The Villages purchase another 900 acres
 

The Villages’ Buffalo Hide and Cattle Co. has reportedly paid $7 million for 900 acres near Mascotte.

By my calculation that puts us approx 30 miles from Disney. Come on monorail !

This purchase is not adjacent to any property the Villages currently owns and separated by a lot of individual properties that would have to be acquired in order to do so.

The Villages developer buys 900 acres in Mascotte – GrowthSpotter

The Villages developer buys 900 acres in Mascotte

By Katie Sartoris
Growthspotter
Mar 23, 2023 at 11:12 am

The Villages could be planning another major expansion into Lake County — this time in the City of Mascotte.

The mega-retirement community, under the LLC Buffalo Hide and Cattle Company, bought land from real estate firm Maury L. Carter & Associates for $7 million earlier this month, according to Lake County property records. The 900-acre property sits west of State Road 33, South of Austin Merritt Road and east of Honeycut Road.

The Villages’ land purchase in Mascotte comes as the community is expanding, but it is unclear at this point what is planned for the property, as no plans have been submitted yet, said Max Spann, the city’s planner.

Daryl Carter, president of Maury L. Carter and Associates, confirmed that the property was sold and that he represented the seller and was the broker. He said he could not comment on the buyer or their intentions with the property.

According to the firm’s website, the property is currently zoned as rural residential and allows for one dwelling per acre, which would mean around 900 homes could be built. A rezoning would be required to build more homes at a higher density.

Currently, The Villages spans three counties — Lake, Sumter and Marion — and several cities including Fruitland Park, Lady Lake, Leesburg, Wildwood and Coleman. It’s the nation’s largest and fastest growing retirement community, boasting a population of more than 138,000. And it continues to climb.

In 2018, Leesburg sold about 1,200 acres to The Villages to build The Villages of West Lake. Plans call for more than 3,200 homes and a $100 million, nearly 250-acre mixed-use district, complete with a regional hospital. Construction started in August 2022.

The Villages’ newly purchased property in Mascotte appears to be about a mile and a half southwest of the property it owns in Leesburg.

The Villages is also building in Coleman and expanding further into Wildwood.

RCLCO, a leading real estate consulting group, named The Villages No. 1 in its list of the country’s top 50 master-planned communities. In 2022, the group reported, 3,923 homes were sold in The Villages, the most of any master-planned community in the nation.

That No. 1 spot isn’t new for The Villages, either. The community topped the same list in 2021, 2020 and 2019, with 4,004, 2,453 and 2,429 homes sold, respectively.

This will be a game changer for those of us in TV's. The value of propertty/home values $$ are function of supply and demand. The supply side appears that it will not stop for many years.

Suspect there will not be a private egress physcial connection between the new purchase and TV's, other than public highway. The new purchased will be packaged as a new concept.
Suspect more land will be purchased to enable the new area to provide the growth (new homes) that supports $$ the family
Current parcel could support around 6,000 homes
Anticipate, guess, build out of TV (extraction of $'s for the family) to be completed ahead of the new concept as in the interim more land will be secured and infrastructure built out,

The game changer will be when the demand side of the equation dries up. Future generations are up to their eyeballs in debt, don’t have pensions, and many live paycheck to paycheck. At our ages, it will be our children’s issue to deal with.

very interesting and appreciated perspective

I'll wait for GoldWingNut's video.

Maybe an upmarket, real gated community.

Like the phases of Del Boca Vista. Being near booming Clermont is a positive

Just for perspective, north of SR 44 there’s approximately 37 square miles. From SR 44 to CR 470 there’s approximately 20 square miles. And maybe another 20 sq mi South of 470

900 acres is 1.4 sq mi., Not exactly a "game changer."

And the developer owns over 15,000 acres south of Middleton that hasn't even started yet.

Yep, 24 more sq mi., and they are kicking up dirt down there already.

This is all very exciting!

Not really surprising, given that Da Family is getting larger, with ever so many more mouths to feed - and palms stretched out. It wouldn't even surprise me to hear that at some point in the not to distant future, that a large portion (all?) of the existing sprawl gets sold and they start fresh somewhere else (like in the area of this new purchase?).

As anyone who made it to upper management in a previous life knows, the larger the entity/responsibility, the larger the headaches and time/effort/attention suck. It's not out of the realm of possibility, that the elder Morse children may have designs on wanting to totally retire themselves at some point and hand off what has proved to be a winning formula, to the younger generations...who can start all over in a different location.

As someone else mentioned previously though, makes no never mind to us as it will be our kids choice to sell or stay in what might be by that time, the 5th largest city in Florida. lol.

According to the article the property is about one and a half miles from the property owned in Lessburg!

I agree with your second and third sentence, however not with your first sentence. This isn't a "game changer". This is a continuation of the same game they've always played.

One of the aspects of owning a place in TV that I wrestled with for several years was the fact that if I wanted to sell some day, I would in essence be selling in competition with the developer. Eventually I wrapped myself around that reality, accepted it, and did what I wanted to do, figuring I could survive a "worst case" scenario, that likely wouldn't be all that bad anyway.

At my stage in life, I will do what I want if I can afford it, and not worry about where the chips will fall in a decade or two. I think we'll be OK.

Plans for the new land acquisition could also include retail, commercial, or non-age restricted housing. Non of that would require connectivity to The Villages age restricted area. It's all speculation.

After reading TOTV for years, the developer finally bought land for a Villages COSTCO

The Morse family is doing it right! It’s exciting to see the growth.

AKA the new walking trail

Totally agree, it's fun to be part of it.

Joe

It’s an exciting time to be part of The Villages for sure - as a younger retiree, I can’t wait to watch as all the new development unfolds over the next 20-30 years.

Translation (for at least some who object): "I have my little slice of heaven, now slam the door shut!"

I’d be interested. Tired already of surrounding communities mooching off our multi modal paths, courts & pools. Maybe it would have a no short term rental clause too! That would be perfect. Guess I am dreaming…

Do like the idea of a separate Villages II concept. Can only wish.

I suspect that the developer already owns a number of properties between this new purchase and The Villages. There is a lot of open land between the two. Highway 44, it seems, may indeed be our Mason Dixon Line between the Villages North and The Villages South. It will be a VERY long drive down to the bottom part by golf cart, and I don’t expect the 100,000 new residents to come to Spanish Springs for the music and dancing.

question
 

Appreciate all the detail. You obviously are on top of this. Pretty interesting. But these figures always throw me. So RCLCO says the Villages sold 3932 homes last year. Is that just new construction? Villages Realtors generally quote that they build about 1000 homes a month. So those numbers work But then they also sell a lot of resales, and MLS also sells a healthy number of resales. What does that 3932 actually represent? Thanks

They probably already have their hooks in much of that land already, albeit owned under different land trusts. In Florida, it’s next to impossible to determine the actual “owner” of Florida land trusts. It’s how Disney did it…

Would anybody care if the XYZ company out of Dallas bought the 900 acres?

It will soon be 20 years here. Experiencing TV growing from 30,000 to 130,000. Has it affected our lifestyle? Yes.....it has become better. Once critical mass population achieved national brands started opening businesses here.

More traffic? yes....so what! Takes and extra 5 minutes out of a retired schedule....not a big deal.

T-times....never had a problem to date.

Crowded restaurants? Just go after the early birds....no problem.

The lifestyle we bought 20 years ago is still being enjoyed today!

I agree, everything they do is quality

Manifest destiny
 

westward hooh

Why do people think this place is so expensive and things are going to dry up? 99.9999% of the people moving here, this is not their 1st home, and I’ll bet most of these same people will be selling a house that costs much more than what they will be spending here in TV.
On top of that, a lot of people pay cash so they will be benefiting from any soft sales in TV that might occur.
All of Florida is benefiting from a huge influx of people coming from other states and I don’t see this ending anytime soon, and actually, we might be getting more people move here than in these last few years. How many new homes do you see go unsold?

See attachment - page 1 of the 2022 TV Market Update mailed by Properties of The Villages.
2022
2,538 Pre-owned
3,923 New
6,461 Total
Not included, pre-owned sold by MLS

They reported 3,749 new homes closed in 2022.

SO true.

Just seeing the situation in my state of origin, Minnesota, is proof of that. Minnesota's population has remained relatively stable over the last decade or so, but the NUMBERS of people don't begin to tell the tale. The people moving there are largely persons who come to take advantage of Minnesota's largesse: third-worlders, mainly Somalis, routed there by the Federal government because of Minnesota's liberal (calling it what it is) welfare policies. Migrants who work, when work is available, in Minnesota's agricultural industry and who subsist on the taxpayer's dime during the rest of the time. Folks who once a month crowd Amtrak and the bus lines to come to Minnesota to claim welfare benefits while using the local address of a friend or family member. And etc. etc. etc.

The other side of that coin are the folks who are fleeing Minnesota like deranged lemmings because of the vapid government policies, ruinous taxes and lack of effective law enforcement. But those deranged lemmings are the folks with money; not only retirees but skilled workers and professionals who have tired of what Minnesota has become. All these people take not only their money, their bank accounts, their toys and their purchasing power to the states they move to, thus enriching that state, but they're also taking with them all the potential taxes they WOULD have paid, had Minnesota not have tried to wring every possible dime out of them while they were there.

So...in Minnesota the NUMBERS have remained more-or-less stable, but the people moving out with the money and the careers are being replaced largely by people whose idea of a "career" is slurping at the public trough.

The politicians realize this. Not all that many years ago the then-Governor of Florida joked publicly that he was thinking of sending the Governor of Minnesota a thank-you card, for all the Minnesotans with money flooding into his state.

Just an FYI, some of your neighbors are here because they did a short term rental to check out The Villages and decided they loved it. They are not all bad!

until your house is worth less than what you paid for it..... supply and demand... new vs old.

At this point in life, today or any day following could be, and eventually one will be, my last day, the value of my house is the least of my worries . . . with or without a mortgage, though the TV house has no mortgage.

future former finance guy

It is true. A day of Villages reckoning will come where the generations have no retirement funds in order to buy these used houses and the place will fall into an abandon land of the dead. The only option will be to open it up to non 55 normal purchasing in order that anything gets purchased at all.

We played golf last week all along the West Coast from Venice to Bradenton, and played with a former:

NY Fire fighter
Local Merrill Lynch rep
PA small business owner

All moved for better weather. . . and less crazy lifestyle

Twice played near Lakewood Ranch, and the traffic on 75 was jammed most of the day,
but the interesting part was south during the morning and north during the afternoon/evening
and looked like a lot of trades heading to the hurricane damage to work for the day. .

During the commute home, some light sequences weren't timed to the amount of traffic so there were
cars trapped in the middle of the intersection when the light turned red. Some restaurants had a 90+ minute wait.

Lakewood ranch is a Villages built around a normal lifestyle. Most all have terra cotta roofs, and normal residential type businesses a short drive away. . houses are a bit more expensive than TV, but you are closer to the coast.

This is simply long term supply chain management. They (the developer) have been doing this for years, they have to, it can take years to put together large swaths of contiguous properties to create any development. Don’t kid yourself into thinking this won’t be an eventual part of The Villages, it is only about a mile away from the Renaissance Trail property in Lake county that they acquired that is now a part of CDD14, and some digging into property records of the properties between these two parcels reveals entities with long relationships with the developer. This property will probably stay undeveloped for longer than most of the readers of this post, myself included, will be around.

As far as the market collapsing from a lack of retirees, I think you are selling a lot of the younger generations short. There are many that are planning ahead and for their own retirements, there is also, just like in our own generations, that have and are not planning for retirement. The developer has shown themselves to be adaptable to market changes for nearly 40 years, it seems unlikely that they’ll either get suck in the mud and not adapt or thrown in the towel on the family business.