Problems at The Villages In Lady Lake, FL

Before you buy or build a home in The Villages, you may want to read this. First of all my wife and I really love the golf and social life at The Villages. There are about 16 of my fellow high school friends that live there and they are the one that got me to build a home there. Here are some of the problems my wife and I ran into: This was an email I sent to a couple who was considering building a home in The Villages. We bought must of our furniture from Southernlife Styles as they are owned by The Villages and could come into our home and set everything up before our closing so we could stay in our home that same day. They knew we were putting our home in the rental program and never mentioned that if we did so, the warranty would be VOID!

We have an annual high school golf tournament and that is where the word got out about The Villages. We keep adding more classmates and it's really nice to have so many of us there. Rather than go through my story again, I am enclosing some of the correspondence I have had trying to get things repaired that should have been repaired 2 years ago! They keep telling us that we fell through the cracks. Well. this is the 3rd time we have fallen through the cracks. It seems like the only way to get things resolved is to contact Jennifer Parr, the founders Granddaughter, and then heads start to roll. Of course it's almost impossible to talk to her directly. You normally get her assistant who does get the message to Jennifer. Feel free to call me if you would like to talk me and I will also send you another email of a list of vendors whom I have found to be very good. The thing that really has my wife burning is the furniture we bought from Southern Lifestyles. The sofa and loveseat are from Flexsteel, which is the top of the line. They both have torn fabric, fading and pilling. Can you believe they told us to shave our furniture! Even their brochure states that it doesn't fade and has no pilling. Our property manager told us that they replaced the loveseat and when we arrived a few weeks ago it was obvious it had not been replaced. They had tried to sew it up and did a miserable job of that. Now we were told we had to wait another 3 weeks for a Flexsteel representative to come out and look at the furniture. After reading this please feel free to call me if you have any more questions.

Sincerely,

Ed

Here is the complaint I filed online with Flexsteel Furniture:

We live in Va Beach, VA and have a vacation home in The Villages and have been trying to get this problem resolved since June of 2003. Here is the last response we received from The Villages:
Hi Ed,

I finally got a call from Southern Lifestyles and they said it is not unusual for the material to pill. Patsy suggested getting a "pill shaver" and removing what is there. She also said that it would stop doing that after a couple of "shaves". I think my wife has a shaver, so I will try it to see what I can do. Patsy also said that if you have any further questions you are welcome to call her direct.

Here was my wife's response: Tell him I am far more concerned about the rips than the piling. However, if we must rely on shaving the fabric,
which weakens it, please notify Southern Lifestyles that we want our Flexsteel sofa replaced with a sofa that does not have to be shaved. Please send Chris's e-mail to the Flexsteel representative. I can not believe they expect their customers to shave their furniture. Here is my response: have to agree with her. You don't buy the top of the line furniture and expect to shave it. If that is truly the case someone from Southern Lifestyles should have informed us of this. I can assure you we would not have purchased it. We have been fighting this battle for over a year now and I decided to go directly to you. I really don't believe this is the way Flexsteel treats their customers. I don't have the style or fabric number here in VA, so I tried to pick out something that was close from your online catalog. Thank You for helping solve this problem.

Here is some FYI stuff.

The Villages now has about 900 homes in their Property Management program. The 1st year you will probably get good rentals, then the next year they try to put the people, who come down on the preview program, into house near the new construction. This means your rentals will drop off after the 1st year. After fighting with them for 2 years they still had not repaired our bathtub, furniture, or painted the walls where the drywall had to be repaired. We were told the Manufactory Rep from Flexsteel couldn't get by for 3 weeks and the Manufactory Rep for the bath tub couldn't get it repaired before 3 weeks. The painter did come buy and did the touch up. We told him it looked like it didn't match but he assured us it would when it dried in 24 hours. You guessed it, it still doesn't match. We decided to repaint it ourselves when we come down the next time. Since we built the house My wife has not have very much time to enjoy it as she is always waiting for someone to come and look at the problem, meet with someone to complain about the problem or someone to come out and fix the problem. Not FUN!!!! Our game plan was to sell this home and build another one when we retired to The Villages. She is so fed up with The Villages now that she just wants to sell this home and go somewhere else or just stay here in Va Beach. We are going to sign a contract with Debbie Okruhlica of Remax Realty to manage our property as soon as The Villages gets everything repaired. I don't want to rock the boat Debbie has 30 homes she rents in The Villages and appears to do a lot better. She only charges 15% commission and if we or any of our family members want to use our home there is only the cleaning fee that needs to be paid ($50 vs. The Villages 18% & $55 cleaning fee). We had a lot of things missing when we got down this time and it appears the cleaning crews took it. Had to replace it all. They have had trouble with this and they fire them when they catch them but because of the shortage the rehire the same ones back. If you need to contact Debbie call her at 800-552-5269 or 352-753-2029 or email sodsquadfl@aol.com. There is a lot more to this story but I'm sure I have worn you out by know. Feel free to email me if you have more questions email me at Ed Dalton