What a One Bedroom Actually Rents For in Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia Counties

By Brenden Rendo, Realtor · Updated October 21, 2026

A post on r/orlando titled "You shouldn't need a roommate to afford a one bedroom apartment" picked up 941 upvotes and 352 comments after it went up on September 21, 2026, and it is still the loudest housing thread in the local feed a month later. The poster said a 600 square foot one-bedroom runs $1,800 or more while new complexes sit half empty. Both of those are the poster's read, not measured facts, and the market data does not support the second one: vacancy is improving, slowest in the newest buildings. So I pulled the numbers: what one-bedrooms actually closed at in Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties, what a comparable place costs to own, and where the gap between the two really sits.

What one-bedrooms actually closed at

I pulled every residential lease that closed in Stellar MLS in Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties in the 90 days ending October 20, 2026: 2,423 in Orange, 543 in Seminole, 527 in Lake and 309 in Volusia. On a lease record the close price is the monthly rent, so these are signed deals, not asking prices. I split attached homes (apartment, condominium, townhouse) from single-family rentals, because mixing them produces a number that describes nothing. Any group with fewer than 30 closed leases is suppressed below, and the count sits next to every median so you can see how thin or thick each one is.

Source: Stellar MLS, closed residential leases, pulled October 20, 2026. One-bedroom counts in Lake (13 attached) and Volusia (16 attached) fell under the 30-lease floor and are suppressed rather than reported. Days to lease uses only the leases that report a contract date (135 of the 236 Orange one-bedrooms, for example); where fewer than 30 do, that cell is suppressed.

Two things jump out. The first is the level. A median one-bedroom in Orange County closed at $1,313, which is about $487 a month under the $1,800 figure that set the thread off. The second is the negotiation. Just over half of those Orange one-bedroom leases, 50.42%, signed for less than the landlord first asked, and in two-bedrooms it was 55.03%. Among the 135 of those leases that report a contract date, the median one-bedroom sat 41 days before going under contract. That is a renter's market in the only way that counts, and almost nobody in the thread is pricing it in.

Why the MLS number and the apartment number disagree

Here is the honest limitation, and it matters more than the headline. Stellar MLS leases skew heavily toward houses, condos and townhouses owned by individuals. Of the 3,802 closed leases in this pull, 1,888 were single-family houses and only 164 were listed as apartments. Most large managed apartment communities never put a unit on the MLS at all. So when someone says a one-bedroom costs $1,800, they are usually quoting a leasing office, and when I say the median closed at $1,313, I am quoting a different slice of the same market. Both can be true at once.

The metro-wide asking number sits between them. Realtor.com's September 2026 Rental Report, released October 15, 2026, put the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford median asking rent for studio through two-bedroom listings at $1,669, down 1.60% year over year, with 60.9% of listings offering a concession against 43.9% across the 50 largest metros. Note the geography: that metro definition includes Osceola County, so it is not a figure for the four counties I work, and I am not presenting it as one. What it does tell you is that six in ten advertised units in this metro are dangling something to get you to sign, and that nationally rents have now fallen year over year for 38 straight months.

If you want the longer arc on where that softness came from, I wrote it up in the 2026 Orlando rental market outlook.

The fees the rent figure hides

The sharpest comment on the whole thread was not about base rent. It was about what gets added after you agree to the base rent:

"My rent for a 1/1 is $1700/mo and $200 of that is 'mandatory fees.' The base rent has gone up $500 and the fees have increased $125 over the last 8 years for the same apartment. 49% of my monthly income goes towards rent"

Top comment, r/orlando, September 21, 2026

That ratio is the real story. The 30% of income line the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies uses in America's Rental Housing to define a cost-burdened renter stopped being a useful benchmark for this commenter years ago, and the fee stack is a large part of why. It is not only a Central Florida complaint. On X on September 30, 2026, @BillWiIdin posted that a landlord had announced "a mandatory $75 monthly 'trash valet' service starting November 1st" with a $100 fine for non-compliance, adding that "'Luxury' apartment complexes in America are no longer offering perks." I have no way to verify that complex or that landlord and I am not naming either. The pattern is what is worth your attention: compare total monthly outlay, not advertised rent.

Separately, an r/orlando poster on September 22, 2026 flagged the RealPage rent-pricing class action, writing that "RealPage and corporate landlords used algorithmic pricing software to artificially inflate rent prices and coordinate rate hikes across properties nationwide." Those are allegations, and the settling defendants deny them. That litigation is In re RealPage, Inc., Rental Software Antitrust Litigation (No. II), M.D. Tenn. 3:23-md-03071, and the official settlement information lives at realpagerentalsettlement.com. I am a Realtor, not a lawyer, and I have nothing to tell you about whether you qualify or what any payment would be. Read the official site.

What the same monthly budget would own

Now the other side. I pulled every active condo and townhouse listed under $400,000 in the four counties on October 20, 2026 and built the real monthly cost: principal and interest on a 30-year fixed at the 7.40% in Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week of October 15, 2026 with 20% down, plus property tax at 1.23% of price (the median ratio of listed annual tax to list price across 6,258 active listings in this pull; those are the current owners' bills, often homestead-capped, so a buyer's tax will likely run higher and this line is a floor too), plus that specific listing's own monthly HOA dues. I only counted listings where the HOA figure was actually populated, which is why the usable counts are smaller than the total.

Source: Stellar MLS active condominium and townhouse listings under $400,000, pulled October 20, 2026. Monthly cost excludes homeowners insurance, and the tax line uses current owners' bills, so treat it as a floor.

Read the right-hand column against the rent table and the answer is plain where there is a rent to compare: in Orange, Seminole and Volusia the typical entry-level condo or townhouse costs more per month to own than the typical one- or two-bedroom attached rental costs to rent. Lake is the exception: it had too few attached one- and two-bedroom leases to compare, its typical listing is a three-bedroom, and at $2,142 that runs just under the $2,275 median three-bedroom attached lease (60 leases), before insurance. I am not going to tell you owning is cheaper, because outside Lake, in the middle of this market, it is not.

The interesting part is the tail. In Orange County, 125 of those 1,093 listings (11.44%) carry a monthly cost at or under the $1,312.50 median one-bedroom rent, and 341 of them (31.20%) land at or under the $1,650 two-bedroom rent. Seminole runs 10.48% and 26.86% against its own medians, and 62 of Volusia's 304 (20.39%) come in at or under that county's $1,538 two-bedroom rent. So the break-even exists, it is just narrow, and it lives in smaller, lower-priced units rather than anything new.

One sentence on rates, because this is not a rate post: at 7.40% the financing cost is doing most of the work in those monthly figures, and I have written separately about what crossing 7% did to local buyers and how the rate climb changed buyer cost.

The cash wall nobody puts in the comparison

Every monthly-versus-monthly comparison on the internet quietly skips the part that actually stops people. Here is what a renter would have to put on the table to reach the cheapest tier above.

• Down payment. The Orange County listings that priced at or under the median one-bedroom rent had a median list price of $128,500. At 20% down that is roughly $25,700 in cash, before closing costs.
• Closing costs. Separate money, due the same day, and not recoverable if you move in two years.
• HOA dues. Already in my table, but worth saying out loud: a $456 median in Volusia is a second rent payment that never builds equity and that the association can raise. I broke the dues down by county in the Central Florida condo HOA fee report.
• Special assessments and reserves. Florida associations are funding structural reserves now, and an assessment can arrive after you close with no warning in the monthly number you used to decide.
• Insurance. Not in my monthly figures at all, so treat every number in that table as a floor rather than a total. The statewide direction is favorable: the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation has been approving homeowners rate decreases through 2026 and statewide premiums have eased, but in Orange, Seminole and Lake the average charged premium was roughly flat from September 2025 to March 2026, so do not count on a drop. I covered how carrying costs stack up in the insurance and HOA carrying cost breakdown.
• Financing eligibility. Some condo buildings will not qualify for conventional financing, which can turn a listed price into a cash-only price. Ask your lender about the specific building before you fall for the unit.

Is the market really half empty

The other claim in that thread was that the new complexes are sitting empty. The market data points the other way, though not dramatically. Northmarq's Orlando multifamily report for the second quarter of 2026, published September 11, 2026, found that vacancy has improved since its peak, only modestly so far in the newest Class A buildings, which are still moving through lease-up, that renter demand outpaced new deliveries during the quarter for the first time in roughly two years, and that permitting has fallen to about half its five-year average pace. That is a metro-level read and the metro includes Osceola, so again, not a four-county number.

What it means for a renter is uncomfortable but worth knowing early. The concessions and the sub-asking leases in my pull exist because a construction wave that is now ending left the market oversupplied. As those deliveries dry up and absorption catches up, the leverage in that 50.42% figure is more likely to shrink than to grow. If you are renting, that argues for using the leverage now rather than assuming it will be there at your next renewal.

For the ownership side of the same supply picture, see the condo months-of-supply report, and for how local wages line up against local prices, the first-time buyer wage and price gap. The sellers who are moving on price are listed on the county pages: Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia.

Questions renters keep asking

Is a one-bedroom in Orlando really $1,800 a month?

Not in the closed-lease data. The median one-bedroom lease that closed in Stellar MLS in Orange County in the 90 days through October 20, 2026 was $1,313 across 236 leases, and Seminole County was $1,275 across 55. Asking rents at large managed complexes run higher than that, and those complexes mostly do not list on the MLS, so the two numbers describe different parts of the market rather than contradicting each other.

Can I negotiate rent in Central Florida right now?

The data says many people already are. Of the 236 Orange County one-bedroom leases in this pull, 50.42% closed below the original asking rent, and two-bedrooms ran 55.03%. Median time to lease was 41 days for a one-bedroom, among the 135 that report a contract date. A unit sitting a month or more is the strongest signal that there is room to ask.

Is buying a condo cheaper than renting in Orange, Seminole, Lake or Volusia County?

Generally no. In Orange, Seminole and Volusia the median active condo or townhouse under $400,000 carries a monthly cost above the median closed rent for a comparable one- or two-bedroom attached rental, and that is before insurance. Lake is the exception: its typical listing is a three-bedroom, and at $2,142 a month it runs just under the $2,275 median three-bedroom attached lease, before insurance. A minority of listings do clear the bar, 11.44% in Orange against the median one-bedroom rent, but they require roughly $25,700 down plus closing costs and carry HOA dues, possible special assessments and financing conditions that renting does not.

Why are so many Orlando-area rentals offering concessions?

Supply. Realtor.com's September 2026 Rental Report put the share of Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford listings offering a concession at 60.9%, against 43.9% across the 50 largest metros. That reflects several years of heavy apartment construction landing at once. Northmarq reports that permitting has now fallen to roughly half its five-year average, so the oversupply that created those concessions is working its way out.

If you are weighing a renewal against a purchase, the useful thing is not an opinion, it is your actual numbers against this week's actual listings. Send me your current total monthly housing cost including every fee, and the cash you could put down without emptying your savings, and I will tell you honestly whether anything on the market clears your bar or whether renewing and negotiating is the better move this year. Brenden Rendo, Realtor, 407-616-9019, or start with the Central Florida housing market hub.