Not So Open Houses
 

We took friends who are here to check out TV on a Open House Tour today. We started with a pre-owned courtyard villa in Amelia. We arrived 15 minutes before the end of the open house to NO AGENT. We then moved on to the advertised open houses of new homes in Sanibel. We stopped at 3 new homes for the 1-3pm showings. NO AGENT. Are you kidding me? So I called the Sales office and asked what was up? They had no idea, but the agents were no shows at 4 homes.
We finally found a home for them to look at in Winifred, but that point, they were bored with all the driving and the hassle.
Nice going TV Sales Agents. Why bother advertising homes when there is no one there to show them? I can understand if they have been sold, but these were the models.
The wheels came off the bus today in the sales department.

us too
 

We had that happen to us while we were there with a new home in Sanibel only to find out that they did not open it because it had sold.

:doh:

sounds like a bad hair kind of day.. and frustating...

fortunately, The Villages is better than the sales process, don't give up

I can understand one of them being sold, but 4 out of the 5 houses had no sales agent.
Honestly, I could care less, personally, but our friends were only here for a two day whirlwind. I didn't leave a positive impression on them.. We were stunned.. dumbfounded.
We told them that this alone is a good reason to use an MLS agent for any purchase of a pre-owned home in the future...

We found even if they were sold (big letters in the window) the house was still being shown. Hope their manager gets the message that no one was there.

Has happened to us several times as well. It is really irritating, especially when they don't even post a sign that says it is cancelled.

We went to one open house of an MLS listing by realtor Paul Carraway. He was there and had the house open, even though he had gotten a contract on it that morning. He said feel free to look around but it sold this morning: Since it was advertised I went ahead and opened it. Now THAT is a class act IMHO. If I wasn't already working with an MLS agent, I would have immediately retained Paul.

He's a smart salesperson too, Ed. Holding the open house anyway......good way for him to make additional contacts with potential buyers for other properties.

Bill :)

In the new homes,if there were a couple of guys or gals standing in the kitchen talking to each other....dressed casually...they could have been the agents. Don't expect to get a "pitch" from them, at least I have toured a lot of new homes here over the past four years and NO one tried to sell me one. They will answer questions but not tour the house with you. I can't believe there was no one official there. But I have been wrong before.

What I was saying, and I beleive the OP was saying, is that the homes were not open. Doors locked, no one there, and no sign saying the open house was cancelled. Very infuriating when you drive around several miles and see nothing.

OH sorry. That has happened to me. They don't show a spec home that they have received an offer on. They will always show a furnished model, because it CAN'T be sold. Unfortunately/fortunately...the houses that are built to sell, sell quickly and unexpectedly. THIS is the beginning of the big selling season. We bought at this time, both times.

All I have to say is that it works for them. I have never run into that many in ONE day of cancelled homes that were advertised. I bet you did feel frustrated. Sorry. I didn't read carefully.

their are many MLS agents who would help then with resales. Check out HomeHeader.png for resales in the villages. I have my friends use that.

Boy howdy, the market must really be picking up! Every real estate agent knows that you don't necessarily have an "open house" to sell that particular home but to get prospects (buyers) to sell ANY home to!

However, I've heard that TVs agents are not commissioned and, if so, guess they just wanted the day off today never thinking they'd be "found out"! The cats out of the bag now!

Sorry your friends had to experience this "bad business" tactic!

Gracie, I see where you said this is the start of the big selling season. I thought that the busiest selling time would have been Jan, Feb, March, and would be slowing down about now?

Yes, "snowbird season" is the busiest time of the year! The Villages Agent who sold our last house for us in 2010 told us to get our house on the market in December, in preparation for the snowbird explosion. We sold our house in January.

Attendance at open houses is already declining (according to an agent who has a house on our street for sale).

We need to send a newsflash to VLG and tell them it isn't a good day to visit open houses in the Villages. :blahblahblah: :throwtomatoes:

I have the opposite opinion.
 

Understand you people who are upset because the houses weren't open when you went to visit them. However, we were called by our neighbors in Hemingway wondering why the people had an open house in our house after we had bought it. The agent said because it had already been in the works to have the open house. I was not too thrilled to have additional people looking at my home. Especially when the style of my home was not being made anymore.:(

I'd be interested in hearing the response of the Sales Department to your complaint. Please let us know their explanation.

My problem was not so much that they did not have the open house they had advertised, but they did'nt even put out a sign that said open house cancelled. I know they have the signs, because I have seen them occaisionally, so there is no excuse. Several times I parked and went to the door before finding it was locked. Bad business practice.

This is based on just my observations. And our rep, Jim McLaughlin told us once that many life style visitors come back in the Spring and buy. The busiest selling season across this country has always been in the spring and when school is getting out. That would enable prospective buyers here to sell their houses there.

I doubt that those people would take the day off and work very long for an organization like Morse runs. Sometimes there is a sign that says that the open house is cancelled. Things happen quickly around here.

We wanted to buy the house that became the house next door to us in Hadley. But it was taken off the market a half an hour before we could see it. Those people became our dear, DEAR, friends and neighbors. I remember how incredulous I was then. Four years ago at this time they did not build for you. You only had choices of homes already built.

A couple of years before that you could make wider choices and build. Now the choices are wider again and they are building for you.

It still is NOT anything like the choices of a custom home back where we came from, but they build a darned nice home and we are thilled with ours. It was the eighth home in our lifetime we had built. And the eleventh NEW home. I have no complaints.

Just my two cents. Waiting for change.

I would think that since TV reps are independent agents, sometimes a situation may arise where they are unable to work the open house and due to conflicting schedules of the other agents it is impossible to get coverage. Sometimes a rep that was doing an earlier open house is covering and it takes awhile to get from one open house to the next so it starts late. I work with these people and I know that open houses and appointments are taken very seriously...but if an emergency arises, in my own opinion it's not the end of the world if an open house gets canceled. You can always go to the sales center and have someone give you a personal tour of that home and many others.

next time I'd let a salesperson take them around.

Is there any particular time or month that homes are discounted? I've noticed that the CYV's are not discounted at all right now. Maybe they sell faster than any other home?

I agree! If you really want to see a lot of homes in a short amount of time, viewing homes with a sales rep is the way to go. They have access to every model and spec home and can show you a least one example of just about anything you want to see. And as has been pointed out many times, they are not at all pushy. A TV sales rep spent an afternoon showing friends of mine around, knowing full-well that they are at least a couple of years away from purchasing.

I think that most of the discounts take place when there are a few unsold homes in an otherwise sold-out neighborhood, or when a particular home, for whatever reason, isn’t generating a lot of interest. In the CYVs, it depends on which style/model that you are looking at. Currently there are a lot of discounted “Cabana” style villas in the new home section of thevillages.com.

If they are like me, they don't want to have a realtor show them around, because they are really not ready to buy. We look at open houses often, as we plan to buy if our house sells, and it is an interesting, and entertaining pastime for us. Occasionally an open house is cancelled, and I understand -- stuff happens. The PROBLEM is that, too often they cancel and don't even put out a sign in the yard of the home stating it has been cancelled. When they put a sign out, you can see it as you drive by, and move on. If no sign, it causes you to wonder if they just didn't get the open house flag out, and you park, walk to the home, and find the door locked. That is an inconvenience and could have been prevented by simply dropping by, or having a realtor associate drop by, and put up a cancellation sign. For real estate people associated with The Villages in in unconscionable, for there are so many they could solve this with a phone call. It is not a huge deal, or the end of the world as we know it, but it is frustrating and a poor marketing strategy for a company otherwise so astute at marketing.

We had guests here on Sunday and took them to a Holly in St James, a cottage, a Fern, a Gardenia and a Whispering Pine all in Sanibel. This was Sunday afternoon and no problem getting in. We must have picked the right ones!
Nancy

With CYV's they normally discount them when they are ready to finish out a villa section. In Tamarind Grove we have 5 CYV villa sections, no patio villas, and all were sold out in about a 12 month period. Just about every 3 or 4 months they will sell out a villa section of about 88 CYV's.

Currently I see 77 CYV's under construction, however about half of those are in that Mission Hills section up off CR466, since they are slated to build 300 units, they won't be discounted for quite awhile. The current units in St. James will probably finish up in 2 or 3 months.

We bought last summer at Southern Star Villas, which is just north of St. James in Tamarind Grove. Our villa section has 88 units and when they had about 15 or so left they started dropping the price on those remaining about $6,000.

We had a double discount on ours. What started out at $169K was discounted to $163K when they had about a dozen units left. Then they decided to change the name of masonry villas from 'Savannah Series' to 'Bungalows' and dropped ours another $6,000, and we ended up only paying $157K. We were on a tight budget and had originally planned on buying a patio villa in Buttonwood for $140K, but with a privacy fence and masonry construction we couldn't turn it down. Sometimes you can plan but it's good to keep all your options available.

Our's is a 'Woodlawn' which in the new Bungalow series is called a 'Durham'. What you might find is when they are ready to discount they won't have all the models available, we were lucky because we had 5 Woodlawns to choose from. Had we wanted a Stoney Brook or Foxglove we would of been out of luck, they were all gone. That's a problem you might run into, waiting for your model to be discounted and they are all gone. The 3 BR models sell out first.

Thank's so much for the info. I saw some CYV's on the village site that were discounted. I'll do some research.....Thank's again.