[BobKat1]

Originally Posted by EdVinMass

If you are serious about playing a lot of golf, then TV is the logical choice and the other surrounding communities just don’t compare. But the private ‘free’ golf in TV is for the par 3 executive courses. The championship courses are open to the public. On the other hand, the executive courses become more attractive as we age and loose distance to father time.

Since I play very little golf these days, other factors came into play with my decision for Stonecrest:

TV homes are made up of clusters of manufactured, vinyl sided, and stucco construction. All the homes in Stonecrest are stucco, a look I prefer. Most of the homes in TV are two bedroom whereas the Stonecrest homes are 3 bedrooms or more and I wanted a guest room and a full size den for all my computer equipment and other toys.

Stonecrest is a 24/7 guard gated community, TV is not.

Stonecrest has a year round heated indoor pool, TV closed their only indoor pool a year or two ago. Stonecrest has an exercise room with a variety of equipment like treadmills, stair steppers and bicycles which is covered by our amenities fee ($104/mo). To use such equipment in TV runs about $600/yr for a couple.

Stonecrest has all of the sports facilities that TV has including pickle ball, tennis, bocce, shuffleboard, and horseshoe courts, billiard tables and table tennis and a beautiful softball field. We just don’t have the huge number of them that TV has because have just 4000 residents. So I don’t see what the advantage is to having 20 times the number of rec centers etc. when you have to support 20 times the number of residents. But I will admit that Stonecrest’s rec center is rather mundane compared to some of the beautiful regional centers in I've seen in TV.

The Stonecrest golf course is owned by the developer but the rec center, pools and recreational facilities are owned by the residents. TV residents don’t own any of these facilities in their neighborhoods. They have a contractual right to use them in return for the amenity fee.

For the vegetable gardeners in our community, Stonecrest’s garden club has a fenced and locked area at the back of the complex that provides 15x25 raised beds with irrigation for something like $15/yr. As far as I know, the TV gardeners will have to use pots on their lanais or birdcages to grow vegetables.

But when it comes to clubs to join, TV with well over a thousand clubs leaves everyone else in the dust. Stonecrest’s 40 or so clubs covers the basic card and activity clubs, but that’s about it.

And finally there’s the touchy subject of the ‘access to The Villages’ advertisements that a few surrounding communities boast. I don’t like it because it connotates being a freeloader at TV resident’s expense when it’s hardly the case. I wish they would change that to ‘convenient access to hundreds of stores, restaurants, and medical facilities along the 441 corridor’. When I looked at Stonecrest, I saw that I could have access to all those facilities from Stonecrest just as easily as if I lived in TV. But to do that in a golf cart would require traveling the long dirt road that runs between Lowes and Orange Blossom Hills. So I simply purchased a street legal cart and I cross over 441 onto Buenos Aires Blvd to shop and eat out and I never have to drive on TV’s private cart paths either.

I think TV is beautiful and a great choice for the tens of thousands of retirees who have chosen to live there, but Stonecrest came closest to meeting my criteria for a retirement community and I don’t regret the decision to live here either.

Thanks for the good perspective.