Housing near Orlando VA Healthcare System

04Getting to Lake Nona from each of our clusters

The Orlando VA Medical Center sits at Lake Nona, on the opposite side of the metro from the neighborhoods where our thirteen homes are. Our homes are grouped on the west, northwest and downtown edges of Orlando, and Lake Nona is out to the southeast, past downtown and the airport corridor, which is why this is one of the longer regular drives on the site no matter which home you start from.

Orlando VA Medical Center · Jessica Feinleib · CC BY-SA 4.0 · resized from 4032x3024

Lake Baldwin, the VA's other campus east of downtown, sits closer to several of our homes for a simple reason: it sits closer to downtown itself, which is where our Parramore and Holden Heights homes already are. If your appointments or your assignment run through Lake Baldwin instead of the Lake Nona medical center, ask us which home puts you nearest that side of the city rather than the southeast.

The 25th Street House in Holden Heights is closest to the Lake Nona medical center at about 32 minutes. Three homes sit tied just behind it at about 33 minutes each: the Amelia House in Parramore, the Dollins House in Washington Shores, and the Sunset Lake House, also in Washington Shores. The map below places every home by its true compass direction and drive time from the medical center, and the chart lines up all thirteen times side by side so you can compare your own options at a glance rather than guess from a neighborhood name.

05The commute across town

A drive of half an hour or more crosses most of metro Orlando, so the route matters as much as the minutes on the page. From the west and downtown side of the city, the road east toward Lake Nona runs through or around downtown before it picks up the corridor toward the airport and the medical campus beyond it. None of that changes the figures here: the times listed are typical road-routing times without traffic, and Orlando's rush hours add real minutes to a drive this long, in the morning push into downtown and the evening push back out of it.

Because the trip runs across the whole metro rather than a short local hop, it is worth planning for it the way you would any regular commute rather than a once-a-week errand. A contractor working a standard week is making this drive most days for the length of the assignment, so the difference between a 32-minute run and a 42-minute one adds up over a month in a way it would not for a single visit. The exact tolls on your route will vary, but a SunPass or E-PASS transponder is worth setting up in your first week if you expect to make this drive several times a week; it costs less per trip than paying by license plate.

Parking is never the trouble on our end of the trip. Every home comes with its own driveway, carport or parking pad, so a contractor arriving late from a long day at the medical center, or a family heading out before sunrise for an early appointment, has a private spot waiting rather than a shared lot to search. What parking looks like once you reach the VA's own campus is something to confirm with your facility or your assignment coordinator before your first day.

06Per diem paperwork and billing for VA contractors

Federal per-diem travel comes with its own paperwork, and we build our agreements to fit it. Every stay gets a written agreement naming the home, the dates, the rate and the deposit, plus itemized monthly receipts you or your travel coordinator can file against a lodging allowance. If your employer or the contracting company is the party responsible for payment, we write the agreement to the company, invoice it monthly in the company's name, and provide a W-9 and a certificate of insurance on request; Libema carries a commercial landlord liability policy.

Rates are never posted on the site. We confirm the monthly rate, the deposit and the pet policy in writing once we know your dates and which home you want, so the figure you get matches the lodging cap you are working against rather than a number pulled from a page before your assignment is finalized. Net-30 terms are available to an established company, agency or contracting firm on a signed agreement or purchase order; an individual traveler's first booking is paid up front. However you reach us, by phone or by email, we aim to answer the same day so the paperwork is not the thing holding up your travel orders.

Assignments change. A rotation gets extended, a contract gets renewed, or a family's stay near a patient runs longer than the original estimate. Whenever that happens, tell us as soon as you know. Extensions run month by month at the same terms, and we hold the following month for you where we can rather than asking you to rebook from scratch or move to a different house partway through.

07A month for travel nurses and relocating clinicians

A VA travel nurse on a short rotation and a clinician relocating to take a permanent post at Lake Nona or Lake Baldwin end up wanting the same thing day to day: a whole house with a kitchen you can actually cook in, laundry you do not have to leave the property for, and a bedroom that is made up and ready the night you arrive. The Dollins House has blackout curtains in its bedrooms, which matters if your shifts run overnight and you need the room dark at nine in the morning after a long drive home.

For a relocation, the month-by-month structure is the whole point: you take a house while you look for a neighborhood and a permanent place to live, without signing a year-long lease before you know the city. Extend a second month or a third on the same written agreement, and move out on notice once your own house or apartment is ready. The kitchens come stocked with cookware and dishes, so the first grocery run after you arrive is for food, not equipment, and Wi-Fi is live from day one rather than something you have to schedule an installer for.

None of the four closest homes has a dedicated desk, so if paperwork or continuing-education work is part of your routine, a dining table does the job. The Amelia House's dining area seats four, Fruit Tree Home has a glass-top dining table of the same size, and the Sunset Lake House's dining table also seats four. Our travel nurse and medical housing page goes further into stipend paperwork and the homes near the other Orlando hospital campuses.

08For a veteran's family staying nearby

A long course of care changes the shape of a family's month, and a hotel room near the medical center gets small and expensive fast once more than one relative needs to be close by. A whole house gives everyone a bedroom, a kitchen for real meals instead of takeout every night, and a living room where the person who took the overnight watch can rest during the day while the rest of the household keeps moving.

The written agreement and the monthly billing work the same way for a family as they do for a traveling clinician: one rate, one deposit, itemized receipts, and an extension by the month if a course of treatment runs longer than planned, which it often does. Nightly and weekly stays through each home's Airbnb and Vrbo listings cover a shorter visit or an appointment with a known end date, so a family does not have to commit to a full month for a single procedure. Our page on housing for patients' families goes further into how that works.

We are careful with the language here on purpose: Libema Properties is a private, independent housing provider and is not part of the VA system in any way. Our part in this is a clean, ready house within about an hour's drive of the medical center at most, and a fast answer when you call, not any role in your family member's care.

09The homes closest to this cluster

South of Downtown

Holden Heights

Fruit Tree Home

3 bd 2 ba Sleeps 10

6 min downtown · 5 min ORMC · 13 min Universal

Travel Nurse & MedicalInsurance & Displacement

Downtown Orlando

Parramore / Downtown Edge

Amelia’s Arena Retreat

4 bd 2 ba Sleeps 8

7 min downtown · 9 min ORMC · 16 min Universal

Travel Nurse & MedicalInsurance & Displacement

West Orlando

Washington Shores

Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando

4 bd 2 ba Sleeps 13

7 min downtown · 7 min ORMC · 16 min Universal

Travel Nurse & MedicalInsurance & Displacement

West Orlando

Washington Shores / Lake Sunset

City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes

3 bd 1 ba Sleeps 8

7 min downtown · 8 min ORMC · 15 min Universal

Game Days, Concerts & WeekendsTravel Nurse & Medical

Fruit Tree Home in Holden Heights is closest at about 32 minutes. It is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow that sleeps 10, with full-size laundry on site, keyless entry, a screened front porch and a fenced backyard, and it carries 142 Airbnb reviews at a 4.83 rating, the most of any home in the portfolio. Its bedrooms are on the small side, which suits one traveler or two colleagues well and a small family adequately, and we say so plainly on its own page.

Three homes tie at about 33 minutes out. Amelia’s Arena Retreat in Parramore has four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sleeps count of 8, with one bedroom carrying its own attached bathroom and a fenced backyard under mature shade trees, useful if two people on the assignment keep different hours and want separate space. Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando in Washington Shores has four bedrooms, a sleeps count of 13, blackout curtains for anyone working nights, wall-mounted TVs in the bedrooms, and a driveway on a shaded lot of mature oaks, a fit for a bigger family or a small group of contractors sharing one house. City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes, also in Washington Shores, is smaller: a three-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow under a live oak that sleeps up to 8, with a carport, a white kitchen and a dining table for four, two minutes from Camping World Stadium. Its fenced backyard is being refreshed and is for walking pets only for now, worth knowing if pets are traveling with you.

All four sit on the west and downtown side of the city, so the crossing to Lake Nona runs about the same long way from any of them; what differs between the four is the size and layout of the house waiting for you at the end of that drive.

10What's in the house

Every one of the thirteen homes comes furnished from the first night: beds and linens, a stocked kitchen with cookware and dishes, a washer and dryer, Wi-Fi, and private parking in a driveway, carport or parking pad. Exact inclusions are confirmed in writing when you book, since the details vary a little from house to house.

Exact inclusions vary a little by home and are confirmed in writing when you book.

None of the thirteen homes has a pool; they are residential houses, not a resort property. Bed and bath counts match what each home's own listing publishes, and a sofa is never counted as a bed. Six of the thirteen, the 25th Street, Amelia and Dollins houses among them, publish a street address on the site; the other six publish a neighborhood and zip code and share the exact address once you book. If pets are part of the household coming with you, several homes accept them, and the policy and any deposit are confirmed in writing before you commit.

11Around Holden Heights, Parramore and Washington Shores

These three neighborhoods sit on the close-in and west side of Orlando, well away from Lake Nona itself, but they are where daily life happens during a long per-diem assignment or a family's stay. The Publix at The Paramount on Lake Eola is downtown's grocery store, a compact urban Publix and about the only supermarket you can walk to in the city core, an easy trip from Amelia’s Arena Retreat's edge of downtown. South of downtown near Holden Heights there is a separate Publix on South Orange Avenue, the more local option for Fruit Tree Home. From the Dollins and Sunset Lake houses in Washington Shores, the Walmart Supercenter on West Princeton Street is the nearest big-box grocery, with the same downtown Publix stores a short drive further east.

For a meal that is not from your own kitchen, Nikki's Place on South Orange Blossom Trail has served soul food since 1999 and sits only minutes from Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando. Downtown Orlando's Church Street and the Mills 50 district are a short drive from the Amelia and 25th Street houses for a wider range of restaurants. College Park, a short drive north of those two homes, adds Loch Haven Park's museums and the Edgewater Drive strip of cafes and kitchens for a day off between shifts. Lake Eola Park downtown has a roughly one-mile sidewalk loop and a Sunday farmers market, and the Downtown Orlando YMCA on North Mills Avenue is a full gym with two pools if you want to keep up a routine during a long stay. Pharmacies line Orange Blossom Trail and West Colonial Drive, with a Publix pharmacy at Lake Eola and CVS and Walgreens downtown.

A car is the only practical way to reach Lake Nona from any of these homes, but around the homes themselves, downtown's two SunRail stations and the free LYMMO bus mean the car can sit some days if you are only headed into the city core. Our downtown and close-in area guide and Washington Shores area guide go further into daily life around each cluster.

12What guests said

These are real reviews from Fruit Tree Home's own Airbnb listing, the closest of our homes to the Orlando VA Medical Center, quoted exactly as guests wrote them along with their name and the month of the stay. Every home carries its own set of reviews on its page, and the full collection across the portfolio is on our reviews page.