You’ve read all the articles about the best places to retire. Consulted every friend or acquaintance you could on what they think are the best retirement towns. Then even got in the car and had an old fashioned road trip to visit, in person, your best candidates for retirement states and towns. But unfortunately, you still aren’t sure you have found your ideal active adult community.
Sound familiar? You may have come up against the last, and sometimes most difficult, hurdle in your pursuit of the best over 55 community – how do you find the actual development you want to live in. It’s not that easy a job, as we found out when we researched communities for this article. We'll try to give you some practical help here.
If you want to find your best active adult community, these are the steps we recommend you follow:
1. Find the state and town. We have tried to assemble reviews of the most promising retirement towns and states so you can try them out – first on paper, then with a visit.
2. Check out our database of active adult communities. This list is meant to help after you have found a good town or region to check out. All the communities we know about are listed for each city in every state. Just click on the link to find out more. We encourage quality developers to add their over 55 communities to this database, because we want to have our visitors see the full range of communities in each town or city. When our editors find out about other good ones, they add them to the list. The Top and Featured Listings provide even more useful detail and links.
3. There are still more active adult communities out there – and you need to find them. The problem is that a lot of over 55 developments are established – they have sold all the original units and disbanded their sales office. These places, some of the nicest, can be harder to find.
4. Internet to the rescue? Searching on “active adult communities in Asheville” at Google, Yahoo, or MSN can help a little bit. Mostly you will find a handful of sites, including Topretirements. Unfortunately, most if not all of the listings are nothing but paid ads. Still, better than nothing and you’ll get some ideas. When researching this article we tried searching on some of the new real estate sites on the Internet (Zillow, Terabitz, Realtor.com, and ZipRealty) – with generally disappointing results. Mostly the results we saw were pages and pages of homes - we had no idea if these homes were in an active adult communities or not. The best site we saw of that bunch was Realtor.com – which leads us to our next point.
5. Get a good realtor! If you haven’t found your dream active adult community after looking at all the listings on this site, the best answer is a very traditional one. Get a good realtor! After all, you are buying – not selling. You won’t have to pay a commission, so for Pete’s sake, get a hard-working professional to do your leg work for you! A good realtor will know all the best communities, and should be able to quickly point out developments that you would never find on your own.
6. How to find a good realtor. There are lots of ways to know. You can search on Google for “realtors in ” and you will instantly find a good list for any town. Or, go to Realtor.com – there you will see ads for realtors specializing in different areas, including active communities. Also on that site you can use their “Find a Realtor” feature to find a professional from their organization.
7. How do you know if you have a good realtor? Sometimes it’s just instinct – does this person strike you as hard-working, smart, and honest? Do they return phone calls, show you places you want to see, respond to feedback, come up with more suggestions than you do on your own? Check out references, don’t be shy. And if time goes by and you aren’t seeing what you want and the vibe is not great – find someone else.
Finding your dream active adult community is not an easy process. But it is important to do it right so you make a smart decision – the first time. Good luck!
See also:
"Is An Active Adult Community Right for You?"
Topretirements list of Active Adult Communities | 
