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As I noted at my Review of Oak Point Homes post, we were actually looking for a place like this for a couple of years before we found it. I'm sure there had to be newspaper ads we missed - it might have helped if we actually subscribed to a newspaper, but we gave that up years ago as a waste of paper: between TV, radio and the Internet, we just feel no need to contribute to the daily waste of paper and ink.

So we mostly used the Internet. That's a great way to find things generally, but for certain things, it can be difficult. For example, if you want to find retirement choices in MA, should you search for "MA retirement communities" or "Massachusetts retirement communities"? Or wait: should that be "55+" instead? Or "Senior"? Or maybe "55 plus"? I tried all of them. "Active adult" is another phrase to throw in, as are "age restricted" and "senior independent retirement", "senior-friendly", "independent living" and "master planned community". There certainly are a lot of phrases to describe what we want, and they all bring up different results!

We visited a number of places. Condo apartments? No thanks. All inclusive meal plans? No, we don't need that. Very expensive places with large homes and golf courses.. nope, out of our range and we don't play golf anyway.

Early on we realized we didn't want condominiums or another two story home. So I started trying things like "Massachusetts retirement community modular homes". That found "Massachusetts Mobile Home Parks and Used Homes for Sale", which listed a boatload of mobile home parks, but Oak Point wasn't (and still isn't) among them.

We did visit some of those, but they were all too low end: rows and rows of tightly packed mobile homes with little more than a driveway for a yard. That wasn't what we wanted either.

At one of those parks the owner listened to what we were looking for and said "You know, there's a place down in Middleboro that might be what you want.. but it's very expensive."

So we paid absolutely no attention to that. In retrospect, we should have realized that there are a lot of different ways to define "expensive". I think the rent at his place was something around $100 a month, so yes, in comparison, Oak Point is more expensive. But for what we were looking for, it isn't at all, so I wish we had been smart enough to go investigate then. But we were not, so it was another year before I stumbled upon it.

I don't know what magic combination of "Massachusetts" (or was it "MA" ?), "retirement" or "senior" or "55+", "community", "park", and so on finally brought up Oak Point, but I do remember realizing immediately this had to be what we wanted: single floor modular homes, good sized lots, attractive clubhouse, southeastern Massachusetts, over 55 restricted. I've tried a few times to repeat the search, and it's still hard to find. You can cheat with things like "retirement living middleboro ma", but even that isn't on the first page of Gooogle hits.

A search that does work is "55-and-over community massachusetts". Possibly that's how I did finally find it, but note that "55 and over community massachusetts" doesn't do it - who'd think to put dashes in? Well, when you are trying to find everything you can, that's the kind of silly thing you have to do.

Or you could buy a newspaper.