© andreapricot
The vacation home rental industry in Orlando, Florida has been attempting to avoid many of the local government regulations that apply to hotels, but they have run into an influential opponent in the state Capitol, which is the Walt Disney World company.
Disney considers offsite vacation rentals as competition to the 25,000 hotel rooms and time-share units that the company owns in the city. They have joined with local governments to oppose a bill that would have invalidated existing city and county laws that prohibit vacation rentals or require them to comply with the same regulations as commercial hotels. This legislation ended up being rewritten to placate Disney, and the new version prohibits only new laws that target vacation rentals, while keeping current regulations in place. This means that short-term vacation rentals in Orange County will continue to be allowed only on properties zoned for commercial or industrial uses.
