Westgate Resorts is in hot water with Orange County's development review committee. 

  • Corredor family refused to sell townhome to Westgate Resorts
  • Contractor severely damaged Corredor's townhome
  • According to Westgate, the contractor was told not to demolish the home

County officials have a lot of questions about how the timeshare empire applied for permits to begin demolition on a large piece of property on Turkey Lake Road in Orlando when they didn’t own all of the land. One town home is left standing, but the legal battle has just begun since that home is no longer inhabitable.

“Nothing about this is normal,” attorney Doug Ackerman, partner at Kirwin Norris Law, said.

Standing alone, surrounded by rubble, the Corredor family’s two-story town home is surrounded by a construction fence and danger signs. All of this happened after a contractor hired by Westgate Resorts demolished the adjoining units leaving significant structural damage to the vacation home.

“That’s not normal to partially demolish townhomes and leave one standing in the middle,” Ackerman said.

Ackerman is an attorney who specializes in construction and land use. He took a look at the permits filed for the project and just like county leaders, he said he’s wondering how the project was allowed to begin when Westgate Resorts never owned all of the land inside their 180-acre construction project.

“They cannot force them off their property,” Ackerman said.

Instead, the property is no longer safe for the family to set foot on. And now the Orange County Planning Division wants answers from the timeshare empire.

A letter sent Friday from the Orange County Development Review Committee to Westgate Resorts COO Mark Waltrip, said the tear down “was performed without proper demolition permits.” The letter also said, “at no time during the County’s review or approval of these plans did… Westgate communicate to the County that other owners existed.”

Yet Orange County officials never checked the property records during the application process.

“The government would not typically go back and search to see whether what you told them was actually true,” Ackerman said.

But now the County is checking every detail and is prepared to bring some consequences.

The expansion project for Westgate Lakes could come to a screeching halt if permits and approvals are revoked.

While code enforcement could soon condemn the Corredor’s townhome because of the contractor’s damage, it won’t change who owns that piece of land - and that could continue to put a wrench in Westgate’s plans.

“This would pose land use problems for the developer,” Ackerman said. “If you really want your development to go through, you need to pay them off.”

We reached out to Westgate Resorts for more information and COO Mark Waltrip told us that they “made countless offers to them over the past 20 years, and as recently as 2 weeks ago at a price more than double what their property is worth.”

News 13 has not been told what that figure was.