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How close to Disney does your short-term rental really need to be?
Ask the internet and you'll get the same answer every time: as close as possible, ten to fifteen minutes, buy in a resort community. After ten years operating short-term rentals in Central Florida, I think that advice is incomplete, and often expensive.
By Paul Kim, licensed real estate agent, Norkis & Co Realty. Ten years as an STR host and operator in the Orlando area.
Closer isn't always better
Start with the thing nobody mentions in the listing copy: the closer you sit to the parks, the more tourist traffic sits between your guests and everything else. Groceries, dinner, the highway on the way out of town. Your guests feel that on every trip that isn't to a park, not just the one drive to the gate. Proximity to Disney is also proximity to Disney traffic, and that's a daily tax on the stay.
Right next to the parks, your biggest competitor is the parks themselves
When your property sits in the immediate parks area, you're not only competing with other rentals. You're competing with the resorts the parks own. Disney and Universal both run value hotels, a Pop Century on the Disney side, a Terra Luna on the Universal side, and those are just examples, not the only ones, that drop specials in the slow seasons. Book one direct and the guest pays no third-party booking fee and no separate cleaning fee, and they get perks a rental can't match: early park entry, free transportation to the parks, and no theme-park parking fee.
Run the math as a guest and staying on-property often makes the same or better sense than a rental a few minutes away. So if you want to win right next to the parks, you have to offer something they can't. Space is the obvious one, a larger unit or a whole house, which is genuinely hard to find in the immediate parks area. The other is a real concept: a reason to choose you that has nothing to do with being a few hundred yards closer.
The proximity trap
This is the mistake I watch buyers walk into. They pay up to be close, then rent at the same rate everyone else in the area gets. You bought expensive and you earn at market. The distance you paid for never shows up in your revenue, it just sits in your mortgage.
"Close to Disney" is the wrong question. Close to what?
Orlando isn't one destination, and the guest your rental is built for decides what "close" even means. Disney is only one of the reasons people come:
- The convention center pulls business travelers who don't care how close you are to Magic Kingdom.
- ESPN Wide World of Sports fills entire weeks with national cheer, dance, and volleyball competitions, families who need to be near the complex, not the castle.
- World-class golf brings golf trips that measure distance in tee times.
- Greater-Florida trips treat Orlando as one stop in a bigger journey, other cities, a cruise out of Port Canaveral, Kennedy Space Center. For that guest, an EV charging station at the property can matter more than park proximity.
Pick the guest first. Then "proximity" means proximity to their reason for coming, which often isn't Disney at all. That's the whole idea behind building a concept instead of a theme.
The drive-time number is usually a lie
One more thing, because it causes real problems. Almost every listing quotes drive time at off-peak. Real traffic here is not off-peak. We've had guests complain about it directly. If your entire pitch is "X minutes to Disney," you've set an expectation that I-4 and 192 are under no obligation to honor, and a disappointed guest writes it into the review.
The bottom line
In my experience, for a good listing, one with a real concept, well managed, clean, and priced right, there is no reliable correlation between how close you are to the parks and what you can charge. Meanwhile plenty of close-in properties struggle just to hold their occupancy and their rate. Proximity to Disney is not the moat. The concept is.
This is my opinion from operating in this market, not a guarantee of any result. Every property, concept, and season is different.
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