I own a property in the Disney market and co-host/manage another 25 in the area.
Disney I think is a good market if your goals are more aligned with traditional long term real estate goals, and a bad market if your goals are more immediate gratification and short term cash flow.
The major benefit of the Disney market is that it's about the safest market you can find from a long-term perspective. If you buy in the proper STR areas there is practically zero regulation risk. It is my personal opinion that 50 years from now STR in residential zones will be illegal in 100% of the country. STRs in their current form are simply big hotels, and legislation has been slow to catch up because in their original form they were more conducive to residence (someone crashing on your couch for $39/night).
When in that 50 year span a particular market will catch up and require hotel/tourist zoning for STRs is a coinflip, but in the Disney market it's already done. The STR neighborhoods here are built specifically for STR. The houses are not meant to be lived in full time. They don't even have mailboxes. To run an STR here you get a hotel license. They are already treated as hotels, there isn't really any risk of being regulated out.
Additionally, from a demand perspective Orlando is built around tourism. 20 years from now people will still be going there for Disney/Universal/Seaworld etc. A lot of other markets 20 years from now could be ghost towns with little demand.
But on the flipside, that safety/security comes with lessor immediate returns, as is a normal balance with investments (more risk traditionally equals more short term gain potential). If you're buying a place turnkey you're unlikely to be able cash flow positive or even break even, especially if you're paying a manager (although management fees are the lowest in the country here due to all of the competition). There is just too much competition.
If you're willing to invest heavily into theming you can force cashflow, but even that is going to be tight unless you really hit it out of the park with your theming. Because again, there are lots of people that are theming, competition is VERY high here. A 99th percentile property in a different market is a 70th percentile home here. To be 99th percentile you need a Bowling Alley AND a laser tag arena INSIDE the house.
So it comes down to goals. Are you looking from a more traditional real estate perspective where you're trying to acquire an asset for long term preservation of wealth, tax advantages, to have guests help out with the mortgage payemnts, potentially have rents and home value increase in time with normal inflation, and are okay with the idea of paying some amount out of the pocket some (most?) months out of the year? Then the Disney area may be a good fit.
But if you watched some youtube channel with someone, who seems to get a deceitfully large percentage of their info from selling courses, preaching the dream of massive upfront cashflow that you can then leverage into another down payment next year and so on while exponentially increasing your wealth so you can quit your job and live on the beach in Aruba, Disney is the wrong market for you unless you're willing to invest substantially into super tippy top end theming.
The good news if you're in the former camp is that prices have come down quite a bit here compared to most of the country with all of the saturation/competion. Not quite to pre-covid levels but homes that were $550k pre-covid can be had in the high $600's now, down from a peak of around $900k. So unlike markets like 30A and the like where prices have remained rather steady despite the returns being extremely poor at current home prices, I think we've probably already hit the bottom (or at least near it) on home values.
