Slick ADU Renderings vs. Real Builds: How to Vet an Orlando ADU Builder

The rendering is the cheap part

Here's the thing about that glossy image of a cottage tucked behind your house. It costs a company almost nothing to make. A little money, or a weekend with the right software, and now they've got a slideshow that looks like a finished neighborhood. The render is a sales tool. It isn't proof of anything.

What you actually want to know is whether they've turned one of those pictures into a real building with a real address in Orange County — one that passed a final inspection and got its certificate of occupancy. Because a render doesn't have to pass a wind-load check. It doesn't need a septic tank or a tie-in to your sewer. It never waits three weeks on a permit review. Every hard part of building an ADU here happens after the picture is done, and the picture tells you nothing about whether they can do it.

So the real question isn't "does their work look good?" It's "have they ever actually stood one up, here, and can they show you where?"

Make them hand you an address, not a portfolio

Ask for two or three ADUs they've finished in the last year, in Orange County, with the street they're on. Not a gallery. Addresses.

Then do the thing almost nobody does: go look. Drive past the one in Winter Garden or Rio Pinar. And pull the permit record — building permits in Orange County are public, and you can search a property to see whether a permit was ever filed, who filed it, and whether it passed inspection. This is exactly where render-only outfits fall apart. In case after case around the country, homeowners called the county themselves and found out no permit had ever been pulled for the job they'd already paid for. The contractor had sworn everything was moving. The county had never heard of them.

A builder who's really stood ADUs up in unincorporated Orange County leaves a paper trail — permits, inspections, a certificate of occupancy with an address on it. A builder who only renders leaves a folder of pictures. One of those you can check from your couch. The other you just have to take on faith.

Check the license and the deposit the same afternoon

Florida runs a public license lookup at myfloridalicense.com. Type in the company or the license number and you'll see the name, the type of license, and whether it's active. An ADU is a real structure, so you want a certified building contractor (CBC) or general contractor (CGC) — and you want that license current, not inactive, not "pending." One of the uglier scams works by borrowing a real contractor's license number, so make sure the name on the license actually matches the company asking for your check.

Then look at how they want to be paid. A solid builder takes a reasonable deposit and ties the rest to milestones you can see — slab poured, framing up, inspection passed. Somebody who wants a big slice of the whole project before a shovel moves is telling you something. Same with the sales feel: a lot of people who got burned later said the same three things — the estimate was sloppy, the guy was in a hurry, and their gut told them to walk. Trust the gut. And be careful with a brand-new company that has no finished local jobs behind it; the pattern in these collapses is one LLC folding and a fresh one opening the next week, same people, new name.

First, find out if your own lot can even hold one

Here's the part that comes before all of that. You could vet ten builders perfectly and still be stuck, because not every lot in Orange County can take an ADU. There's a size cap — roughly half the square footage of your main house, up to a ceiling — plus setbacks from your property lines, and it all rides on your zoning and whether you're in unincorporated county or inside a city like Winter Garden. The county's Ready Set Orange program even offers pre-approved ADU plans, but only for unincorporated Orange County.

So before you fall for anybody's rendering, find out what your own backyard in Conway, Pine Hills, Meadow Woods, wherever you are, is actually allowed to hold. That's what the ADU Fit Check is for. You answer a few quick questions about your lot and it tells you whether an ADU pencils out where you live — before you've handed anyone a dollar or gotten attached to a single picture. Start there. Then go make a builder prove they've done it for real.

Common questions

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