[Chopper]

This is my first post on TOTV.

We first visited TV in April 2007, just two months after a tornado ravaged the area. On the last day of our visit, we were within an hour of closing on a new designer home when we were struck with a dose of reality. Better sell our current house and take care of some other items before making our big move. It was the right decision at the time. Other priorities put TV on the back burner for the past two years.

Now we are ready to pursue our dream again. The economy has introduced new challenges. Selling our house in Alabama is going to be tough in this housing market, but, we are committed to making the move to TV.

I have been reading the forums on this board for the past week or so and have found the discussions to be very informative and helpful. What a great information resource for a TV wannabe! One item that I found interesting was that since sometime in 2006 buyers could no longer make any choices in building a new home. It has been a "take it or leave it" approach to marketing the new homes.

I just received the latest TV Lifestyle Brochure and Video. The "Our Homes" brochure (printed 11/08) indicates that there are now two ways to select your Villages Dream Home.

Option 1: New Personalized Package Program for Designer and Premier Homes. This plan allows the buyer to select the homesite, select an Interior Decor Package and select an Exterior Color Package.

Option 2: Move right into any of our newly constructed, professionally designed homes and villas.

I wonder how much the buyer can actually specify regarding the interior decor package. Are there just a few "stock" packages. Pick A, B, C or D, or can the buyer actually build an interior decor package. Does anyone have any idea how this works?

Having said all of that, we are also very open to the idea of purchasing a pre-owned home. We have already seen several homes on the internet that were very appealing and also in our price range. We are not ready to just opt for a new home without first exploring all buying options (pre-owned listings by TV realtors, pre-owned listings by outside realtors, and, pre-owned listings from a recently discovered website - Villages FSBO).

Any information on how the Interior Decor Package selection works would really be appreciated.

In the meantime, we will continue to be envious of all of you who are already living TV lifestyle. I go to bed thinking about it and I wake up thinking about it.

[rshoffer]

Here's my advice.... When you are able to move here come and rent for 3-6 mos. Take your time getting all of your questions answered. There are so many variables and nuances you should not depend on TOTV to answer everything.

[NJblue]

We went through this process in July. Unless it has changed since then, here is how it works:

Starting with the interior, there are a number of base "models" from which to choose. I'm not sure, but there may be an already constructed home in each of the interior choices. In our case that was the situation. Hence we could walk through the home and see exactly the colors and material for the tile, carpet, walls, cabinets and countertops. The only modifications that I recall were allowed were: walk-in versus standard shower in the MBR, Lanai extensions (both length and width), appliance package, blinds or no blinds.

For the exterior, the package selected dictates color of siding and roof and the front door as well as lighting fixtures. Options included: one of 3 elevations, which in some cases also dictated the ceiling style (i.e., vaulted or not) in some of the bedrooms. You could also opt to add a golf cart garage (if your lot is wide enough) and also extend the overall length of the garage. There may have also been an option to add a couple of feet to the width of the house but I don't recall. The exterior options for roof/color/door/lighting were available in many different models and hence if you wanted to buy a Lantana but found an exterior option to your liking in a Gardenia, you could get it also in a Lantana. Our agent drove us around for over an hour just looking at different exterior packages before we finally picked one (most likely out of shear exhaustion and hunger).

While not nearly as flexible as it used to be in having a house almost custom built, it certainly is an improvement over the take-it or leave-it approach. The one problem that we encountered was knowing what the price of the various options would be. The only thing that our agent was able to give us definitive pricing for was what was in the model that we were looking at. Any of the the above-mentioned options could only be derived by estimating by the agent. We could also have had a formal price quote provided, but they would only give you one price quote at a time so if you were undecided about stretching the garage, for example, because you didn't know how much it would cost, you would have to have them quote you first one way, wait a few days to get the quote and then ask them to quote it the other way. Meanwhile the original price that was quoted was only good for a few days and (at least our agent) made us feel that we could jeopardize getting the original price if we went back for a second quote. The bottom line was that because of this ambiguity in pricing, they left some money on the table because we opted to not stretch the garage fearing that the other options that we asked for would completely blow our budget. As it turned out, the quote for these options came back less than what we expected and we probably would have opted for a stretched garage as well.

Another irritation was not having details about the appliance package options. Not only were the exact prices not available for each package, but what you got for your money in terms of features was also not documented. The best that we were able to do was have our agent take us to various homes which had different appliance packages and we could look at them (and try to remember from the knobs and buttons on the faceplates what features they had). I would have thought that having a simple brochure available for each option would have been very easy to administer.

My advice is don't wait until your last day to make these selections (like we did). If you are sure you want to buy and have selected a model and lot, get your agent to show you the various options several days before you plan to leave so that you can have time to think about them. We were making decisions right up to 7 PM on our last night there.

Note that when we bought using this program in July it was the very first time that our agent had done such a deal. Perhaps since then some of my above-mentioned "gripes" have been addressed and at least the agents have become more proficient in dealing with these issues. Despite these gripes, we are grateful for the program to allow us some level of customization. Good luck!

[mdfrog]

We purchased a lot in January with 6 months to start building. We submitted 2 packages for pricing, one with everything we wanted and one pretty basic. There are still different packages for the interior and exterior, but you can make choices of color and materials on cabinets, counter tops. When you choose an elevation and color that dictates front door and lighting style. Even with having to choose from specific packages we were able to come up with what we wanted. It would definitely be easier if could just know how much certain extras would cost ie: summer kitchen, extended lanai.

We had a great agent would recomend him to anyone, he would have submitted as many quote requests as we would need. Our first couple of trips to TV we had agents who were not pushy at all but didn't seem to be that knowledgeable or that interested in selling a home.

[Carla B]

We selected a lot last April and only had 48 or 72 hours to come up with the down payment or lose the lot. We were also "rushed" through the process and shown perhaps six alternatives for an interior package. The quote came in lower than we had expected. We selected one mainly because we liked the color of the cabinets and floor tile. But ANY changes we wanted to make were our responsibility to make after closing. A big expense was changing the formica kitchen countertops to granite.

It seems that the builder adds some nice touches to the spec houses that are not available when you contract to build. For instance my husband insists that the yard of the spec house next door got "better, weed-free, greener" grass than we did thus proving that the grass is always greener on the other side.

[katezbox]

Hi Howard,

This is my first response!

My husband and I purchased our home in Bonita on January 30 - and we were offered the option to customize. Here are a few things we learned:

1. What you are allowed to customize is dependent on the model of home you choose; it is also dependent on your lot. For example our lot was about 6" too narrow to accommodate a golf cart garage.

2. There is a customization worksheet that gets submitted for pricing. This worksheet lists all the possible choices for your model of home.

3. With your agent you go from model home to model home (right now they are all in Hadley) to see your choices. For example, we selected the cabinets from the Bridgeport, the tile from the Gardenia, the counters from a Bougainvillea and the exterior color and lighting package from one of the Lanatanas.

4. If a home already in the works has your exterior color choice, you will need to choose an alternate.

5. It is definitely the way to go if you want new and you want it "your way." On the other hand there are some real bargains in neighborhoods they are finishing.

Hope this helps,

Kate