Celebration Life

Here’s an interesting item. It’s not strictly Celebration, per se, but has enough similarities with here that I’ll include it here anyway.

The Walt Disney Company announced today the start of pre-sales for Golden Oak. “a one-of-a-kind luxury residential resort community offering the unprecedented opportunity to purchase a home at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida” (from the press release).

It’s the “on property” aspect of this that I find most interesting. For those of you familiar with the layout of Walt Disney World property, this is just east of Fort Wilderness, so it’s really quite close to everything Disney.

I won’t recite the press release verbatim — you can read it here if you’d like — but the bullet points are:

• Single family custom homes priced between $1.5 and $8 million
• Fewer than 30 to start, with completion in 2011
• Full ownership by means of deed
• Gated
• Eventual footprint of 980 acres, about half of which is conservation area
• Residents will have access to amenities at a previously announced Four Seasons
• Total build-out plan is for 450 homes
• $25k refundable deposit in first-come order

As a resident of Celebration, another Walt Disney “Imagineered” community, I’ll be interested to follow the progress of this new development. What are your thoughts? Disney’s a smart company and has done its homework, but is there pent up demand for this kind of development? What problems might you foresee?