- July 12, 2025
SeaGate Homes has evolved quite a bit since it began building single-family homes in Flagler County in 1994. The family-run business marked its 31st anniversary in June.
John Gazzoli started the company. His children currently run it. Robert Gazzoli is the president, Brian Gazzoli is the vice president, and Laura Gazzoli is the HR director.
They have lived in Palm Coast since 1977, when John, then an executive with ITT Corporation, moved the family here when ITT’s Palm Coast headquarters was moved from Miami.
Robert Gazzoli, the oldest of the three siblings, has been with SeaGate Homes since Day 1. In the beginning, their specialty was building affordable homes for first-time home buyers.
“I want to say, our first year or two of operations, we were selling house lot packages for around $60,000. It was around a 1,000- or 1,100-square-foot house,” Robert Gazzoli said. “It was a smaller home, but it was very affordable.”
Thirty years later, $300,000 is now considered the price of a starter home, he said.
“Over the years, we’ve gotten into a lot of different types of building,” Gazzolil said.
In 31 years, SeaGate has built around 6,000 homes, most of them in Flagler County but they’ve also built quite a bit in Volusia and St. Johns counties.
Pro Builder magazine recently named SeaGate Homes as one of the top 200 U.S. home builders of 2025, ranking the company at No. 155 based on housing revenue. It was the third year in a row the company made the top 200 list.
A second SeaGate company, Bellagio Custom Homes, specialized in designer homes.
“Someone could design a home, or we would design a home and build it. It could be a one-off, never-been-built-before,” Gazzoli said.
Bellagio focused on larger homes, 4,000 to 6,000 square feet on average, while SeaGate’s homes are more in the 2,000 square-foot range. Since the pandemic, Bellagio Custom Homes has mostly been inactive, Gazzoli said.
We've always tried to pride ourselves on customizing for people so they have a choice to be able to make their home the way they want it. And we've been pretty consistent with that over the years, with the exception of the pandemic.
— ROBERT GAZZOLI
“When we got in the pandemic, it became very difficult to get materials, very difficult to find labor to do things, and the large custom homes just became too much to handle,” he said. “So, we kind of got out of doing those and scaled back. We’re still doing some luxury homes, but not really the custom, custom stuff. We've always tried to pride ourselves on customizing for people so they have a choice to be able to make their home the way they want it. And we've been pretty consistent with that over the years, with the exception of the pandemic.”
They have built million-dollar homes in recent years, a far cry from the $60,000 starter homes they built in their first year or two of operations.
Home prices almost doubled after the pandemic, changing the housing market, Gazzoli said. A lot of builders have moved into the area. And fewer homes are being built on a home owners' lots based on their specifications.
“This market has transitioned into a spec market, or inventory-home type market where you have to do a lot more building of inventory and have it available for people, rather than building it for them from scratch,” he said. “So, we still do build for people. We call that new builds, but it's shifted a lot more towards completed inventory, where people can select a home and then close on it within 30 or 60 days.”
The technology has also changed in the past 31 years. Now, there’s software for everything, Gazzoli said.
“How we did things early on was much more manually intensive,” he said. “It’s much easier to communicate. Everybody has a cell phone. You don’t need as much manpower. We’re definitely more efficient now than we were when we began the company. We’ve seen a lot in 31 years.”
