Lake Nona Plaza has officially broken ground, and a 54,000 sq ft Publix will be the main attraction, with an additional 25,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space according to Learn Lake Nona.

Lake Nona Plaza will be located near the entrance of Eagle Creek, and across the street from Lake Nona Middle School.

Not sure what will happen to the Publix on Moss Park and Narcoossee Rd, but I’m excited about the new plaza coming.

What are your thoughts? Getting excited by the growth in the Lake Nona area? Let us know in the comments.

According to a report by Channel 6, Authorities on Wednesday found a body while searching for a woman who vanished after dropping her kids off at school, but officers are not saying whether it’s a male or female that was found.

This is a very sad follow-up to the story I just posted Lois Garcia Wilmeth: Eagle Creek and Lake Nona Flooded with Cops as Search Continues for Missing Mom.

For more details visit Click Orlando. We will keep you posted with more info as we receive it.

Anyone with information about her whereabouts is urged to call the Orange County Sheriff’s Office at 407-836-HELP

I’ll be honest, I had not heard about Lois Garcia Wilmeth, the mom who went missing after walking her son to Lake Nona Middle School yesterday, until pulling into Eagle Creek this morning, and seeing a sea of officers, and even more news trucks. I immediately posted to Twitter and Facebook to find out what was going on, and was sent to the Orlando Sentinel’s story – Lois Garcia Wilmeth: Search continues for missing Lake Nona mom.

Garcia Wilmeth was new to Lake Nona, and was last seen walking along Narcoossee Road yesterday, and relatives say she “suffers from bipolar disorder, and may have become disoriented on the walk back home.”

Here’s a picture I took of the officers preparing to search on horses.

UPDATE: BREAKING NEWS: Body found in search for missing Lake Nona woman

Twitter is an amazing place to follow breaking news, so I’ve embedded a search below that you can check any time for the latest info on the search for Lois Garcia Wilmeth.

If you have any other details, please share in the comments below.

There’s no denying it – Orlando loves Food Trucks, and Lake Nona is no exception. If you haven’t experienced the Lake Nona Food Truck Bazaar yet, clear your calendar every 4th Sunday, and head to CrossPointe Church (11002 Lake Hart Dr.). The bazaar is an amazing way for Lake Nona residents to come together and enjoy a unique meal (or with others in the area, all while walking around outside in the incredible weather we’ve been having lately. Cubans, Lobsta Rolls, and Prime Rib are all on the menu.

Our friends at The Daily City and Tasty Chomps both have write ups on the events, so be sure to click the links to see pictures, and read more about them.

We will be at the next one, and hope to see everyone there!

It’s always been funny to me how swimming pools in one neighborhood can be very similar in chemical balance, yet, in the neighborhood across the street, the chemical balance can be completely different. We decided to start posting about what we’re seeing while cleaning pools in specific neighborhoods.

We’re starting this series in Eagle Creek, where we have a large majority of our pools.

Eagle Creek is a golf community, and with that, you are faced with an odd set of circumstances that can effect water balance. Special chemicals are used to maintain golf courses, and those chemicals can travel through the air and into pools…or they travel through the air, and stick to screen enclosures, so all of the buildup on the screens washes into the swimming pool during the next storm.

One of the biggest problems we face in Eagle Creek is dealing with phosphates. We’ve posted about phosphates on this site before, and phosphates are found in most fertilizers. Each time the course is treated with fertilizer or insecticides, we see a boost in the amount of phosphates in our clients’ pools. Phosphates aren’t harmful in pools, but they are algae food, so even if your pool is chlorinated, phosphates can cause an algae bloom to start and thrive.

When we notice the phosphates getting high, we usually do a treatment, which clears the problem up in a day or two. If the phosphate count in your pool is very high, you may notice your pool being cloudy for a day after we’ve done the treatment. This is all very normal, and we note it when it occurs.

Another challenge we’re faced with in Eagle Creek is dirt…yes, dirt! Between road construction on Narcoossee Rd, new homes being constructed in the south end of Eagle Creek, and the development going on across the street from the community, there is a ton of dirt blowing through the air. Just like the chemicals containing the phosphates, this dirt travels into pools or sticks to screen enclosures, causing excess debris to form in the bottom of your pool or in your filter.

We typically combat this by monitoring the cleanliness of your filter. If your filter is clogged with dirt, we clean it more often than our normal once-a-month scheduled cleaning.

Other than that, the pools in Eagle Creek stay pretty well balanced. The pool builder used great pool equipment, so there are not a lot of problems there, and the build quality of the pools in Eagle Creek is very good compared to other pools in the area.

We’ll go into detail on some of the other surrounding neighborhoods in the near future.

If you live in Eagle Creek, and have specific questions about your pool, feel free to ask us in the comments below.

She’s actually a very good columnist, but I want to address her most recent post, Medical City still a far cry from being a city.

Beth is technically right – Lake Nona’s Medical City” still has a long way to go before it truly earns that “city” label. Andy Chiles, Athletic Director at Lake Nona High School, may have said it best when it comes to the building of this community: “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Beth,

If you have not visited Lake Nona recently, you might want to make the short drive to see exactly how things are changing here. No other place in Central Florida has the same buzz going as we do. Our streets are being widened. A new middle school has grown out of an old cattle field. New stone monuments have been erected, welcoming visitors to our non-city. Lake Nona High School had an amazing season last year creating a spirit in this community often lost in larger towns in Central Florida.

I guess what I’m saying is, no, Lake Nona has not earned the title of “City,” but to make this area sound like a failure of an idea is uncalled for. Eagle Creek and VillageWalk are having record-setting sales months for new construction, and a trip through the construction areas on Medical City is awe-inspiring.

If you’d like a tour of our “Medical City” to see what is really going on here, give us a call. We’ll be glad to prove that Lake Nona is doing just fine.

Sincerely,
Lake Nona Pools

Almost every member of Lake Nona‘s boys and girls water polo teams didn’t know the ball was yellow two years ago.

Most of them couldn’t swim and two of them were cheerleaders — Hope Davis and Taylor Bullock — before trying out for the team.

Now the second-year Lions program has its girls in a state play-in game where thet will face Oviedo at 6 Tuesday night at the Orlando YMCA Aquatic Center. Oviedo and Dr. Phillips will play in a boys play-in game at 7:30.

“It’s truly remarkable. I was like a proud father,” said Lake Nona coach Alex Bennett, who won nine state title with Gulliver Prep before coming to Lake Nona.

“The first day of practice, the girls showed up in two-piece bathing suits. They didn’t know they needed one-pieces in order to play. They would wear T-shirts at practice until they got the right suits.”

Continue Reading: Lake Nona water polo making strides in second year

Lake Nona’s George Kirchgassner, the baseball coaching icon, after two long weeks of waiting, watching and competing without winning, got career coaching victory no. 619 pushing him one game past another coaching legend in Sonny Wise as Orange County’s most prolific baseball coach.

It took extra innings for Lake Nona to clip Harmony, 3-2 for the victory and for the longest time it looked like this game could go like those of the previous weeks after the new South Orlando school had built a 16-1 resume and a pick in the Bright House Sports Network top 10 poll. They now are 17-4.

Wilfredo Rodriguez’ walk-off sacrifice fly produced the winning run in a game that Kirchgassner will re-play in his mind for years to come. Kirchgassner won his games at Colonial, Cypress Creek, Freedom and Lake Nona. Wise built his mark at Apopka.

Not every community could pull off naming its streets for Nobel laureates.

But that is what Lake Nona plans to do with Laureate Park —– the first community being built to complement the giant development’s Medical City cluster of hospitals and bioscience-research laboratories.

Styled like Orlando’s neotraditional Baldwin Park neighborhood, the 2,500-home project will have an average home price of $315,000 and feature narrow lots with back alleys. And, like Baldwin Park, it will charge its homeowners fees not only for maintenance but also to construct and keep up the roads and utilities.

“We’re going to pitch it to employees [in the Medical City] as a place where they could walk to work,” said James Zboril, president of Lake Nona Co. “We think the right residential play is more neotraditional.”

The government-permit process is also under way for Lake Nona’s Watermark apartment community, and the developer is selecting companies to build and operate an extended-stay hotel and a conference-style hotel next to the emerging medical complex.

Lake Nona quietly plodded along as an outlying country-club development until 1996, when Tavistock Group, an investment holding company for British billionaire Joseph Lewis, purchased the 7,000-acre property. The new owner has worked in recent years to create a cluster of health-care and bioscience facilities anchored by the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, a Nemours Children’s Hospital and a VA Medical Center.

The development now stands as one of the region’s chief hopes for economic development and high-paying jobs.

Although surrounding landowners have had a three-year head start building and selling homes near the Medical City, Tavistock and its Lake Nona unit are only now launching their residential plans. The Windermere-based parent company will start with 200 of what eventually will be 2,500 residences in Laureate Park, which is southwest of the Narcoossee Road interchange on State Road 417.

The developer envisions a pedestrian lifestyle. Plans call for a small village center that might accommodate a fitness center, sales offices and possibly a restaurant and coffee shop. Northeast of S.R. 417 and Lake Nona Boulevard, Watermark is planned as a 342-unit apartment complex with 11,800 square feet of commercial space slated for child care.

About two thirds of Laureate Park’s homes will have back alleys. Home lots will be less than 50 feet wide in the first phase, and town homes will be 30 feet wide. Though the housing will be near the medical city, the walk could be more like a hike for employees at Sanford-Burnham, which is more than a mile away on Sanger Road (named for 1958 Nobel laureate Frederick Sanger).

Like Baldwin Park, Laureate Park will charge each homeowner a community-development-district fee on top of a homeowner-association fee. But unlike many other developers that have charged that extra fee, Lake Nona has not incurred bond debt on any improvements so far.

“It allows us to put in a high level of infrastructure and maintain it,” Zboril said. “There’s a sensible way to do CDDs.”

The average price in the initial phase will be $315,000 — more than triple the median price for resales by members of the Orlando Regional Realtor Association. Some prices will be less than $200,000, and the initial phase won’t feature large estate homes, a segment with particularly slow sales during the past year.

Zboril said he doesn’t expect such price tags to be problem because new-home competitors are selling town-home-style units for $190,000 and single-family homes in the $300s.

With new-home construction at a relative standstill for the past three years, brokers and others in the real-estate business will be watching closely the progress of what may now be Central Florida’s most-anticipated residential project.

Land Advisors broker Steve Flanagan, who recently researched Orlando’s southeast area to help market the Randal Park development, said Lake Nona should attract premium buyers because the jobs being created there are higher paying than the local average and the development will be distinctive.

“Trying to carve out a niche for a new-urbanist village is a good way to differentiate yourself from other communities in the area,” he said.

Potomac Land Co. Division President William Sullivan said the market for that area appears to be slowing slightly, with Lake Nona’s nearest competitor, Eagle Creek, having sold 45 houses in the high $200,000s and low $300,000s last year. So far this year, Eagle Creek has had about four sales a month.

Plans for two hotels make sense, he added: An extended-stay facility can target families of hospital patients, while a conference-style inn will appeal to affiliates of Burnham and the medical school.

Sullivan noted that several other residential projects are in planning phases for the Lake Nona area generally. Already under construction: Camden Lake Nona expects to complete by this summer a 420-unit apartment complex at Narcoossee and Dowden roads.

Lake Nona Co. expects to announce a lineup of four or five production builders in the next two months for Laureate Park. Though the developer isn’t calling for specific energy-conservation standards in the homes, Zboril said Lake Nona will be pushing builders to offer “more green and environmental products” as part of a “compelling and appropriately priced” product.

Source: Orlando Sentinel

We promised big things from the Orlando Pool & Spa show this year, but sadly, it seemed like a slimmed down version of last year’s show. If you don’t remember last year’s show, here’s a video refresher…

We were late to register for the show this year, so we ended up registering onsite. The registration process has always been simple, but this year, the registration area was in the same area as the classes. In prior years, the registration has been in a completely separate area, but it seemed like there was a reduction in the number of classes offered this year, so that could have something to do with it.

Looking through the classes, we didn’t notice anything new on the curriculum. I decided to attend an “Internet Marketing” class put on by Frank Motola of @Brandtastic. He’s apparently an accomplished marketer, otherwise, he wouldn’t be teaching the class, right??? Wrong. One look at his Twitter account shows his marketing style – a very one-directional, all promotion type of style….but that’s a discussion better had on PoolShak.

The other classes were very standard, and not much new was learned or discussed. So on to the show floor.

The floor opened at 11:00 am. We always make it a point to stop by the American Leak Detection booth to pick up a free 5 gallon bucket to help carry the other “swag” we’re given throughout the floor.

After scoring a bucket, we went back to the beginning of the aisles, and walked through looking for anything new and exciting to report. Pool nets, pool brushes, tile, grout, pool route software, chemicals, and other pool products were everywhere. We expected variable speed pumps to be highlighted this year, but sadly, only a few were there.

Not variable speed, but probably the most interesting thing at the show.

We managed to walk the entire floor in under an hour. It seemed to be about two rows less than last year, and the variety of vendors was limited. We’ll continue to go each year, but with the economy picking up, I thought this would be a stellar year….it wasn’t.

Here are a few more pictures from the floor. If you have any questions about the show, ask in the comments, or on Twitter at @LakeNonaPools.