Homes for a Booming Market
By: Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: 2004-08-13 13:11:00-04:00
With the leading edge of the 78 million baby boomers marching closer to the traditional retirement age, builders and developers are anticipating a sea change in what, for the time being, is called the senior housing market. Chances are, this generation isn’t buying "senior" anything. And they promise to be anything but retiring.
For boomers, says Myril Axelrod, president of Marketing Directions Associates in New York City and a veteran consultant to developers of senior housing, "everything always has to be different. They’re adamant about doing it their own way."
Because the oldest boomers are only 58 and likely to delay traditional retirement, it may be too early to know what they’ll demand six to 10 years down the road. Builders and developers, though, don’t seem to be waiting.
"The largest national builders have said that they’re looking to drive 30 percent of their business toward active adults," says Leslie Marks, executive director of the National Association of Home Builders’ Senior Housing Council.
The emerging trend: more options that include almost every form of housing, from urban high rises to rural enclaves and from in-town rentals, condos and single-family houses to new-style destination communities.
"I think this group of people coming along is more interested in the opportunity to pick and choose," says Tracy Lux, founder of Trace Marketing in Sarasota, Fla., and another longtime adviser to the senior housing industry.
Current house-hunters in their 60s and older are previewing the expanding menu, beginning with a broadening concept of "retirement community."
The phrase used to imply a distant place for leaving old lives behind. But only about 4.5 percent of retirees—a stable number in the last four U.S. censuses—move across state lines, says Charles Longino Jr., a gerontology professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and an expert in retiree migration. Recognizing that, developers are offering more choices closer to where people raised their families and built their careers. [See The Good Life in the Big City from our June 2004 issue.]
Boomers like to think of themselves as being open to everyone and everything, so age-segregated communities, cut off from the ebb and flow of Main Street life, are likely to feel too homogenous and too disconnected from the world at large for their tastes. In his new River Oaks community in Paso Robles, Calif., developer Dick Willhoit is assigning 40 percent of the 481 planned homes to Traditions, an age-restricted community within the larger community.
"One of the things that stood out in our research is that [customers] wanted the opportunity to engage with the rest of the community," he says. And they want a community with 300 to 500 homes, one "that’s not so large they can’t know their neighbors."
House-hunters should allow for the possibility that they’re choosing a place to spend the rest of their lives. "Don’t buy a home with built-in barriers," says Leslie Marks. "You’re feeling good now. But as your eyesight changes or as you need knee or hip surgery, you’ll want to have a house you can live in.
"We’re not talking wheelchair access necessarily. This is about better task lighting, first-floor master suites, roll-out cabinets—things everybody should want."
Ben Brown is a freelance writer in Asheville, N.C.
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