Non-Traditional “Retirement” Metros Becoming Meccas for Older Adults Who Want to Age in Place
Our guest blogger today is Nikki Buckelew. As the Founder and CEO of the Seniors Real Estate Institute, Nikki brings great insight into the Senior Market.
It’s probably only natural for real estate agents to assume that most boomers or retirees bent on moving to a new city to enjoy their golden years will be on the trail to Florida, Arizona, or some other state blessed with warmth and plenty of sunshine. And those states are probably the ones best situated to offer plenty of age-in-place benefits, right?
Nope.
When a boomer or senior who’s open-minded about where they wish to move and retire searches Google for the best cities to age in place or best cities to retire, they finds some spots that are a bit out of the norm, but quite intriguing nonetheless.
Places like Sioux Falls, SD; Provo, UT; Iowa City, IA; Bismarck, ND; Columbia, MO; Omaha, NE; Madison, WI; and Boston, MA top the list.
As adults 55+ begin to contemplate their future and plan for a possible move, they are hearing more and more about the importance of preparing to age-in-place. They already know they hope to live in their own home, independently, for as long as possible. And the cities listed above – plus many other non-traditional retirement options – are receiving plenty of attention as go-to spots for their aging-in-place benefits in the form of quality healthcare, accessible transportation, government initiatives in building the city as senior-friendly, and a number of other indexes.
The Milken Institute, a non-partisan think tank, compiled a list in 2012 of the 259 Best Cities to Age Successfully. Another ranking is due later this summer of 2014. It divided the rankings into “Large Metros” and ‘Small Metros,” with Provo, Utah topping the Large City list and Sioux Falls the Small City rankings.
Others in the Top 10 of Large Cities to Age Successfully include Pittsburgh, Toledo, Des Moines, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C.
Others in the Top 10 of Small Cities to Age Successfully include Rochester, MN, Ann Arbor, MI, Missoula, MT, Durham-Chapel Hill, NC, and Gainesville, FL.
See the entire list here and learn more about the Milken Institute’s approach to promoting aging-in-place awareness: http://successfulaging.milkeninstitute.org/bcsa.html
Frankly, if I were a real estate agent or broker in any of these top cities (and even many further down the list), I’d be going full-bore to make sure I was positioned to capture as much of this older adult segment in my town as possible. Yes, older adults will purposefully be moving to my city and I should be the one to serve them and find a stellar house for them to buy. That would include promoting my area’s dominance as a haven for older adults, while working to ensure that I had the knowledge to properly help them. And oh yeah. Since older adults from outside the area will be searching online for information about my city, I’d want to make sure that I popped up front and center on Google as an expert in real estate for boomers and seniors in my town.
Simply put, lists like this give you plenty of marketing power – plus motivation – to grab a huge segment of business in your market that perhaps you never even knew existed.
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