4 guides north-west of downtown. College Park was platted in the 1920s land boom with streets named after universities (Princeton, Harvard, Yale) on a chain of lakes, and it kept its bungalow stock and its main street on Edgewater Drive when most of Orlando was rebuilding itself around cars. It is old Orlando in the way that Seminole Heights is old Tampa. The other three are unsettled in different ways. Park Lake/Highland has the same pre-war stock as the historic district next door and none of the designation, because not one of the six districts the city has created since 1980 covers these streets. Lake Fairview is a 250-acre wedge holding one shore of a 405-acre lake whose open water is not in the city at all. Rosemont is 1,167 acres of late-1970s subdivision whose golf course closed in 2014.
What you are buying here is mature canopy, small lots and a walkable commercial strip, which in central Florida is a scarce combination. What you are buying with it is 1920s construction: most of the stock predates every modern wind code, and a wind mitigation report will move the insurance quote more than the price does. The other thing to establish is the boundary. Winter Park is a separate municipality with its own council and its own millage a short distance east, and the line between the two is not obvious on the ground. Two more questions decide a purchase further north. Around Lake Fairview, two addresses a few hundred yards apart can sit in different jurisdictions: the city's own levy inside the 18.0878 total mills is 6.6500, and an unincorporated address is not charged it. In Rosemont the question is time, because council rezoned the closed golf course in December 2021 for up to 5,650 homes and none of it is built.
4 communities, guide by guide
College Park
1920s bungalows on a chain of lakes, with streets named after universities and a main street that still works.
- 103.9 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 1920s
- The decade the neighborhood was platted and largely built
Lake Fairview
The north end of Edgewater Drive, where College Park's main street runs out into a ski lake and the prices step down with it.
- 95.9 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 250 acres
- Extent of neighborhood 111 on the city's political neighborhoods layer, 2026
Park Lake/Highland
The 1920s houses of the historic district next door without the designation: no local historic district covers Park Lake/Highland, the second-lowest measured ground of any Orlando guide, a few inches above Thornton Park.
- 76.2 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 263 acres
- The area the City of Orlando's political neighborhoods layer gives Park Lake/Highland, 2026
Rosemont
Nearly twelve hundred acres of 1970s subdivision on Lake Orlando in the far north-west, and the cheapest ground inside the city limits with a golf course on it.
- 82.0 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 1,167 acres
- Extent of neighborhood 72 on the city's political neighborhoods layer, 2026
Photographs: A cottage on Gerda Terrace, College Park by Gerdater, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · College Park by Eric Friedebach, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Downtown from Lake Eola by JER3L1337, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
