Leland is the biggest town in Brunswick County and the fastest-changing address in the Wilmington region. The town’s community profile puts the certified population at 33,065, up 44.33% from 22,908 in 2020, in a county that grew 24% over the same period to 169,448 people. Leland was farmland within living memory and is now where a large share of the region’s new houses get built.

The town is young on paper. Leland residents voted 427 to 42 to incorporate on September 12, 1989, around the land between the Brunswick River, Sturgeon Creek and U.S. 74/76, per the town’s history page. It now covers about 28.4 square miles, per the Census Bureau’s 2024 gazetteer file, and listings carry ZIP 28451 or, toward Winnabow, 28479.

What people usually mean by Leland is one of the master-planned communities along U.S. 17 and Highway 74/76. Brunswick Forest, Compass Pointe, Magnolia Greens, Waterford and Mallory Creek each have their own amenities, builders and price bands, and we have separate guides for Brunswick Forest, Compass Pointe and Magnolia Greens. Outside the gates there is older Leland: ranch houses on Village Road, wooded lots off the two-lane roads, pockets that still look the way the town looked in 1995.

The housing stock skews new because it is new. The Census Bureau’s 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey puts the median year built at 2010, with 10,659 of 13,219 occupied homes owner-occupied.

Reading every page of Coldwell Banker’s Leland listings on September 22, 2026, we counted 498 active residential listings asking $150,000 to $1,400,000, median $412,447. By type, 387 single-family homes ran $225,000 to $1,400,000, median $439,900, and 103 townhomes ran $210,000 to $575,000, median $329,112. The handful under $200,000 were manufactured homes.

On the sale side, our Brunswick County market update put the county median sale price at $409,000 for the three months ending August 2026, up 2.2% year over year, with a 98-day median time on market against 67 days a year earlier. The Census Bureau’s 2020 to 2024 estimate of median home value in Leland is $398,900.

Of those 498 active listings, 227 were flagged as new construction. You are competing with builders more than with other buyers, and builders here compete on incentives rather than sticker price. A rate buydown plus a closing credit can beat a resale that looks cheaper on paper. If you tour a model home, register our team on the first visit or you may lose representation on that purchase.

Leland is not a restaurant town yet, and we would rather say so than oversell it. What it has is a real parks system, two well-regarded golf courses, a pickleball scene that has outgrown the county and, at the Leland Cultural Arts Center, the arts hub for Brunswick County. The anchors:

• Cape Fear National, the championship course at the center of Brunswick Forest, open to public play
• Magnolia Greens Golf Club, 27 holes that have hosted PGA and USGA qualifying events
• House of Pickleball at 115 Kay Todd Road SE, six indoor cushioned courts anchoring one of the largest pickleball communities in the southeastern United States
• Founders Park, the town’s first park at 113 Town Hall Drive, eight acres with a playground, splash pad, stage and a 0.6-mile paved path
• Westgate Nature Park, boardwalk trails and an outdoor classroom over the wetlands behind the U.S. 17 strip, expanding toward nearly five miles of trails

For food, Visit Leland points people to Papi’s Chicken, The Pit Backyard BBQ, Farm House Kitchen, PT’s Grille and Shuckin’ Shack Oyster Bar. The town calendar carries the In Bloom Festival, the Leland Fall Festival and Leland in Lights, and Cypress Cove Park at 844 Appleton Way NE launches kayaks onto Sturgeon Creek. If you want a dense dining scene, it is ten minutes across the bridge, and most residents treat downtown Wilmington as their restaurant district.

Leland is served by Brunswick County Schools, and the assignment depends on which end of town you are in. We ran real Leland addresses through the district’s address lookup tool on September 22, 2026:

• Brunswick Forest and south Leland: Town Creek Elementary, Town Creek Middle, North Brunswick High
• Central and west Leland, including Compass Pointe: Lincoln Elementary, Leland Middle, North Brunswick High
• The Belville end: Belville Elementary, Leland Middle, North Brunswick High

Every Leland address we tested feeds North Brunswick High. On the state’s 2024-25 School Report Cards, Town Creek Elementary earned a B with a school performance score of 74 and exceeded its growth target. Belville Elementary and North Brunswick High both earned a C at 63, with North Brunswick meeting growth and Belville not meeting it. Town Creek Middle earned a C at 59, Lincoln Elementary a D at 52 and Leland Middle a D at 47, and none of those three met growth.

We would rather you hear that from us than find it after closing. Schools are the most common reason a buyer picks one side of Leland over the other, and the gap between Town Creek Elementary and the rest is wide enough to matter. Boundaries move in a district absorbing this much growth, so confirm the assignment for an address before you write an offer.

Leland sits at the junction of U.S. 17 and U.S. 74/76 with I-140 wrapping the north side, which is most of why the town looks the way it does. The Town of Leland puts downtown Wilmington at ten minutes, Wilmington International Airport at 11 miles, the Port of Wilmington at seven miles and Myrtle Beach at 90 minutes. For the beaches, routing estimates from the Village Road area put Wrightsville Beach at about 16 miles and 28 minutes, Carolina Beach at about 21 miles and 35 minutes, and Oak Island at about 28 miles and 41 minutes. Treat those as approximate and add time for the bridge.

The bridge is the honest caveat. Everything between Leland and Wilmington funnels across the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, a four-lane vertical-lift span built in 1969 that NCDOT calls functionally obsolete, with lift openings and maintenance making travel times unreliable. Replacement is funded: NCDOT lists it as project HB-0039, with a $242 million federal grant awarded in 2024 against a $1.1 billion estimated cost. Good news for the next decade, a headache in the meantime. If you will commute to New Hanover County, drive it at 7:45 a.m. before you buy, not at 2 p.m. on a Saturday.

Flooding is address-specific here, not town-wide. We queried FEMA’s National Flood Hazard Layer on September 22, 2026 at points across Leland. The Village Road corridor, Brunswick Forest, Compass Pointe, Waterford, Magnolia Greens, Westgate and Mallory Creek Drive all returned Zone X, an area of minimal flood hazard. Points along Sturgeon Creek and the Brunswick River edge near Belville returned Zone AE, a Special Flood Hazard Area where a federally backed mortgage requires flood insurance. Pull the determination for the parcel. Two houses on one street can fall on opposite sides of it.

Insurance costs more than inland buyers expect. Carriers writing in Brunswick County commonly apply a separate wind and hail or named-storm deductible, often a percentage of insured value rather than a flat amount. Get a bound quote during due diligence, and read the deductible line before the premium.

Almost everything new is an HOA community. Brunswick Forest, Compass Pointe, Magnolia Greens, Waterford and Mallory Creek each carry their own dues, amenity structures and sometimes a separate club membership. Dues vary widely, so we pull the current budget, the reserve study and the covenants before you go under contract. Older Leland outside the subdivisions often has no HOA, and some of those properties are on private well and septic. Confirm which one you are buying.

Water and sewer capacity is a live question. As of September 22, 2026 Brunswick County was under a Stage 1 voluntary water conservation alert, extreme drought and a burn ban. At the September 21, 2026 Board of Commissioners meeting, staff briefed the board on wastewater capacity, allocation and planned treatment expansions, and recommended a workshop on how much new capacity to build. The county has also spent years removing PFAS from Cape Fear River source water. None of this stops a closing. All of it is worth understanding first.

Growth is the trade. A 44% population increase in four years buys new schools, retail and roads. It also buys construction traffic and neighbors whose back-lot view becomes the next phase. If you want a finished neighborhood today, Leland is the wrong town and we will say so early.