Australia could face a retirement village housing shortage in the next decade with baby-boomer retirees pushing the number of people aged 55 and over to 1.7 million by 2011.
Professor Robert Stimson and Michelle Manicaros from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute at the University of Queensland have written a book entitled Living in a Retirement Village providing a snapshot of the retirement village industry and future trends.
To be unveiled at the annual Retirement Village Association of Australia conference in Launceston on Tuesday, September 14, the book urges greater government, community and industry collaboration to ensure a wider range of housing choices for Australian retirees.
Professor Stimson said that Australia would probably need about 135,000 housing units in retirement villages by 2011 to satisfy current trends in demand. But as many as 225,000 people might be in the market by then.
"One of the big challenges for the financiers, developers and managers of retirement villages in the future will be how to cater for the demands of the baby-boomer generation, born between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, who will be retiring and entering older age by the hundreds of thousands over the next two decades," Professor Stimson said.
"Their diversity, demanding expectations as consumers, and their lust for lifestyle will create many new market niches as well as large aggregate demand for more specialised living environments, including the incorporation of health care as a high priority."
One of the potential difficulties the retirement village industry faced was its over-dependence on better-off retirees who had sold homes to finance their moves to retirement villages, he said. "The retirement village industry also needs to cater for income and asset-poor aged people," he said.
The new book provides a profile of who moves to retirement villages and why. The typical resident is female, around 75 years old, widowed, had a formal education only until the end of secondary school, and a cash income of $21,000-$32,000 per year. But most were couple households when they moved into the village, the book says.
"People decide to move into a retirement village because of concerns with health and security, the desire to reduce time and costs of maintaining the family home, and for a lifestyle change. The majority of moves to a retirement village were less than 10 km. Most retirees don't want to leave their local area with which they are familiar and where they have social networks including children," Professor Stimson said. The research highlights a lack of public transport and poor access to shops as a problem for many residents in retirement villages.
For more information, contact Professor Robert Stimson (telephone 07 3365 6307 or mobile 0411 020 627).
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