Villages Real Estate agents are licensed real estate agents. But they are under exclusive contract with the Villages, and can't represent sellers of homes outside the Villages. But since they are the contracted agents, they have the exclusive rights to selling Villages-owned properties (meaning - have never been sold to anyone yet). Non-Villages Real Estate agents are not allowed to sell NEW homes in the Villages, but can represent homeowners to sell pre-owned homes in the Villages.
Since Villages agents have exclusive rights to never-owned property, it's in their best interest to focus their sales efforts on those homes. It's also in the Villages Developer's best interest, since they're the ones who profit from the sale. The Villages developers don't profit from sales of pre-owned homes, UNLESS it's one of their own agents selling the home. But their own agents have to compete with other agencies for those homes.
Our "buyers' agent" was a Villages real estate agent. We had the lifestyle visit down across from Brownwood in the villas there. I was 100% NOT interested in looking for a new home anywhere near it, and was disappointed when they said we couldn't do a lifestyle visit in the Sumter Landing area (the cottages used to be lifestyle visit properties). We wanted to look anywhere from "near" Sumter Landing and points north of that. So the agent and we had to waste a lot of time travelling.
Thankfully we found what we wanted online a year later in the "historic" section, and our agent was happy to help us navigate the sale.
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