Original research · August 2026
We pulled the state licence register and the county registration files, then worked out something nobody publishes: not how many rentals there are, but how few people run them.
That is the number of individual addresses on the state’s vacation-rental licence register across 69 counties. It counts locations, not licences: one licence can cover a whole condo building, so the location count is the closest thing to “how many doors exist.”
| County | Locations | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Osceola | 20,770 | 11.8% | |
| Walton | 15,644 | 8.9% | |
| Orange | 14,587 | 8.3% | |
| Bay | 13,840 | 7.9% | |
| Miami-Dade | 11,198 | 6.4% | |
| Broward | 10,678 | 6.1% | |
| Lee | 8,697 | 5.0% | |
| Okaloosa | 7,936 | 4.5% | |
| Pinellas | 7,888 | 4.5% | |
| Monroe (the Keys) | 6,396 | 3.6% | |
| Manatee | 6,238 | 3.6% | |
| Polk | 6,093 | 3.5% | |
| Collier | 4,817 | 2.7% | |
| Volusia | 4,803 | 2.7% | |
| Sarasota | 4,335 | 2.5% | |
| St. Johns | 3,573 | 2.0% | |
| Brevard | 3,021 | 1.7% | |
| Palm Beach | 2,644 | 1.5% | |
| Escambia | 2,461 | 1.4% | |
| Charlotte | 2,152 | 1.2% | |
| … and 49 more counties | 17,712 | 10.1% | |
| Total | 175,483 | 100% |
The top four counties — Osceola, Walton, Orange and Bay — hold 37% of every licensed rental in Florida. Two of them are the Orlando theme-park corridor; the other two are the Panhandle beach market. Miami and Fort Lauderdale together add another 12.5%, and they behave differently: urban, year-round, mostly apartments.
2.6% of operators control 63% of the units. Of 16,794 distinct operators in the register, 442 run 50 or more properties each — and between them they hold 79,314 of the 125,830 units on record.
Short-term rental is usually described as a cottage industry of individual hosts. On the licence data that is true by headcount and false by volume.
| Portfolio size | Operators | Share of operators | Units held | Share of units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50+ properties | 442 | 2.6% | 79,314 | 63.0% |
| 20–49 | 551 | 3.3% | 17,321 | 13.8% |
| 5–19 | 1,129 | 6.7% | 10,917 | 8.7% |
| 2–4 | 2,358 | 14.0% | 5,964 | 4.7% |
| One property | 12,314 | 73.3% | 12,314 | 9.8% |
| Total | 16,794 | 100% | 125,830 | 100% |
Read the two bold numbers together. Three-quarters of the operators own a single property between them and account for less than a tenth of the market. Meanwhile 12.6% of operators — anyone with five properties or more — hold 85.5% of all units.
If you run five or more doors, you are already in the top eighth of the market by volume, competing mostly against other professionals rather than against hobbyists. Your listings sit next to portfolios with pricing teams and 24-hour guest response.
If you run one or two, the competitive picture is the opposite of what the headline count suggests: the guests you are bidding for are being bid on by operators with a hundred doors and the tooling that comes with that. Which is roughly why the software gap matters more at the small end than at the large one.
Two counties we studied in detail sit at opposite ends. In Walton County (the 30A corridor) the top 28 operators hold 46% of the 7,015 registrations, and operators with five or more doors hold 76% of the county — a professionally managed market. In the City of Sarasota registry, roughly 70% of registrations are self-managed by owners or co-hosts. Same state, opposite structures, and they need completely different things from a software vendor.
HostsPilot builds short-term-rental management software, and we run rentals on Florida’s Gulf Coast ourselves. We assembled this data to work out where our own market is, and it seemed worth publishing rather than sitting on. There is no gated “full version” behind this one — this is the report.
We refresh this report every quarter from the state register. Leave an email and we send you the next edition when it is out.
