What This Video Covers
This is the Lake Asbury episode of the neighborhood buyer series. Every episode takes one neighborhood, pulls the real MLS data, and puts the four numbers a buyer actually needs on the screen: what is for sale, what it costs a month, what you have to earn, and what credit score gets you in.
Lake Asbury is in Green Cove Springs, southwest of Jacksonville in Clay County. It is about forty five minutes to the airport and forty to the stadium. This one is written for a move-up buyer rather than a first-time buyer, because the cheapest house in the neighborhood is $440,000 and the typical Clay County household earns $87,820. The math only opens up once you bring equity from the home you already own, so every figure here assumes $100,000 down from a previous sale.
What is actually for sale
Ten single-family homes are available, from $440,000 to $799,500. The median home that closed in the last twelve months sold for $620,000, at about $257 a square foot. A lot of these sit on more than an acre, and some are on the water.
The thing worth knowing before you make an offer: asking prices here are negotiable and closing prices are the real ones. Seven of the ten homes currently listed have already cut their price, by as much as $75,001. Thirty-seven listings over the period gave up and never sold at all. And of the 43 homes that did close, 32 sold for less than they were asking — the median closed at 97.8% of ask. The market is not slow, it is just honest: closings actually sped up, from three a month in the prior six months to about four a month in the last six. Houses here sell, but they sell after a real reduction.
What it costs a month
With $100,000 down on a conventional loan at 6.9%, taxes and insurance included, payments run from $2,980 on the entry home to $6,100 at the top of the market. At or under about $500,000 that $100,000 puts you at twenty percent down, which means no mortgage insurance at all.
Two carrying costs here are genuinely cheaper than Jacksonville. There was no CDD bond on a single one of the 111 records in this pull. Where an HOA exists it is nominal — $50 to $125 a year, and one of them is voluntary. And Clay County’s combined millage is 15.347 against Duval’s 17.86, so the tax rate is lower too.
One warning that applies to every Florida purchase: do not use the seller’s tax bill as your own. Florida resets the assessment to market when a house changes hands, so a long-held homesteaded seller’s bill can understate what you will pay by several times over. The payments above are modelled on the purchase price, not on what the current owner pays.
What you have to earn
At a 45% debt-to-income ratio with no other monthly debt, the income needed runs from $79,600 on the $440,000 home to $162,800 at $799,500. Add a $550 car payment and the entry number moves to about $94,300. Add a car, a student loan and a card — call it $1,150 a month — and it is $110,300.
That is the approval number, not the comfortable number. A lender will approve a payment plenty of households would not want to actually live on, so run your own budget against the payment before you run it against the approval.
It also assumes the mortgage on your current home is gone. If you are carrying both, a lender counts both payments and these figures no longer apply.
Credit score
Scores start around 620 for a conventional loan. Lender overlays vary, and a stronger score buys a better rate rather than a yes or a no, so ask before you assume you are out.
About the house in the video
The home shown is 201 Dow Court, and it is Bryce’s own listing — worth saying out loud. It is a four bedroom, three bath home of about 2,627 square feet on 2.08 acres with 120 feet of water frontage, fully remodeled, with two full primary suites rather than one. It is listed at $550,000, reduced for a quick sale. For context on where that sits, the fair-value line in the scattergram below reads around $650,000 at that square footage, and the home plots underneath it.
Every number on this page comes from a single realMLS export pulled November 10, 2026, covering 111 single-family records in Lake Asbury, Green Cove Springs 32043 and Middleburg 32068. These are generalities for a neighborhood, not an approval for a person. Every file is its own puzzle.
- Ten homes for sale from $440,000 to $799,500, with a median sold price of $620,000 over the last twelve months
- Monthly payments of $2,980 to $6,100 with $100,000 down, taxes and insurance included
- Household income of roughly $79,600 to $162,800 with no other debt, and what a car payment or a student loan does to it
- Why $100,000 down on anything at or under about $500,000 means no mortgage insurance
- No CDD bond on a single record, HOA dues of $50 to $125 a year, and a lower county millage than Duval
- Why 7 of the 10 listings have already cut their price and 32 of 43 closings came in under asking
- The Florida tax reset that makes the seller's current tax bill useless as your estimate
