.8% of qualifying sales — about 1 in 11.
• In 25 cases, a moving owner bought the home of another moving owner — a chain of neighbors trading up the ladder.

The communities where owners stay put

Lee County · Oct 2025 – Oct 2026

Owners who bought again in their own club

Bar = share of the community's sales that were an existing owner moving within it.

1. Fiddlesticks20%
   7 of 9 moved upTypical move $250K → $665K
2. Shadow Wood16%
   11 of 14 moved upTypical move $1.10M → $1.65M
3. Lexington11%
   16 of 17 moved upTypical move $262K → $363K
4. Bonita National10%
   10 of 11 moved upTypical move $570K → $1.06M
5. Bonita Bay9%
   17 of 20 moved upTypical move $639K → $1.34M
6. Miromar Lakes9%
   6 of 7 moved upTypical move $1.26M → $2.30M

A few stand out:

• Fiddlesticks: one in five sales was a current owner buying again inside the gates.
• Lexington: 16 of 17 movers went up — the most consistent ladder of any community we studied.
• Bonita Bay had the most move-ups in absolute terms, with owners roughly doubling their price point.
• Miromar Lakes owners who moved up typically went from about $1.26 million to about $2.30 million — without ever leaving the lake.

Pelican Sound: the "never leave" community

Pelican Sound tells a different but equally telling story. 17 owners moved within it — the highest rate we found anywhere, at 26% of its sales. Ten moved up and six moved down. In other words, Pelican Sound residents resize — bigger, smaller, condo, house — but they do not leave. In one case, two owners effectively traded homes with each other on the same day.

Bundled and private, alike

This is not just a private-club phenomenon. The 161 move-ups were split almost evenly: 83 in bundled communities and 86 in private ones. Whether membership comes with the home or is purchased separately, owners are choosing to stay in the ecosystem.

What this tells us

The records show what owners did, not why. But the pattern is hard to ignore:

• Owners are betting on their own communities. Buying a bigger home in the same club is about the strongest vote of confidence a resident can cast.
• Much of the demand comes from inside the gates. A meaningful share of buyers already know the club, the course and the neighbors — they are not newcomers taking a chance.
• Move-up buyers are well-capitalized. Four in five bought before or as they sold, which suggests owners able to carry two homes rather than buyers forced to sell first.
• Sellers have a natural audience. In these communities, your next buyer may already live down the street.

How we did it

This analysis is not available from any listing feed or market report. Here is the method, at a high level:

1. Starting point. We downloaded Lee County Property Appraiser's official 2025 property roll (finalized October 16, 2025), which records the owner of every parcel.
2. Scope. We limited the study to parcels inside 36 Lee County bundled and private golf communities.
3. Matching. We compared those 2025 owners against current county ownership and recorded deeds, looking for owners whose name left one golf-community parcel and appeared on another.
4. Cleaning. We kept only standard arms-length sales over $100,000; removed estates, "unknown heirs," companies and banks; and rejected any pair where middle initials conflicted.
5. Verification. We pulled 20 matches at random and checked each against the county's own records. 19 were clearly the same household (typically a name written differently, or a home moved into a trust); the one false match led to the middle-initial rule above.

Limits, stated plainly: matching is by name, so a small number of errors are possible; the window is mid-October 2025 through October 21, 2026; records cannot tell us why anyone moved; and Collier County is not included because its county records are not yet current enough for this kind of study. No owner or address is identified in this post — only totals.

Why we do this

Most real estate marketing tells you a community is wonderful. We would rather show you. This study is part of the proprietary, data-first research our team does every day — mining county records, MLS history and sales archives so our clients make decisions on evidence, not slogans.

If you are thinking about moving up within your community — or moving into one where the neighbors clearly never want to leave — reach out to Julie at 239.238.7786 or julie.borden@sothebysrealty.com. We will show you the numbers for your club.