Your screen name is "Golfer38", and excuse me if I'm jumping to conclusions here, but I am assuming golf is important to you in your decision to explore The Villages. Understand this: despite The Villages website not being clear about this, if proximity to golf is important to you, you need to know that there are not many golf courses south of 44.
If you look at maps and check things out carefully, you will see that between 466 and 466A, (these are 20 year old areas, approximately) there are many many many (a lot) more courses, both executive and championship, within a 15 minute golf cart ride than you will find south of 44.

The brand new homes being built in the brand new villages have many things going for them, but easy access to many golf courses is definitely not one of them.

While The Villages real estate representatives do list and show pre-owned homes, the focus will be on convincing you to buy new. Nothing wrong with that, but you need to know that's where they are coming from.

Enjoy your trip. It's a fun place to be.

My gut reaction says nice idea, but my brain says No. I think you would better served spending your time with a real estate agent. At the very least you would need to define your expectations. Age, marital status hobbies, sports, new home, resale, size, style (Villa, designer, premier), location (near town centers, remote).

A strong recommendation is a leisurely drive from the top of The Villages. CR42 down Buena Vista observing the neighborhoods as you go south. Recognize, that The Villages was developed from North to South. When you get to CR 44, you will find the newer developments as you continue south.

You will note that as you drive south, the homes are newer and so is the bulk of the people.
You will also note that the infrastructure of restaurants, stores etc is more developed in the north.

Also, explore US441/27, CR 466, CR466A, CR44 (more or less east west) for commercial Development.

Get with an MLS realtor NOT a village rep. Most of them are not licensed realtors and will show you what you want then “encourage” you to go south of 44 and buy new. MLS can only show you preowned homes.

Not my experience at all. I told our VLS sales agent that we were not interested in new construction, and it never came up again. Salespeople want to make sales. They don't want to waste their efforts by "encouraging" someone toward something that they will never buy.

Both MLS and VLS is needed to see all homes for sale.

Same here. It's amazing that same, tired nonsense keeps getting repeated over and over again...

We told ours the same and she showed us all pre-owned for half a day and then she asked us if we were open to take 10 minutes to look at a new one. We did and we both changed our minds about new construction within about 2 minutes of entering the home.

I think it's good not to rule out anything (pre-owned vs new, location, home model) without seeing things for yourself.

Wrong. There are actually more than 6.

Knowing what I know now, I wish that I had been open to new construction when we first came. After we decided to move, we went with new.