ORLANDO—Fifty acres of land near the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando has traded hands. CBRE represented UBS in the sale to an undisclosed New York investment firm. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed.

Located east of Downtown Disney, along Interstate 4 at Meadowcreek Boulevard, the land wraps around the Orlando World Center Marriott Resort golf course. It sits adjacent to the 1,037-unit Sheraton Vistana Resort Villas. Approvals are in place for 1,429 hotel/timeshare units.

Robbie McEwan and Jim Kazaros of CBRE’s Land Services Group in Orlando marketed the site for sale with a global marketing campaign. The duo represented UBS in the disposition.

“This sale is an indication that we’ve probably seen the bottom in the Orlando tourist corridor,” McEwan tells GlobeSt.com. “These big vacant land sites have been sitting on the market for the last three and a half to four years.”

Four  years ago, many of the now vacant tracts were development sites. But development stalled when the market crashed. Now, McEwan says, opportunistic buyers are coming to the market buying for land hold positions and waiting for the next development cycle to start.

“A lot of the vacant tracts in this area are owned by lenders or are in the process of being taken back from lenders,” McEwan says. “So there haven’t been many transactions. This is the first big transaction to happen in that immediate corridor.”

With the distressed assets making their way through the cycle, more land tracts in the area could become available this year. And there are funds looking for deals in Orlando’s tourist corridor.

“The hotel markets have rebounded in the tourist area over the six months,” McEwan says. “The occupancy rates and RevPAR have been good. So we’ll see some of these funds actually buying hotels.”