The Villages, Florida: Guy's Playbook for Leading the #1 Real Estate Team for 6 Years Running

So let's talk a little bit about your business.

First and foremost, again, congratulations to the success that you guys have had at RE-MAX, there in the villages.

We know that all real estate is local.

Guy, what do you see as the biggest challenge in your local market?

That's a great question, Tony.

So right now, and I would say for the last two years or so, we've had quite a bit of inventory on the, what we call the resale market, right? Not including new construction.

Currently, as of this morning, there's over 1,100 homes on the resale market, which is pretty high for us.

Homes are taking between 70 to 80 days on average to sell.

And so the struggle that we're having right now is there's just not enough buyers for all the inventory that we have.

So we have to make sure that we're pricing homes appropriately for the market, that we're doing all the marketing we can and being as aggressive as possible and driving traffic to those listings.

But I think a lot of sellers are finding out, unfortunately, the hard way that their home isn't worth quite as much as they hoped it would have been because of the inventory that we're experiencing and have been for the last couple of years.

Now, Guy, I know your team does a phenomenal job on the listing side in terms of moving those inventories.

And again, that's why you're a top ranked successful real estate team in the market.

I have to wonder, as I've read a lot of real estate publications, you know, I mentioned earlier about South Carolina being one of those states that is probably seeing the biggest moving growth that they've ever seen.

And I grew up in South Carolina.

And so do you think part of that is that move, you know, move down for a couple of years in the villages? Maybe we're having just too much fun.

And we need to kind of not go all the way back to Ohio, but just kind of move a little bit further north.

Is any of that to blame for it?

There's a fair bit of that.

I would say it's actually a relatively small percentage of our sales are people that are moving out of the area.

Unfortunately, we are a retirement community, so we do have people that are moving on to another life, so to speak.

That's a portion of our sales.

But the main driver of inventory in the villages and across the state of Florida since about 2024 has been new construction.

So you have these builders that were just ramping up and pumping out new homes for so long.

I think you can only build 25 new homes every day for so long before it catches up, right? And eventually those become resale inventory and it drives the market down.