Housing near University of Central Florida

04Getting to Creative Village and the main campus

UCF touches this city in four places, and the length of the drive depends on which one fills your calendar. The main campus sits east of downtown, UCF Downtown is folded into Creative Village, the College of Medicine sits inside Lake Nona's Medical City to the southeast, and the Rosen College of Hospitality Management sits near the convention corridor. We track drive minutes to the first three; there is no tracked drive time to Rosen College in our figures. Creative Village is the closest of those three to every one of our thirteen homes, running 6 to 17 minutes depending on which house you book, with the west-side and downtown-edge homes at the short end of that range.

Reflecting Pond (30098171300) · elisfkc from Orlando, FL, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0 · resized from 4000x2992

Amelia’s Arena Retreat is about seven minutes from Creative Village, tied with City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes and one minute behind Fruit Tree Home's six, and about 27 minutes from the main campus, one minute longer than the cluster covered in the next section. No single home wins on every route; which one suits you best depends on where your actual days are spent.

The Head Avenue and Katherine houses in the northwest run about 30 minutes to the main campus and 10 to 12 to Creative Village, in the middle of the range. Wekiwa Home, farthest west of our thirteen, is the longest drive to the main campus at 36 minutes and to Creative Village at 17.

The chart below breaks out the exact minutes from each of the thirteen homes to the main campus by road. Three homes tie for the shortest drive, and the next section covers them and what each one offers beyond the commute.

05The homes closest to UCF

Three of our thirteen homes tie for the shortest drive to the main campus, at about 26 minutes: Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando, Fruit Tree Home and City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes. All three are also close to Creative Village, and Fruit Tree Home has the shortest Creative Village drive we have, about 6 minutes, and the shortest drive to Lake Nona too, about 30 minutes.

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

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

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

The 25th Street House in Holden Heights is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow with a full-size washer and dryer and a screened front porch entry, on a quiet residential block about 5 minutes from Orlando Health and 6 minutes from downtown. It sleeps ten and carries 142 Airbnb reviews at a 4.83 rating, the most of any home we have; it is compact, with small bedrooms, which suits a solo postdoc or two colleagues well and a family of four adequately.

The Dollins House in Washington Shores is about 8 minutes from Creative Village and 26 from the main campus: four bedrooms, two bathrooms, blackout curtains in the bedrooms, and a shaded lot under mature oak trees, sleeping up to thirteen. The Sunset Lake House, also in Washington Shores, is a small three-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow under a live oak with a carport, about 7 minutes from Creative Village, and sleeps up to eight. Both are modest, older single-story homes on quiet residential streets, freshly renovated inside with updated kitchens and bathrooms; neither is new construction, and neither claims to be more than a comfortable, practical whole house.

Sleeping capacity across the three runs from eight to thirteen, so a solo researcher, a visiting couple, or a family of four or five joining a semester appointment each have a home sized for the stay rather than paying for empty bedrooms. Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando and City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes are also two to three minutes from Camping World Stadium, so a stay here can double as a game-weekend base if a visit happens to line up with one.

Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando carries a 4.15 rating across 12 Airbnb reviews and City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes a 4.4 rating across 7, and the guest quotes for each are pulled straight from those listings.

06Where the homes sit relative to campus

The map places each of the thirteen homes at its true compass bearing from the main campus, with distance from the centre standing in for drive time rather than miles. Read next to the neighborhood pages, the pattern holds: the Washington Shores homes, including Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando and City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes, sit around Lake Mann and Camping World Stadium on generous, shaded lots with off-street parking, seven to twelve minutes from downtown by SR-408 or I-4. The Holden Heights home, Fruit Tree Home, sits just south of the downtown core between Orange Blossom Trail and Orange Avenue.

None of the three sits anywhere near the east-Orlando campus itself. What they share is a short run into downtown and Creative Village, and from there the same SR-408 corridor that every other home in the portfolio uses to reach the main campus.

07The commute and the tolls

The minutes on this page are typical road-routing times without traffic, and a drive to the main campus runs longer at the edges of a 9 a.m. class or an evening lab, when SR-408 and the east-Orlando interchanges carry the heaviest volume of the day. A schedule with office hours or a lab that starts mid-morning usually clears the worst of it, and outside those two windows the same drive is a straightforward highway run.

SR-408 is a toll road, collected by transponder or by plate. Over a four-month semester of round trips, setting up a SunPass or E-PASS in the first week is worth it, since paying by plate costs more per trip. I-4 is free but carries the heaviest volume in the metro if your route touches it. If your role only calls for the occasional trip out to the main campus rather than a daily commute, paying by plate for those few visits is often simpler than setting up a transponder at all.

Parking is never the issue at the house. Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando and Fruit Tree Home each have a private driveway, and City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes has a carport under a live oak, so a car has somewhere to sit overnight and a visiting couple with two cars is not hunting for street space. Campus parking permits and visitor arrangements are UCF's to explain; check with your department or host before your first day.

08Billing a department, grant or institution

A visiting appointment rarely lines up with a normal twelve-month lease, and a hotel adds up fast over a semester. We write the agreement to fit: to the visiting scholar directly, or to the university, a department, or a grant account, whichever your paperwork needs. Every stay gets a written agreement naming the home, the dates, the rate and the deposit, plus itemized monthly receipts a department or grant administrator can process.

• A written agreement naming the home, the dates, the rate and the deposit
• Itemized monthly receipts a department or grant administrator can process
• Net-30 terms for a department or grant account on a signed purchase order, with the first booking paid up front while that paperwork is arranged

A W-9 and a certificate of insurance are available on request; Libema carries a commercial landlord liability policy. Extensions run month by month, so an appointment that grows from one semester to two, or a grant that gets renewed, is a simple conversation rather than a new search. If you already know an appointment will run two semesters back to back, telling us early makes it simpler to hold the same home both times, the same way we do for a travel nurse whose contract extends.

09A month near Creative Village and downtown

For a stay based at Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando or City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes, groceries mean a short drive to the Walmart Supercenter on West Princeton Street or Presidente Supermarket on Pine Hills Road, and the compact Publix at The Paramount on Lake Eola downtown. Fruit Tree Home in Holden Heights is close to that same downtown Publix and to a Publix on South Orange Avenue. For food, Nikki's Place on South Orange Blossom Trail has served soul food since 1999, a few minutes from the Washington Shores homes; downtown and Church Street, five to ten minutes east, cover a wider range of restaurants and bars. Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando is also about 8 minutes from the Central Florida Fairgrounds, if a fair or a concert at the Amphitheater happens to line up with your stay.

Lake Lorna Doone Park, a twelve-acre city park just north of Camping World Stadium, has a walking loop, outdoor fitness stations and a splash pad, close enough to City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes to be a daily walk. Lake Eola Park downtown adds a roughly one-mile sidewalk loop, swan boats to rent, and a Sunday farmers market. The Downtown Orlando YMCA on North Mills Avenue is a full family gym with two pools, a few minutes from the Holden Heights home. Pharmacies sit along Orange Blossom Trail and West Colonial, plus the Publix pharmacy at Lake Eola and CVS and Walgreens downtown. If you need a pharmacy or an urgent visit while you are here, Orlando Health / ORMC is minutes from all three homes.

College Park's Edgewater Drive, a short drive north of the Holden Heights home, has Foxtail Coffee for a laptop session and Cups & Pups for a dog-friendly stop; Loch Haven Park gathers the Orlando Museum of Art, the Orlando Science Center and Orlando Shakes a few minutes further on, and Harry P. Leu Gardens, a fifty-acre botanical garden on the lake, is a little farther still. East of downtown, the Mills 50 district holds the largest Vietnamese-American community in Florida, and Z Asian there has earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand. A car is the practical choice for a UCF stay based in this cluster; the main campus is a highway commute, not a bus ride. Local errands rarely need the highway at all: West Colonial Drive and Orange Blossom Trail handle most of the driving between the Washington Shores homes and the shops and restaurants already listed. Downtown itself has LYNX Central, the free LYMMO circulator, and two SunRail stations for the days you would rather leave the car at the house. Our Washington Shores & West Orlando area guide and Downtown & Close-In area guide go further into both neighborhoods.

10For families and medical students at Lake Nona

Every home in the portfolio sits 30 to 40 minutes from the Lake Nona area, since none of the thirteen are on the southeast side of the metro. Fruit Tree Home is the closest at 30 minutes, and Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando, City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes and Amelia’s Arena Retreat follow in a three-way tie at 31. For a medical student or resident on a Lake Nona rotation, that is a highway commute rather than a short hop, worth weighing against a west or downtown-side neighborhood with more going on off campus.

A project team whose work touches both the main campus and Creative Village downtown ends up splitting time between the two; a west-side or downtown-edge home keeps the shorter of those commutes close and accepts the longer one as the cost of also being near downtown.

For a family arriving for orientation, a ceremony, or graduation, a short nightly or weekly stay runs through each home's Airbnb and Vrbo listing rather than the monthly agreement. A family of four fits comfortably at Fruit Tree Home, and the four-bedroom Dollins House has room for grandparents or siblings staying the same weekend. Both keep the group together and cooking at home instead of splitting across hotel rooms. Our relocation and long-stay page and student, intern and resident housing page cover the longer appointments that start this way.

11What's in the house

Every home comes furnished and ready from the first night: beds and linens, a stocked kitchen, a washer and dryer, Wi-Fi, and private parking. Exact inclusions are confirmed in writing when you book.

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

None of the three homes has a pool; they are ordinary residential houses. Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando and Fruit Tree Home are two of the six homes on the site with a published street address; City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes is one of the six where we publish the neighborhood and zip code and share the exact address at booking. City and Stadium Sanctuary Vibes also has a breakfast bar off the kitchen and wood-look floors throughout, and Game Day Getaway-Downtown Orlando has ceiling fans in the bedrooms and the living room, extras specific to those two homes beyond the standard list above.

12What guests said

These are real reviews from Fruit Tree Home's own Airbnb listing, quoted verbatim with the reviewer's name and month. Every home page carries its own set, and the full wall of reviews across the portfolio is on our reviews page.