Price the Parcel Before Pricing the Repair
Across most of this site the sequence is: assess the damage, cost the restoration, compare against the finished value. Close to the centre of Orlando that sequence can produce a number nobody is actually offering against.
Where the location supports more than the burned house represented, a buyer is pricing the land. The condition of the structure affects their clearance cost and very little else. The full position is on our page covering homestead, rebuild limits and portability.
How Do I Tell Whether I Have a Land File?
Which Changes Who You Are Negotiating With
Housing here spans several eras from the 1910s onward. F.S. Section 193.155(4) assesses a calamity rebuild using the value as of the January 1 before the damage where the square footage stays within the threshold, with 3 years from the following January 1 to commence. The thresholds were 110 percent or 1,500 square feet, raised to 130 percent or 2,000 square feet for homestead property from the 2026 tax roll.
A rehabber prices the restored house and cares a great deal about the slab and the framing. A builder prices the parcel and cares about what may be built, access and the cost of clearing.
Those two produce numbers that are not comparable, and an owner who does not know which situation they are in cannot tell whether an offer is good. Ask each buyer which they are doing, then compare like with like.
Does the Fire Damage Matter to a Land Buyer?
We publish no land values or development capacity figures for the central neighbourhoods. What a parcel supports depends on its zoning, dimensions and access, and the city can confirm all three for your address.
The Homestead Question Still Applies
If the property was your homestead, the provisions on our rules page apply here exactly as they do anywhere else in Florida. A land buyer's higher offer does not change the fact that rebuilding within the square footage threshold would preserve your assessment cap, or that not rebuilding starts the porting window.
Those two things sit alongside the price rather than instead of it, and on a long-held property they belong in the comparison.
Parramore and Downtown in Context
The other city-permitted area of older housing, where long ownership rather than land value dominates, is covered on our page about the long-held homesteads north of downtown. Where county permitting applies and lots are more uniform, see our page for a large area of mid-century houses.
Central Orlando Questions
Two Buyers Gave Me Completely Different Numbers.
Likely one is pricing the restored house and the other the parcel. Ask each which they are doing and compare each against the right benchmark rather than against each other.
The House Is Old and Small on a Good Lot.
That is the classic land file profile here. Worth establishing what the parcel supports before accepting a figure built on the restored house.
Will You Buy on Either Basis?
Yes, and we tell you which basis our figure is built on so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.