A buyer touring Bay Colony this season will hear the same sentence from two different addresses. Stand at a beachfront mansion in The Strand and the story is Gulf-front dining, attended beach service, sunset cocktails on the sand. Cross the Mediterranean-style bridge into Bay Colony Shores, three streets back on a lake, and the amenity list reads almost word for word the same. Same Beach Club. Same tennis and pickleball courts. Same association card in your wallet.
What doesn't match is the price. Homes in The Strand have sold between $12.5 million and $19 million over the past decade, and as of mid-2026 one home there is asking $34.9 million, or roughly $4,840 a square foot. Bay Colony Shores, meanwhile, has recently listed a home its own marketing described as the lowest price per square foot in Pelican Bay. Same gate. Same club. A gap wide enough to buy a second house.
That gap is the story worth understanding before you write an offer in either direction.
The membership doesn't know which street you live on
Every homeowner in Bay Colony, whether their address sits on The Strand's twelve beachfront lots or one of Bay Colony Shores' lakefront homesites, carries dual membership: the Bay Colony Community Association and the broader Pelican Bay Foundation. That dual card is what unlocks the Bay Colony Beach Club's attended service, its formal and casual dining, and its tennis and pickleball facilities. Golf is the one line item that isn't bundled in either direction. Both Strand and Shores owners have to buy into the Bay Colony Golf Club in Pelican Marsh or Club Pelican Bay separately if they want it.
In other words, the thing that most buyers assume they're purchasing when they pay a beachfront premium, the club membership itself, is not actually for sale at a premium at all. It's identical whether your lanai faces the Gulf or a preserve.
Which means the price difference between the two neighborhoods has to be explained by something else entirely.
What twelve homes actually cost
The Strand's scarcity is structural, not marketed. There are only twelve homes in the entire enclave, secured behind a second, separately gated entrance beyond Bay Colony's main gate. Turnover is rare enough that comparable sales inside The Strand happen closer to once every year or two than on any predictable seasonal rhythm. When one of those twelve does trade, the number reflects that scarcity: the historic range of $12.5 million to $19 million, and as of mid-2026, a current ask north of $34 million for a home built in 2023.
That's not a price for beach access. Beach access, again, comes with the Shores address too. That's a price for being one of twelve owners on a finger of land with the Gulf on one side and 570 acres of permanently undeveloped conservation land on the other, a view that literally cannot be replicated or expanded because there is no more beachfront left inside the gate to build on.
Scarcity of buildable Gulf frontage, not scarcity of club chairs, is what The Strand is actually pricing.
What buyers get for less at the Shores
Bay Colony Shores trades a beach view for something else worth naming precisely: a shorter walk to the same club, a quieter street, and a construction cycle that's been actively remaking the neighborhood since 2016.
The community's own association describes roughly seventy-five original homesites reached over that Mediterranean-style bridge, with brick-paved streets and gaslight-style lighting that dates the neighborhood's original build-out to the early 1990s. Listing agents and MLS-fed sites more commonly cite a working count closer to sixty-six standalone addresses today, and at least one current listing helps explain the discrepancy: a nearly ten-thousand-square-foot estate built across two combined lakefront homesites, the kind of lot consolidation that happens when a buyer wants more house than the original platting allowed and simply buys the neighbor's parcel too.
The teardown-and-rebuild cycle started in earnest in 2016, when the first pre-existing Bay Colony Shores home was purchased specifically to demolish and rebuild. It sold in 2017 for $7.2 million. That single data point told the rest of the market something: land inside this gate, even without sand at the property line, was worth more empty than the 1990s house sitting on it. Rebuilding has continued every year since.
The practical upside for anyone actually living there, as opposed to touring it, is proximity. Shores residents reach the Beach Club by a short walk or drive. Most of the rest of Pelican Bay reaches its beaches by tram through the mangrove boardwalks. That's a real daily-life difference that has nothing to do with square footage or finishes.
Same neighborhood, its own internal hierarchy
Even inside Bay Colony Shores, position matters more than the brochure suggests. Homes set back from Vanderbilt Drive and Pelican Bay Boulevard, the two roads that carry through-traffic near the community's edges, consistently draw stronger interest and higher prices than lots closer to that road noise. Lakefront homesites are the most sought after of the interior lots, ahead of those with only landscaped or preserve views.
It's a small-scale version of the same logic that separates Bay Colony Shores from The Strand. Buyers aren't just pricing square footage and finishes. They're pricing distance from noise, sightlines to water, and how many other owners share that exact view. Inside a single sixty-some-lot community, that math still holds.
| The Strand at Bay Colony | Bay Colony Shores | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Direct Gulf beachfront | Interior lakes and preserve |
| Homesites | 12 | Roughly 66 to 75, some since combined |
| Beach Club access | Included | Included, identical terms |
| Tennis and pickleball | Included | Included |
| Golf | Separate membership required | Separate membership required |
| Recent pricing signal | $12.5M to $19M historically; one home currently asking $34.9M | Wide range; one recent listing marketed as lowest price per square foot in Pelican Bay |
| Built | Custom, ongoing | Originally early 1990s, active teardown-rebuild cycle since 2016 |
What this means if you're comparing the two
If the goal is the Bay Colony lifestyle itself, the Beach Club chairs, the attended service, the tennis program, the gated pedigree, Bay Colony Shores delivers all of it at a meaningfully lower entry point, with the added benefit of a construction cycle that means you can still buy a 1990s original and rebuild rather than compete for one of twelve fixed addresses that almost never turn over.
If the goal is specifically to wake up with the Gulf outside your window and nothing between your lanai and the water but sand, only The Strand's twelve homes qualify, and the math changes. You aren't shopping a neighborhood at that point. You're waiting for one of twelve owners to sell, which happens on a timeline measured in years, not listing cycles.
Neither choice is a compromise once you understand what's actually being priced. The confusion only sets in when a buyer assumes the club membership itself carries the premium. It doesn't. The Gulf does.
FAQ
Do Bay Colony Shores homeowners get the same Beach Club access as The Strand? Yes. Membership in the Bay Colony Beach Club and Tennis Club is tied to the Bay Colony Community Association, not to which of the five neighborhoods you live in. Shores, Strand, Vizcaya, Villa La Palma, and the high-rise condos all carry the same access.
Is golf included with a Bay Colony Shores purchase? No. Golf is a separate, optional membership at either the Bay Colony Golf Club in Pelican Marsh or Club Pelican Bay, and it works the same way regardless of which Bay Colony neighborhood you buy into.
Why do some sources list a different number of homesites in Bay Colony Shores? Counts vary because some original homesites have been combined by owners rebuilding larger estates across two adjoining lots, a pattern that's been active since the teardown cycle began in 2016. The platted number and the current number of standalone addresses no longer match exactly for that reason.
If you're weighing a Bay Colony Shores address against a beachfront alternative, or trying to figure out what a specific lot inside that gate is actually worth this season, The Resop Team spends its days inside exactly these comparisons. Book an appointment and bring the two listings you can't stop comparing.
