Custom home builder in Rocky Point, North Carolina.

Here's what the rules decide for your Rocky Point lot.

We build new homes and remodel existing ones in Rocky Point, from our home base in Southport.

• Septic needs a soil test and a county permit before the house is planned around it.
• A shared lane needs a travel way at least 20 feet wide in a 45-foot easement, for four lots and 500 feet at most.
• Where a flood height is set, the house must sit two feet above it.

At a glance

County

Pender County

Jurisdiction

Unincorporated community: Pender County's UDO governs, and the county reviews permits

Ultimate design wind speed

130 mph in Rocky Point Township (2018 NC Residential Code, Table R301.2(4), note j)

Drive from Southport

About 47 miles, roughly 65 minutes, via US 17, I-140 and I-40 to Exit 408

Water & sewer

Many lots use a private well and septic; a county water and sewer district serves some addresses

Residential Contractor License #109520 · Member, Brunswick County Home Builders Association

Your family's farm lane has to become a recorded easement.

Jurisdiction

Unincorporated community in Pender County: the Pender County Unified Development Ordinance applies

Adopted code

Pender County Unified Development Ordinance (zoning, subdivision, access); Pender County Code of Ordinances Ch. 18, Flood Damage Protection (enacted Dec. 2019)

Permit authority

Pender County: the UDO's Administrator for zoning and access approvals, a county Floodplain Administrator under Ch. 18, Environmental Health for septic and wells, Pender County Utilities where public water or sewer reaches, and the permitting and inspections department (805 S. Walker St., Burgaw, with a Hampstead annex) for building and trade permits

Water & sewer

Many lots on private well and septic, permitted by Pender County Environmental Health; the county's Rocky Point/Topsail Water & Sewer District serves some addresses

Access

A lot on a public road at least 30 feet wide, or reached by a recorded easement at least 20 feet wide (UDO 5.3.2.B.1); a shared easement needs a 20-foot travel way in a 45-foot easement, serves at most four parcels, and runs no more than 500 feet (UDO 7.5.4)

Dividing a tract

Every new parcel under 10 acres needs a recorded plat signed by the Administrator; divisions into parcels over 10 acres with no street dedication, or under a probated will or intestate succession, are exempt from subdivision review (UDO 3.8.1, following G.S. 160D-802)

Flood-map source

FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map panels and the NC Flood Risk Information System (fris.nc.gov); regulatory flood protection elevation set at the base flood elevation plus two feet of freeboard where one has been determined (Pender County Code Sec. 18-5)

Ultimate design wind speed

130 mph for Rocky Point Township (2018 NC Residential Code, Table R301.2(4), note j: 150 mph east of the Intracoastal Waterway, 140 mph in Topsail Township west of it, 130 mph in the rest of the county)

On a family tract, the rule that matters first is the UDO's access rule. Every structure has to sit on a lot next to, or with access to, a public road at least thirty feet wide. A lot without that frontage needs a recorded access easement, at least twenty feet wide, to reach one. A tract may have stayed in one family for decades without ever being platted as a subdivision. There, the easement is often what stands between a chosen building site and a permit. Section 7.5.4 sets its standard: a passable travel way at least twenty feet wide, inside a forty-five-foot easement, at the time of zoning approval. No more than four parcels can share one easement, and it can run no more than five hundred feet to the public street. Those numbers apply to an old farm lane the same as a new one. We measure the lane against them, or record an easement that meets them, at the start of a Rocky Point project.

Two of the UDO's districts show the range a Rocky Point buyer can meet. The RA, or Rural Agricultural, district is one of the designations applied to larger homesites across unincorporated Pender. The ordinance describes its intended use as non-residential agriculture and very low-density residential development. It expects that development to rely mostly on individual wells and septic systems, with public water and sewer lines the exception. The RP, or Residential Performance, district covers more conventional platted development, with its own standards. A structure on the outer edge of an RP project has to sit back at least twenty feet from the adjoining property line. Any RP project has to form and keep active a homeowners association, responsible for its shared open space and stormwater system. Every RP project also has to satisfy the county's flood damage prevention standards, now Chapter 18 of the Code of Ordinances, in full. That twenty-foot figure applies at a project's outer edge. A single house takes its setbacks from its own district and plat, which we read from Pender County's zoning map for the parcel.

Rocky Point is unincorporated, so Pender County's rules govern it directly. Zoning, subdivision and land-development review all run through the county's Unified Development Ordinance. The same document governs Hampstead, Currie and every other unincorporated stretch of Pender. Each office in the table above answers for a different part of a project. The official the ordinance calls the Administrator handles zoning and access approvals. A county Floodplain Administrator enforces Chapter 18, Flood Damage Protection, for building in the mapped floodplain. Environmental Health handles septic and wells, and Pender County Utilities handles public water or sewer where it reaches. Building and trade permits, and the inspections that follow them, come from the county's permitting and inspections department in Burgaw.

Where a family has held a tract for years, the UDO's family-division provisions in Section 6.6.1 apply. A qualified resident household can create up to three parcels, plus a remnant parcel that meets the ordinance. The limits are specific. The division cannot create a new public or private street. The parent parcel must have been created and recorded in the county registry before March 29, 2004. The division's easements answer to the same Section 7.5.4 standards as any other. The travel way has to be cleared and grubbed five feet beyond each edge, and kept passable. If it is not, the Administrator can hold further approvals until it is. A tract recorded after that date has to divide some other way. Section 3.8.1 lists the state-law exemptions, such as parcels over ten acres with no new street. Every new parcel under ten acres still goes on a surveyed, recorded plat.

The plat carries its own proof. It has to show any Special Flood Hazard Area or Area of Environmental Concern inside the division. A Special Flood Hazard Area is land with at least a 1 percent chance of flooding in any year. Each new lot needs a drainage path. That path can run beside a natural drainage way or perennial stream, or along a recorded twenty-foot drainage easement toward one. On an NCDOT-maintained road, the lot can drain to the road with NCDOT's approval. Each lot also needs its wastewater answered, in one of three ways. One is an Improvement Authorization Permit from Environmental Health. Another is a soil analysis showing at least 5,000 square feet suitable for a traditional on-site system, kept ten feet off every lot line. The third is approval to connect to public sewer. A lot that meets none of those is recorded with a note. It says the lot cannot be used for building until an approved wastewater method is permitted. We confirm how a specific tract fits with Pender County's planning office before a surveyor is engaged.

New construction in Rocky Point often means clearing ground that never had a house on it.

Family division

Up to three parcels per qualified resident household, with no new street, where the parent parcel was recorded before March 29, 2004 (Pender County UDO 6.6.1)

Access to a divided lot

A recorded easement at least 20 feet wide where the lot has no public-road frontage (UDO 5.3.2.B.1); on a family division, a 20-foot travel way in a 45-foot easement, cleared and grubbed five feet past each edge (UDO 6.6.1.B, 7.5.4)

Second structure on one lot

Up to three residential structures on a single lot, each meeting the full minimum district lot size on its own, shown on a surveyor's plat (Pender County UDO 5.3.2.A.1)

Detached ADU

One accessory dwelling unit per lot, capped at 33% of the principal dwelling's heated floor area, in the rear or side yard (Pender County UDO 5.3.2.E)

Raw acreage

A Rocky Point tract may never have carried a house: a farm parcel, a timber tract, or a family lot developed for the first time. New construction on raw acreage gives the design more room to work with than a platted subdivision lot does. There is room to set the house back from the road. There is room to turn it toward a long cleared view, and room to size a septic field to the house's actual needs. It also means the driveway, the well and the septic system are all new work, with nothing existing to reuse. That is why those three decisions get settled in the site analysis, long before a framing schedule exists. Once work starts, the well gets drilled early enough to supply the job. The drainfield area is staked and fenced, so trucks and equipment never compact it.

Renovating a Rocky Point farmhouse or ranch

Rocky Point's older houses along NC 210, US 117 and the side roads run from farmhouses to the ranch houses of the later twentieth century. Many were built before a continuous air barrier or today's wind-load rules were part of anyone's drawings. On one of these, renovating the older frame is usually a question of how much of the existing structure is worth keeping. The roof and its openings may need to come up to a current wind standard. Mechanical equipment gets replaced and sized by a load calculation for the house as renovated. Where an addition is planned, the septic system gets checked again for its current capacity before the new square footage is drawn against it.

An ADU or a second house on a Rocky Point tract

On a Rocky Point family tract, the second-dwelling question starts at the lane. A second house for a grown child or a parent can mean a family division under UDO 6.6.1. Every lot that division creates without road frontage has to reach the public road over an access easement. Section 7.5.4 sets its terms: a twenty-foot travel way inside a forty-five-foot easement. Section 6.6.1 adds clearing and grubbing five feet beyond each edge. No more than four parcels can share it, and it can run no more than five hundred feet. The old farm lane may already run farther than that, or already serve four parcels. Where it does, the second dwelling has to be sited to answer the easement before it answers the view. A new easement off another stretch of road frontage can be the simpler fix. If the parent tract does not qualify, or the family wants to keep one lot, the UDO's single-lot routes in the table above apply. A septic-first ADU feasibility check asks the question that tends to bind first on any route. That question is whether Pender County Environmental Health will approve wastewater capacity for a second dwelling at all.

Two rivers shape Rocky Point without meeting here.

Rocky Point is strung along NC Highway 210, in the southern part of Pender County. There the highway meets NC Highway 133, and a few miles east, US Highway 117 and Exit 408 on Interstate 40. Pender County is part of the Wilmington metropolitan area, and the interstate puts Wilmington within easy reach. Away from the highway shoulders, much of Rocky Point is still working land: pine plantation, hardwood bottomland and row-crop fields.

The two rivers shape the township without meeting in it. The Cape Fear main stem lies off to the west. The Northeast Cape Fear runs much closer, and NC 210 crosses it east of the community. The two join only at Wilmington, well downstream, so Rocky Point is ground drained by two separate river systems. Which river a given tract drains toward, and how near it sits to either one's mapped floodplain, is a parcel question. Castle Hayne on the New Hanover side, just to the south, drains to the Northeast Cape Fear as well, under New Hanover County's ordinance.

To the east, Rocky Point Township gives way to Topsail Township. That township line is also where the code's wind figure steps up, from 130 mph to 140. Topsail Township runs to the Atlantic and takes in Hampstead, Surf City and Topsail Beach. Rocky Point Township stays inland. To the northeast, Holly Shelter Game Land holds a broad block of country out of development. The state owns it, and the NC Wildlife Resources Commission manages it. For a tract along its edge, it is a neighbor with its own management plan. The courthouse town of Burgaw is a short run north up US 117. The county offices that review a Rocky Point project are there. Inside those edges, the ground people buy to build on comes in four broad kinds.

• Larger farm and timber tracts, often ten acres or more. Here the design question is as much about which stand of trees to clear as it is about the house itself.
• Family-division parcels split off an older tract. A shared gravel driveway or a recorded access easement typically reaches them, since a family division creates no new street.
• Older homesites along NC 210, US 117 and the secondary roads off them. A well and septic system already exists on many, and may or may not still serve a new house.
• Lots in newer platted subdivisions, sized and served more like a conventional suburban parcel, sometimes with an association and covenants already attached.

Heide Trask High School, the Pender County Schools campus for grades nine through twelve, sits on NC 210.

Soil decides where a Rocky Point septic system can go.

Ground in this part of the coastal plain can shift within one tract. It can run from sandy, better-drained rises to low, wetter flats, sometimes within a few hundred feet. Which kind sits under a proposed building pad decides more than where the house looks best. A septic system needs a soil evaluation, the test many people still call a perc test. It also needs an Improvement Authorization from Pender County Environmental Health. Both come before anything is designed around the system. On a tract with mixed soils, that evaluation can rule out a favorite homesite as easily as it confirms one.

Drainage follows the same logic. Clearing a wooded acre changes how water moves across it. A canopy that used to slow rainfall is gone, and a driveway cut through the clearing can become the new low path for runoff. It has to be graded with that in mind. This is ordinary rural site work. Doing it before the floor plan is fixed keeps a foundation contractor from finding standing water where the plans call for a slab.

On a mixed tract, the soil evaluation can rule out a favorite homesite as easily as it confirms one.

Flooding here follows a river's schedule. A surge event arrives in hours and recedes almost as fast. The Cape Fear and Northeast Cape Fear systems rise over days instead, as rain works down a much larger watershed. High water can sit in place well after the storm that caused it has moved on. Two maps can place a tract in a mapped Special Flood Hazard Area. One is the FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM), and the other is the state's own NC Flood Risk Information System (FRIS). Where either one does, Pender County's Chapter 18 sets a regulatory flood protection elevation. That elevation is the base flood elevation plus two feet of freeboard. The base flood elevation is the flood height the map sets, and freeboard is the extra height the county adds above it. Where no base flood elevation has been set, the elevation is at least two feet above the highest adjacent grade. Whether a given tract is mapped in that area at all is a parcel-level question, answered by the FIRM panel and FRIS. That same map line decides something else too: whether the residential code's Chapter 46 coastal and flood provisions reach the house at all. Section R4601.1 applies those provisions in regulatory floodplain areas, and in the 150 mph wind zone. A 130 mph Rocky Point lot outside the mapped floodplain sits in neither.

Wind is where the code does step down with distance from the sea. The steps fall on township and waterway lines. The 2018 NC Residential Code sets ultimate design wind speeds county by county. Pender's note draws three bands: 150 mph east of the Intracoastal Waterway, 140 mph in Topsail Township west of it, and 130 mph everywhere else. Rocky Point Township takes 130 mph, and mainland Hampstead, nearer the sound, takes 140. The boundary between those two figures is a township line. For a tract near the eastern edge of Rocky Point Township, the parcel record shows which township, and which figure, applies. A 130 mph rating still carries a design requirement of its own. At 130 mph and above, Section R301.2.1.1 of the same code requires a house to be designed under one of the methods it lists. They include the Wood Frame Construction Manual, the ICC 600 standard, ASCE 7 and the International Building Code. They also include the residential code's own high-wind and coastal chapters, 45 and 46. Rocky Point sits right at the threshold where that requirement starts.

Humidity is the other constant. Rocky Point carries the same long, wet Southeastern summer as the coast. A wooded lot adds a condition the beach rarely has: walls and roofs that sit in shade for much of the day. Pine straw and leaf litter gather where water should run off. Those shaded walls and roofs dry more slowly than the same assembly in full sun. Put a seasonal water table close under a crawlspace, and the house has moisture arriving from above and below. Why a shaded lot has to dry differently sets out the drainage, drying and dehumidification thinking for that kind of site.

We walk the land before anything about the house is fixed.

The formal site analysis is the first deliverable on every project we take on. On a multi-acre Rocky Point tract, it has far more ground to answer for than on a platted lot a fraction of the size. On a small coastal parcel, most of the geometry is fixed by the plat, years before anyone walks it. On five or ten wooded acres, almost nothing is fixed. Where the house sits, where the driveway comes in, and where the drainfield goes are all still open questions. How the three decisions constrain one another is an open question too. They are far cheaper to answer on paper than to discover in the ground. The land is sometimes still one family tract. There, the analysis can also help choose which corner of it becomes the homesite, before a surveyor fixes the lines for good.

Sun works differently under a canopy than it does on a cleared coastal lot, and that is part of what the analysis has to read. A stand of mature pine and hardwood can be an asset. Shade on a west wall in August cuts the cooling load in a hot, humid climate. That same stand can also be an obstacle, if it stands where the preferred orientation and the longest view happen to meet. Deciding what to clear and what to keep is a design decision. Where the stand warrants it, an arborist's read informs that decision. Height matters as much as species. A tall pine left within falling distance of the roof is a load no roof standard is written to absorb, however good its shade.

• Soils and the seasonal water table under the specific building pad, ahead of the septic evaluation.
• Where a mapped Special Flood Hazard Area or floodway boundary crosses the tract, and the regulatory flood protection elevation it sets if it does.
• Which trees earn their place for shade and screening, and which stand squarely in the way of the most buildable ground.
• Driveway length and grading, and whether an existing access easement already meets the UDO's width and length standards.
• Utility routing across the tract. A long well line and a long electrical service run are budget items on acreage, worth pricing before the site plan is final.

Access and utilities move the budget on acreage in a way a platted lot rarely does. A driveway can run several hundred feet back from NC 210 or US 117 to a chosen homesite. That is a line item with a number attached, and so is a water line or a power run of similar length. The site phase of new construction prices those runs before the site plan is final.

On land the plat hasn't already decided, the design follows the site. A driveway can route around mature oaks, at the cost of a longer run to the road. A house can turn toward a cleared field and a long view. The foundation gets chosen for the water table under that particular pad. The site-first design process carries that reasoning through every drawing. On a wooded tract it starts on foot, well before a floor plan exists. The written analysis is the first document in the client workspace for an acreage build. It is also the one to reread when a clearing crew asks which trees can come down.

Clearing the trees changes the load the frame has to carry.

The residential code treats open field as a harsher wind exposure than woodland. On a Rocky Point tract, the clearing plan decides which of the two a house stands in.

A stand of pine gives a homesite real shelter until the day it is thinned for a driveway or a building pad. After that, the pad may sit in open terrain, which the residential code defines by distance. Exposure C applies where open ground runs more than 1,500 feet from the building site in any quadrant. It also applies where a building in otherwise wooded terrain stands directly beside open ground stretching more than 600 feet. A cropped field beside a cleared homesite can meet that test, even while the rest of the tract stays wooded. The code also tells the engineer to take the category producing the larger wind forces when a site sits between two. It tells the engineer to account for vegetation as well as buildings, so the clearing plan and the structural design get drawn together. FORTIFIED Gold is pursued on every home Tropical Tides designs. Here it answers that open-field case directly: a sealed roof deck, rated openings, and a continuous load path from the roof to the foundation. An independent FORTIFIED evaluator checks that work before IBHS issues the designation. That is how the 130 mph figure, and the exposure a clearing creates, get built into the house. Before the foundation is laid out, we check the clearing limits on the ground against the exposure the structural design assumed.

Clearing the pines can turn a sheltered homesite into open terrain, and the frame is designed for the terrain it ends up in.

Airtightness is the other half of the standard, and inland it is mostly about moisture. Sub-1.0 ACH50 is a design target, carried from the drawings into construction, until the blower-door test on that house reports the number. On a shaded Rocky Point homesite the reasoning behind the target is plain. Humid outdoor air that leaks into a wall cavity meets surfaces the sun rarely warms. A wall that dries slowly cannot afford to be wetted from the inside as well. The long humid stretches of spring and fall keep that pressure on for months. Drawing the air barrier continuously across every sheathing seam, window opening and roof-to-wall junction is what closes that path before the framing crew arrives.

The foundation decision follows the same logic as everywhere else on this ground. It comes out of what the site analysis finds under the specific pad. A lot with a high seasonal water table needs a crawlspace, sealed, drained and conditioned deliberately. Or it needs a slab whose base and vapor control are designed for that water table. Mechanical equipment is sized to the load the house carries. An oversized system, picked from square footage alone, satisfies the thermostat long before it has pulled much humidity out of the air. In a shaded house on damp ground, that is the failure to design against. Drying potential in shaded wall assemblies sets out the assembly logic behind that. Load-calculated equipment sizing covers the calculation and the equipment choice that follow from it. Why open ground needs the coastal standard covers wind pressure, humidity and sun. All three reach Rocky Point much as they reach the coast, with far less salt.

The airtightness target only works with ventilation planned alongside it. A tight house takes in most of its fresh air through a filtered, controllable path. Near Holly Shelter, that path earns its place. The Wildlife Resources Commission manages the game land with prescribed fire, and on burn days smoke can drift into the communities around it. The fresh-air side of a tight house shows how a tight envelope and mechanical ventilation work together. The indoor air quality standard sets out the filtration behind it.

Rocky Point's community follows its roads.

Rocky Point organizes along its roads. NC 210 runs east across I-40 toward Hampstead on the Topsail side and the Topsail Township line. North, US 117 runs to Burgaw, where the offices that review a Rocky Point plat and permit are based.

Away from the two highways, the secondary roads and the family lanes off them carry most of the community's acreage tracts. Out toward Holly Shelter Game Land to the northeast, tracts tend to be larger and more isolated. The game land is managed by the state on its own schedule, prescribed fire included. A design there treats the boundary tree line as something that can change.

Pender's other rural communities sit farther out on the same road network, under the same UDO. Currie and Moores Creek, to the west, raise a similar mix of well, septic and acreage questions. So does Maple Hill, to the north, on ground of its own.

Each kind of homesite along those roads puts a different question first in the site analysis.

• River-adjacent ground toward the Northeast Cape Fear starts with the FIRM panel and FRIS. Next comes the Chapter 18 elevation, if the tract is mapped. Last is a check against Division of Coastal Management maps, where there is true river frontage.
• Roadside homesites along NC 210 and US 117 raise two questions. The first is an existing well and septic system to evaluate. The second is a driveway onto a state-maintained road, to plan with NCDOT.
• Deep acreage off the family lanes and out toward Holly Shelter raises different ones. There is the access easement, and the length of the driveway and utility runs. There is also the question of which trees will stand closest to the house.

Tropical Tides is based in Southport. Rocky Point is about 65 minutes up the highway from there, a drive of about 47 miles by US 17, I-140 and I-40. In Rocky Point we build through the partner model we direct, under North Carolina Residential Contractor License #109520. We're also members of the Brunswick County Home Builders Association. For a tract you're weighing, call 910-946-5512.