We'd visited The Villages once or twice but the year we decided to get serious, we made a list of the things we were looking for in a retirement community and broke it down into "must haves" and "nice to haves". We also decided on a general geographical area that we wanted to live in. Doing research online, we were able to eliminate quite a few retirement communities and boiled it down to 8 or 9 top contenders. We spent several days on vacation one year visiting all of them and checking off which items on our lists each location did or didn't manage to have plus our overall impressions of the communities. On the way home (we were driving back up to North Carolina, our home for 20 years), we rules out everybody but The Villages. During that last visit, we'd also dropped in on a few open house showings of new homes and had found a model we really liked. When we got home, we searched for houses of that model, took virtual tours of them all and narrowed it down to one. And we bought that one and have lived in it for nearly 5 years now.
Others will tell you that the only way to do it is to rent a house here for a month or two and spend your time while here investigating villages within The Villages. You of course could also visit other communities altogether. Each approach will work for some and not for others. Perhaps we were lucky. If so, we wish you the same luck, whether you decide on The Villages or on one of the other communities you mention or sometimes else!
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