Century is the northernmost town in Escambia County, ZIP code 32535, sitting right against the Alabama line with Flomaton a couple of minutes up US 29 and State Road 4 heading east toward Jay. It is a real incorporated town rather than a subdivision, and it runs its own water, sewer, natural gas, and garbage service out of Town Hall on North Century Boulevard.
It was laid out in 1901 as a sawmill town for the Alger-Sullivan Lumber Company and named for the century that had just begun. The streets still follow the old land grants and the railroad instead of a grid, which is why the map here looks nothing like Cantonment or Pensacola.
The mill closed in 1957 and the housing tells that story plainly. The Alger-Sullivan Lumber Company Residential Historic District, the blocks around Pinewood Avenue, Front Street, Jefferson Avenue, Church Street, and Mayo Street, still holds about forty original mill era residences and has been on the National Register since 1989. Historically important, and in nearly every case well beyond what a buy-and-hold owner can take on.
There is no post-2002 subdivision anywhere in Century, and the county's own development records back that up. Escambia County approved more than fifty residential projects during 2025 and over four thousand homes the year before, spread across Cantonment, Beulah, Perdido, and the Pensacola fringes, and not one of them was in Century. The town is only now drafting rules to allow backyard apartments and tiny homes, which tells you how tight new supply has become.
So we look at Century houses one at a time, and we say no here more often than anywhere else we work. A house that has stood vacant through several Panhandle summers usually has roof, moisture, and system problems that add up to a renovation. What we can do is give you a real answer in a single call and hand you to a local buyer who genuinely wants that project, which saves months if you have already had offers that never closed.
When a Century home does qualify, and some do, the holding logic works in your favor more than you would expect. Prices here are low, so a wholesaler's margin has to come out of a small number and the offer gets brutal. We keep the house and rent it to people working at the correctional institution, at the school, or over in Flomaton, which is the only reason we are in this market at all rather than skipping past it.