The Redland Agricultural Area

What the Redland actually is, and what it is like to live out here

There is a sign on a barn off Krome that reads, The Redland looks good on you. It is the best description of this place anybody has managed, and it took a farm to write it.

What it actually is

The Redland is not a neighborhood and it is not a subdivision. It is roughly 40 square miles of nurseries, groves, palm farms and lots measured in acres, sitting between Homestead and the edge of Miami, and it is protected as farmland on purpose. That is why the grid stops and the addresses start running in long numbers.

It means what is here now is mostly what is going to be here. People do not usually realise that is the selling point until they have lived here a season.

The three things everybody asks about

The water, the drive, and the quiet. The water is usually a well and the waste is usually septic, which is normal out here and comes with its own short list of things to check before you buy. The drive is real, and it is the trade people make on purpose for the lot. The quiet takes about two weeks to stop noticing, and then you cannot sleep anywhere else.

The lot is the whole point

An acre out here does things a quarter acre in the city cannot. We help you build a second place on the same land. Room for the horses, the chickens, the mango trees somebody planted 30 years ago. Room to run a business out of the back and still have a yard.

This is where people from Homestead move up to, and it is where people from Kendall and the Gables move out to. Two completely different buyers wanting the same acre for opposite reasons.

One thing to check before you fall for a house

Most of the Redland is not inside any city, so the tax bill is put together differently than it is a few miles south in Homestead. It is usually the friendlier of the two, but it is never worth guessing at.