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Selling in Conway
Conway is the older, quieter stretch of south Orlando wrapped around the Conway chain of lakes, roughly four miles from downtown and five from the airport. Buyers come here for mature streets, big lots and water access without a lakefront price, and a listing works best when it says exactly which of those the home actually delivers.
Most buyers arriving in Conway are coming from somewhere newer. They have looked at a subdivision built in the last fifteen years, with a smaller lot, a tighter street and an HOA, and they are trying to work out what they get in exchange for a house that is fifty or sixty years old.
The answer is usually specific and local rather than general, which is why a Conway listing written from a template underperforms one written by somebody who knows which street does what.
Conway Was Here Before Most of Orlando
This is not a subdivision with a name borrowed from a marketing meeting. Conway was settled in the 1850s and had an identity long before the city grew out to meet it.
Lake Conway got its name in 1843, when a surveyor named Benjamin Whitner was awarded a contract to survey land here and named the lake for his boss, Valentine Yelverton Conway, the Surveyor General of Florida. Conway Road was cut in 1871 simply to connect Orlando to the community. In the early 1880s a man named Frederick G. May ran the first passenger and freight line between Conway, Lake Underhill and Orlando, twice a week, carrying private mail and fifty-pound lumps of ice that sold for a penny a pound. The fare to Orlando was twenty-five cents, or forty cents round trip.
In 1914 the whole seven-mile road was bricked, nine feet wide, one of the first paved highways in Orange County. It ran along what is now Briercliff Drive, Curry Ford Road and Conway Road, ending at Anderson Road, which was the center of Conway. The Conway United Methodist congregation goes back to 1874, when the Mizell family deeded two acres at the southeast corner of Conway Road and Anderson Road for a church, a parsonage and a cemetery.
None of that goes in a listing verbatim. It matters because it explains the thing buyers actually notice on the drive in: the tree canopy, the irregular lot lines, the streets that bend around water instead of running on a grid. Those are the fingerprints of a place that grew rather than one that was platted all at once, and they are the single hardest thing for a newer neighborhood to compete with.
The Chain, and What Access Actually Means
The Conway chain is the organizing fact of the whole area. Lake Conway covers roughly 1,771 acres across the City of Edgewood, unincorporated Orange County and the City of Belle Isle, and the sections are separated by roads that residents use as landmarks: Hoffner Avenue divides North from Middle Lake Conway, and Nela Avenue divides Middle from Little Lake Conway.
Here is where Conway listings most often go wrong. “Lake access” is doing enormous work in a lot of listing copy and it means at least four different things: a private dock on your own frontage, a deeded community dock or ramp shared with a specific set of lots, a neighborhood easement that lets you walk down and put in a kayak, or nothing more than being able to drive to a public ramp like anyone else in Orange County. A buyer who is shopping the chain knows the difference and will find out. Establish which one you have, in writing, before the listing goes up, and then say it plainly. Precision here builds trust. Vagueness reads as evasion, and it costs you.
The public option worth knowing is the boat ramp at the end of Randolph Avenue, on the site of the old Crittenden Dock. People have been putting in there since at least 1882, when guests at the neighboring Macy Hotel launched fishing trips and pleasure cruises from it. Orange County owns it now.
One more line item. Property in the Lake Conway Water and Navigation Control District is taxed by that district on top of county rates. It is a dependent special district of Orange County covering about 3,776 acres, and it funds waterway markers, aquatic plant management, canal maintenance and off-duty patrol on the chain. The millage is capped at 2 mills by county code and the current rate is 0.4107. Whether your parcel falls inside it is a matter of record, and the Orange County Property Appraiser’s page for your address lists every taxing authority attached to it.
Barber Park
Barber Park at 3701 Gatlin Avenue is the recreational center of gravity here, and its history is more interesting than most county parks get to be.
The land was cattle country. It is named for Carl E. Barber, an Orange County commissioner for District 5 in the 1920s, whose ranching family had been in Florida since 1833 and owned this property until the county bought 66 acres of it in 1990. That same family gave Central Florida the Barber-Mizell feud, a three-month cattle war during Reconstruction that left at least eight Barbers dead and put the county sheriff in a grave. There is a marker at the park that tells the whole story.
The park opened in 1997 with three soccer fields, a playground and a basketball court, and residents have kept adding to it: a covered roller hockey court, a children’s basketball court, a dog park with separate runs for small and large dogs, walking trails and picnic areas. In March 2020 a 15.5-acre expansion opened with two lighted multipurpose fields and a splash pad, on land leased from the City of Orlando.
For a family buying here, that park is a real answer to the tradeoff they are weighing. It is worth naming in a listing with the drive time attached rather than describing the home as “near parks.”
Errands, and Which Way You Turn Out of the Driveway
Day-to-day shopping runs on two Publix stores that between them cover most of Conway: the one at Conway Plaza, 4402 Curry Ford Road, at the Curry Ford and Conway Road corner, alongside an Ace Hardware, Keke’s and Pet Supplies Plus; and Conway Crossing at 4501 Hoffner Avenue, which is the one to use from the south end.
The geography that actually sells the house, though, is what sits at the ends of the roads. Downtown Orlando is about four miles northwest. Orlando International Airport is about five miles southeast, which for anyone who flies for work is a genuine and quantifiable advantage over living further out. The Hourglass District along Curry Ford West, with its restaurants and brewery scene, is a few minutes north, and SoDo and the Orlando Health campus are a short run up Orange Avenue or Conway Road.
Conway sits in the middle of all of that without being in any of it, which is precisely what its buyers are paying for. Say it with numbers.
Schools
Conway Elementary at 4100 Lake Margaret Drive and Conway Middle School at 4600 Anderson Road are the neighborhood schools people mean when they say “the Conway schools,” and Boone High School is the high school most of this area feeds into. Lake George Elementary sits right next to Barber Park and serves part of the area as well.
State the assignment for your exact address rather than for the neighborhood. Orange County zones by address and redraws boundaries, and Conway has enough zone edges running through it that a confident guess is a bad idea. The district’s school locator settles it in a minute, and a listing that quotes it accurately is worth more than one that overstates.
What “Conway” Covers Depends on Who Is Asking
Conway is a name older than any of the lines drawn on top of it. The Census Bureau recognizes a Conway census-designated place of about 3.5 square miles with roughly 13,600 residents as of 2020, but almost nobody uses the term that narrowly. Parts of what everyone calls Conway are inside the City of Orlando, parts are unincorporated Orange County, and the edges run up against Edgewood and Belle Isle, which are separate incorporated cities with their own councils and their own rules.
That matters to you in three practical ways: which government issues your permits, whether you pay a municipal millage on top of the county’s, and which set of schools and services a buyer inherits. Get it right on the listing. A buyer who discovers mid-inspection that the home is not where they thought it was, jurisdictionally, gets nervous about everything else.
What This Means for Your Listing
A Conway home is almost never the newest thing a buyer is looking at. It does not have to be. What it has is lot size, canopy, a location that cuts real minutes off both the downtown and the airport run, and in many cases some form of relationship to the water.
The work is turning each of those into something checkable. Not “large lot” but the actual dimensions and what fits on it. Not “lake access” but which of the four kinds. Not “close to everything” but four miles to downtown and about five to the terminal. Not “great schools” but the assignment the district’s locator returns for this address. An older home competing on vague adjectives loses to a newer one. An older home competing on specifics that the newer one cannot match wins more often than sellers expect.
Local Orlando Seller Representation
Scott and I will walk your street with you, tell you plainly what we would address and what we would leave alone, and give you a number we can support with what has actually closed nearby. No obligation, and no listing presentation unless you ask for one.
If your home sits on the water, that is a different conversation and it has its own page: selling on Lake Conway. More on the area generally is in our guide to living in Conway and on our Lake Conway community page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a Conway listing emphasize?
Lot size and canopy, the exact nature of any water access, and the two drive times that define the location: roughly four miles to downtown Orlando and about five to Orlando International. Then Barber Park and the neighborhood schools by name. Those are the things a buyer cannot get in a newer subdivision twenty minutes further out.
My home is not on the lake but the neighborhood has access. How should that be described?
Exactly as it is, in writing. A deeded community dock, a shared ramp, a walk-down easement and simple public-ramp access are four different things with four different values. Find the recorded document that governs yours before the listing goes live. Buyers on the chain know the difference, and an overstatement discovered during a contract is expensive.
Is my home in the City of Orlando, Orange County, Edgewood or Belle Isle?
It depends on the parcel, and the boundaries are not intuitive. It affects your millage, your permitting and sometimes your schools, so it belongs on the listing accurately. The property appraiser’s record for your address answers it.
What is the extra tax district on my bill?
If your parcel is inside the Lake Conway Water and Navigation Control District, that is a dependent special district of Orange County that manages the chain: waterway markers, aquatic plant control, canal maintenance and patrol. Its millage is capped at 2 mills by county code and the current rate is 0.4107. Buyers generally see it as reasonable once they understand it pays for the lakes being usable.
Should I update a 1960s Conway house before listing it?
Some of it, not all of it. The renovations that pay here are usually the ones a buyer cannot easily do themselves after closing, and the ones that pay worst are the ones matched to your taste rather than the market’s. Walk it with someone who has priced this specific comparison recently, before spending anything.
