Helped a colleague relocate to Orlando before convention season, what tripped her up
A colleague of mine handles registration desks for medical conferences and she took a permanent contract with a venue group in Orlando in February. She asked me to help because I did the same move in 2019 and she does not read contracts patiently.
Her assumption was that Orlando is one market with one price. It is not. What her budget bought near Lake Nona and what it bought near Kissimmee were two different lives, and the drive to the convention centre at seven in the morning is not the same drive as at four in the afternoon.
The part that actually cost her time: short term rental restrictions. She wanted a place she could sublet during the weeks she travels, and half the communities she liked forbid rentals under six months. That is in the HOA documents, not in the listing, and nobody volunteers it.
What we ended up doing was boring and it worked. Two evenings with https://florida-real.estate/ open, filtering by area and writing down what the same square footage costs in each one, then calling the HOA of the three finalists before she looked at a single kitchen.
She signed in April, fifteen minutes from the venue. She says the summer is unbearable and she is not moving again.