Boomer Liquidation Sale On Hold

by Jim the Realtor | Aug 31, 2015 | Boomer Liquidations, Boomers, Jim's Take on the Market, Market Conditions, Thinking of Buying?, Thinking of Selling? | 11 comments

The baby boomer liquidation sale has failed to materialize….so far.  Boomers are holding onto their old homes longer, and living the good life instead:

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Baby boomers are not leaving the homes they own to settle into apartments, as housing economists had predicted.

A new edition of Fannie Mae Housing Insights says that boomers are not responsible for a recent surge in the apartment market. But when they do finally downsize, the very size of the generation will be enough to “move markets.”

Predictions were that boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1965 (some sources say 1964), would begin downsizing naturally as they became older and more frail. “The research showed that the likelihood of Baby Boomers occupying single-family homes has changed little in recent years, despite the factor that boomers are experiencing major life changes that might be expected to cause a downshift in their housing consumption,” the Fannie Mae article said.

Instead, through 2013, boomers had not significantly reduced the rate at which they live in single-family, detached houses, the agency said. And although the number of rooms in those houses has decreased in recent years, “boomer home size has increased since then, suggesting the boomers are not trading down to smaller single-family homes, either.”

The article added that the “number of boomer apartment dwellers has not budged in recent years, whereas the number of millennials in multifamily rental units has grown by nearly half a million annually.”

That’s a significant finding with big implications for the housing market, because “boomers have an enormous residential footprint.” Some 40 percent of the nation’s homes are occupied by boomers, who have “half of the nation’s housing wealth,” Fannie Mae said.

As baby boomers move into their retirement years, they’re having a major impact in other ways, too.

“After working most of their lives, Baby Boomers want it all in retirement: travel, dining out, owning two cars and multiple homes. And they want to do this off of income generated by their investments,” said a recent article in Wall Street Daily. “Yet you’d be amazed how many people go to see an advisor with far too little in savings or investments to enjoy that sort of retirement. Even those people who have enough assets often have them allocated extremely poorly.”

Some boomers have accumulated no savings for retirement, the article said.

Read full article here:

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