Jim and Wanda Dill had lived in a golf-course community in Naples, Fla., for 14 years when they decided to move nearby to a different master-planned community, where the main draw is water.

Their current home, Naples Reserve, is built around a 125-acre lake and woos home buyers with waterfront living, boating, fishing and a tiki bar. The $500,000, three-bedroom house the Dills bought in 2015 overlooks the lake and a nature preserve. From there, they go kayaking, bike on lakeside paths and take their Goldendoodle, Chelsea, to the dog park.

“I play golf. I love golf, but we were ready for something different,” says Mr. Dill, 69 years old and a retired corporate attorney. With his wife, 66, a CPA, he divides his time between the 2,100-square-foot house in Naples and a summer home on Lake Geneva, Wis., near his native Chicago area.

Real-estate developers have long lured home buyers with houses along the rolling greens of golf courses, and some still do. But as golf slips in popularity, many are replacing golf with attractions such as lakes and farms, biking and hiking trails, trendy amenities like microbreweries, food-truck courts, and lifestyle directors who plan mixology classes and pickleball leagues.

Naples Reserve, a 688-acre, $70 million project, was originally zoned as a golf community when iStar, a New York-based real-estate investment, financing and development firm, changed course. The company took the land in 2012 as collateral on a defaulted loan but concluded that Naples—an affluent city on Florida’s gulf coast with a population of 22,000 that grows in the winter months—had enough golf courses, according to Heather Thompson, marketing director at Naples Reserve.