About

New to Ocala is a relocation guide for Ocala and Marion County, Florida, written by someone who made this move from Miami and got some of it wrong the first time.

Why it exists

Everything available when that move was being planned was either a listing site with a blog bolted on, or a page explaining that Ocala is a vibrant community with something for everyone. Neither answers the questions you actually have at that point, which are dull, specific and entirely answerable.

What does August do to an electric bill. Is this street on county water or a well. What is the practical difference between an address inside the city and one fifteen minutes outside it — and the answer turns out to be a paved road versus a clay one, ten minutes from a hospital versus forty, and a tax bill that is not the same.

The things that were misjudged the first time around are on this site because they were misjudged: the cooling season is longer and more expensive than anyone from a cold-winter state expects, and the insurance conversation in Florida turns on the age of a roof far more than on the price of a house.

Who publishes it, and why you should know

What it does not mean is that this site will try to sell you a house. There is no lead form here, no page asks for your phone number or your budget, and nothing is gated behind giving those up. Where an article covers new construction it explains the process and links to a site that lists new homes for sale. That link is the whole of the commercial path, and the line above it says who it belongs to.

The rules that exist specifically because of this arrangement — no builder names, no community names, no lender names, no settlement-service affiliates, no urgency language — are written down on the editorial policy page, and most of them are enforced by a check that refuses to publish the site when it fails.

What this site will not tell you

It will not tell you which neighbourhood is good and which is bad. That is not squeamishness: steering someone toward or away from an area based on who lives there is the thing fair housing law exists to prevent, and the line between "the feel of a place" and that is thinner than people think.

So the area pages describe what is measurable and physical — drive times, what the housing stock is, well or county water, where the nearest grocery store and hospital are, whether there is an association. Schools and crime get links to the offices that publish the data: the Florida Department of Education school grades, the FDLE Uniform Crime Reports, the Marion County Sheriff's Office. No ranking from this site.

How it is written

Every article carries the date it was published, the date it was last updated, and a list of sources with links. Every number cites one of those sources or it is not in the article — which is why some pages here have empty boxes where a competitor would have a confident average.

Getting in touch

There is a contact page. Corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends and they are acted on: the fix and a new updated date, on the page itself.