Stand in the checkout line at a Publix on Highway 27 on a Saturday morning in February and listen. You’ll hear Manchester and São Paulo and Ontario and Osceola County, sometimes in the same conversation, usually about the same thing: the weather, the traffic on 192, whether the pool needs heating this week.
I came here the same way most of them did — as a visitor. Two decades and change later I’m still here, and I’ve spent most of that time helping people from somewhere else buy a piece of this place. It has given me an unusual vantage point on how Central Florida changed. Not the theme parks. The neighborhoods.
The Arithmetic of Arrival
Orlando welcomed 76.7 million visitors in 2025 — the most in its history — and 6.3 million of them came from outside the United States. Canada sent 1.12 million. The United Kingdom sent 933,500. Brazil sent 736,300. Those aren’t abstractions to anyone who lives west of Disney. They’re the reason our roads are busy in July, when the rest of the country has gone home.
A small but stubborn fraction of those visitors do something the tourism statistics don’t capture: they buy. Florida takes 20 percent of every foreign home purchase in the United States, more than any other state, and nearly half of those buyers pay cash. Most of them are not buying in Miami. They’re buying in Davenport, Kissimmee, Clermont and the stretch of Osceola and Polk County that we’ve all agreed to call Four Corners without ever quite agreeing where its corners are.
What That Does to a Place
You can read the effect off the storefronts. Somewhere along 192 there’s been a shop selling proper tea and Cadbury bars for as long as I can remember; when one closes another opens a mile away. The churrascarias came with the Brazilian families and stayed because everyone else discovered them too. There are soccer clubs out here fielding kids whose parents grew up in three different countries and argue about it constantly, and pleasantly, from the sideline.
There’s a subtler effect as well. Communities built around vacation homes are built differently — clubhouses, resort pools, walking loops, gates. For years the assumption was that nobody actually lived in them. That assumption stopped being true a while ago. Drive through Emerald Island or ChampionsGate on a Tuesday in October, and you’ll see school buses. The rental market didn’t disappear; a residential one grew up alongside it.
The Two-Week House
I’ve watched the same sequence play out several hundred times, and it rarely varies much.
A family visits for a week, then for two, then every year for a decade. Someone does the math on ten years of hotel rooms. They buy a house they can use six weeks a year and rent the rest, and they tell themselves it’s an investment, and financially it usually is a reasonable one. Then something shifts. The house stops being the place they stay and becomes the place they keep things — the beach chairs, the good coffee maker, the grandchildren’s height marked on a doorframe in a house 4,000 miles from where those grandchildren live.
I’ve sat at closing tables where the buyer cried and couldn’t explain why. I have a decent theory. What they bought wasn’t a rental yield. It was a fixed point — somewhere the whole family, scattered across time zones, agrees to be in the same place at the same time once a year. Very few things in modern life do that.
The Part we Don’t say Enough
Being on the receiving end of the world’s attention is not an unmixed blessing, and anyone who lives here knows the costs — the traffic, the pressure on housing, the strange experience of watching your ordinary town appear in someone else’s holiday photographs.
But I’d offer the other side of the ledger, from someone who arrived as one of those photographers.
I have clients in Yorkshire who know the shortcut to the Clermont farmers market better than half of Clermont. I’ve sold homes to Canadian couples who spent so many winters here that they now do the school run for a neighbor’s kids in April. My own children have grown up in a place where an accent is unremarkable and where nobody has ever suggested that a kid from somewhere else is from somewhere lesser. That is not a small thing to hand a child. In much of the world it is a rare thing.
Central Florida gets described as a place people pass through. From where I sit, it’s a place people keep deciding not to leave — first for a week, then for a month, then for good. That’s the story that never makes the visitor numbers. It shows up instead at the checkout on 27, on a Saturday morning in February, in four accents having one conversation about pool heat.
James Donovan is Broker/Owner of Team Donovan in Orlando, specializing in Central Florida resort and vacation-home sales. Originally from the UK, he has lived in Central Florida for more than 20 years and closed over 2,500 transactions. Reach him at James@TDFlorida.com or 407-705-2128 — TDFlorida.com.
