We lived in North Carolina until we retired and were able to come down and visit The Villages a few times (a luxury I know you don't have). However, we never did the Lifestyle Visit, we never rented a house for a month, we never researched which would be the "right" neighborhood for us and we never bought a "starter" home, thinking we'd move into our "real" home later on. Instead, we picked out a house we really liked in a new neighborhood and bought it essentially over the phone with the realtor we'd met. We didn't have to be here for our closing. We bought about a year and a half before we retired and moved and used a local property management company to find somebody to rent the unfurnished house out to for a year (and did that entirely by phone). Because we weren't here for the closing on the house, we didn't do a walk-through with the builder until almost a year after we bought the house (and did catch a couple of very minor things to have repaired). When we finally moved in, we risked having the house be really beat up by the renters, of not liking our neighbors and of not having chosen the right neighborhood. Instead, the renters had treated the house gently, the property management company's cleaners made the house look like new, our neighbors have turned out to be great friends we simply hadn't met yet and we love the neighborhood. The whole thing worked out well for us. We'd never owned two homes at once before and that was a little scary but the rental income, while not making us any actual money, did give us some tax breaks and allowed us to buy at the prices we first saw rather than the price houses in our category were going for a year and a half later (and prices only go up here). No regrets here.
Right now you can only buy "new" houses in the new areas to the south that are expanding so rapidly. We've thought that we're glad we're in an area with nearby town squares (Brownwood and Lake Sumpter Landing for us) and other established retail. There's just not enough of that in the new areas for us. My niece bought down in Fenney despite our misgivings and absolutely loves it. She revels in the constant growth, bicycling trough ever expanding neighborhoods, golfing in newly opened courses, playing pickelball in new rec centers and swimming in new pools. She knows that retail and dining and such takes a bit more to get to now, but that it's all coming her way.
There are definitely companies who will watch your house if it is empty (our property management company did that before and after the renters lived there), ones that will do your yardwork (if you have a yard) and pretty much any other service you can think of.
As far as 1 Gb broadband, I'm not sure if there are any here yet (I looked initially because I moved from an area where Time Warner offered 700 Mb and both AT&T and Google offered gigabit). I'm getting 130 Mb DL from Spectrum. I download a lot, stream a lot (including 4K video), play games online and I can't come close to hitting my theoretical maximum download speeds. There are some faster vendors than that, but check to see if they have data caps. What good is gigabyte speed if you can hit your data cap in a week? Also, keep in mind the selection of internet providers is predicated on which neighborhood (aka "Village") you live in as The Villages is so big that it is serviced my multiple vendors.
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