Daily Real Estate News  |  March 31, 2008

Disney Proposes Luxury Development
If you’d like to live in a luxury house next door to Mickey Mouse, Florida’s Disney World is about to make your dream come true.

The proposed property will be built on the banks of Walt Disney World canals. The project could encompass as many as 373 single-family homes, 200 multifamily homes, and 60 time-share units.

A Four-Seasons Hotel is expected to anchor the resort. Marilyn Waters, spokeswoman for Walt Disney Imagineering, the Disney office that handles real-estate development, compared this proposed resort to the Four Seasons-anchored Aviara community in San Diego, a high-end vacation community for people rich enough to have multimillion-dollar second or third homes.

“This is in essence the coming together of the Disney brand and the Four Seasons brand,” she says.

Disney won’t discuss the issue, but speculation is that given the current state of the U.S. real estate market, the luxury homes will be snapped up by wealthy foreign buyers.

Source: Orlando Sentinel, Scott Powers (03/28/08)