[Barefoot]

We just bought in the Villages. I am a real estate agent in Canada and I will try to explain how the Village real estate system works. It took me a while to figure it out. At first I thought all Village listings were through the Village central real estate office on the VLS System. Not true at all. There are an abundance of listings not on the Villages system. I'm glad I read the local paper and found out about MLS listings.

The Village agents have their own listing service called VLS (Village Listing Service). There is another way to buy houses .. on MLS (Multiple Listing Service). The Village agents cannot sell you homes that are on MLS. And MLS agents cannot sell you houses on VLS, they are two separate systems and they do NOT cooperate with each other. They used to cooperate but there were big problems which resulted in two separate systems.

We started off by looking exclusively with a Village agent for quite a while. Our agent was a great guy, but didn't like to talk about bonds, or closing costs, or any negative issues. I found they definitely are trying to keep prices high in the Villages and they will NOT encourage you to make a low ball offer. Many houses listed in the Villages seem to end up reducing the price significantly as time goes by. So if you are uninformed and buy something immediately when it is listed, you could be over paying.

We ended up by buying from a MLS agent, who was fine with a low offer and helped us negotiate a deal which was great for us, and also good for the seller as they got to move on.

The house we bought was originally listed with the Villages on VLS for $249,000. When the Villages listing on VLS expired, the Seller then listed on MLS at $229,000. We paid much less than the asking price. We had a fantastic MLS agent, I cannot say enough good things about the agent. The agent answered all our questions honestly and gave us much, much more information .. both negative and positive.