The Smith Family’s villa crusade (Lauren, Dave, Kirby & Shaunna)

Five years ago, we decided that we were going to buy a holiday home in Orlando Florida with the intention of renting it to like mind people who also wished to enjoy the delights of Mickey Mouse and all that Disney world has to offer. We did all the research on the web, thought we had it cracked, and flew out to buy our new dream villa home.

We stayed at a friend’s villa, started the rounds to all the new developments for new plots (or lots as they call them) and found they were all sold.  We turned our resources to looking at resale homes and we found many beautiful properties, but then we were then faced with understanding of the US process, Property Management companies, finance options, opening a US bank account, tax laws and how to rent out the villa (e.g. marketing / securing rental income) and trust the people who were involved in keeping the property to a high standard.  This process began to eat big time into our vacation and became a full time job “On Holiday” just what we did not need.

Now what are friends for, well when we returned to our friend’s villa we found on her notice board a business card (yes if only we had looked first, but remember we thought we had cracked it). The business card was of one of her friend’s who left the UK some 7 years ago and became a full time qualified professional Realtor in Florida. Welcome Steve Wilson, not only did he speak our language, he understood the whole process of buying a home (at this point our vacation has now returned back to being a holiday).

Within a very short space of time Steve had “found” us a plot on Calabay Parc (Yes they were sold out when we asked) which we paid the reservation fee securing our dream villa there and then. Steve then helped us with all the processes that we were struggling with above and within a few weeks, we successfully completed contracts buying our first holiday home – as easy as that. Even when we were back in the UK Steve kept us informed via email and telephone making sure we were happy that all was well ensuring we had peace of mind. Since then we have successfully purchased many more homes and developed our rental and property management services into what we have today.