Sounds interesting. What about residents who don't bring their cell phone to the pool, and what about those who might be out of sight as in the restroom. And would it pick up just those people getting their mail of walking their dog around the neighborhood pool?

When I lived in an exclusive home community of about a thousand houses a few years ago, the HOA there issued each household two fobs that one could attach to one's keyring. They were about the size of two quarters stacked one upon the other, but were more postage-stamp in shape.

One simply held them up to a sensor along the mag-lock gate doors to access the community pool or the private beach access.

If one lost the fob or it was stolen, you went to the office, paid your $25 and got a replacement. They went into "the system" immediately and deactivated the lost fob. When you sold your house or moved out, your fobs were deactivated and the new residents were issued two new fobs when the new residents went into the office to get their access fobs. IIRC, they had to bring an escrow settlement statement of some such document, but it was fairly easy to "Redfin" the address to see the date the most recent escrow closed to verify the house had new ownership.

Same happened if you rented your place out. Every time you got a new tenant, you had to go and obtain their fobs for them. Usually the fee for fobs was part of the initial rent cost. Then the previous tenant's fobs were deactivated.

Worked pretty well. Tougher to do with short term rentals unless the owner left their own fob(s) and replaced if they disappeared with the renter. Of course, when they did that, the short-term renter's fob would get deactivated, thereby lessening the attraction of stealing it for their own personal future use.

Fob holders were, of course, always discouraged from holding the gates open for people coming along behind them. Unless you knew them personally as neighbors, family members, or whatever.

Just for an idea of scale, how many gates (doors, pools, etc) were equipped with fob readers?

No more than a dozen. Just like your Villages ID cards, there would be a handful of major Rec Centers that would have someone that handled this task. Seems pretty do-able to me.

To be useful:
- 100+ pool gates will need to be updated. My nearest neighborhood pool has two gates so perhaps the number is closer to 200
- 100+ pickleball and tennis gates would need to be updated (this number is just a guess based on at least two gates at each rec center)
- 130,000+ devices would need to be provided to residents
- 1,000+ devices would need to be handed out EACH DAY for guests according to the numbers provided recently

This will be one more thing that needs to be carried by those that can't remember their Villages ID today and this one won't fit conveniently in a wallet.

If these are handed out for free then the cost will hit the amenity budget. If these are not handed out for free then there will be complaints about the cost and there will be demands for the ability to re-activate guest devices used previously.

With 300+ new points of failure there will be a maintenance cost that hits the amenity budget.

It's a solution; we just need to accept that it could require a one-time amenity fee increase that never goes away.

And poof, the solution goes away.

Ya know what they say, "Good Security Is Not Convenient." Nor it is cheap, generally.

It's kinda like the "Good, Fast, or Cheap - pick two" paradox. You can have any two, but not all three. You could say the same thing with "Good security, convenient security, or cheap security - pick any two."

lol…did you pick up on it? That was the whole idea…

What an insane waste of time and money to keep out the small fraction of 1% of people from using our facilities.

Don’t all those access points need to be tied back to a main server, to update when new fobs are issued or fobs are lost.
This would cost a fortune to maintain, let alone roll out

1%? Okay let's roll with that. There are around 150,000 people who live in The Villages. Let's pretend that 50,000 of them are snowbirds, leaving us with only 100,000 full time residents. 1% of that number would be 1000 people.

Please let us know where your neighborhood's closest rec center and pool are. We can invite that 1000 people there, and they can stay away from everywhere else. Y'know, since it's just 1%, and keeping them out is an insane waste of time and money.

Well using your math that would be 3 people per day across nearly 100 recreation facilities!
I agree that everyone should do more to prevent scofflaws from using the facilities that we pay for but recognize that the cost of many proposals will probably outweigh the benefits.

But those 1,000 people don’t travel in a herd any more than the 100,000 do. Yeah, 1% of 100,000 is a big number but 1% of the 30 people in your pool today is a little less than 1/3 of a person. So let’s say one person every three days or 100 people total I’m the course of the entire year.

Are you ready for you amenity fee to go up $16 this year rather than $6 to keep that 1/3 of a person out of the pool tomorrow? Some will say yes while others will say even $6 is too much.

As an ammenity fee paying resident, it would be well worth it to me if I showed up at a sports pool to swim some laps and one of those 1% was taking up the last available lane. If that happened, it wouldn’t be the first time.

You must be at one regional center that doesn’t have 10 people in line 30 minutes before open. Each person I’d scanned before entering. I swam at 4 sites, since 2010, only once was Id not scanned, because of malfunction. However ID’s were still checked. Water sports are far more brutal to acquire a spot that open swim

Since guest aren’t allowed at sports pools and most swim 30-40 minutes. Didn’t take long to acquire a lane to get 2 miles in every morning. Bunch of lanes open at that 50 degree temp