Days of Wine and ...
Today's active-adult communities appeal to aging boomers with spas, hiking trails—even vineyards
Even an hour away from their current community seemed too far to move. But when Trilogy began selling homes for its Vineyards community—so called because it's near the Livermore Valley wine country and will have grapevines and olive groves, a wine-making facility, and maybe even the community's own wine label—the couple quickly snapped up a lot. "If you told me five years ago that we would do this, I would have said you were insane because we were living in our dream house," Maureen Christiansen says. "But it's amazing how quickly your outlook can change."
Active-adult communities have been around since the 1960s, when Del Webb began building them in Arizona. With a few thousand identical homes built around golf courses, he reinvented retirement by giving old folks permission to be active, indulge themselves, and have fun, says Marc Freedman, author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers: Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America. "Even people who didn't move to these places became more active, and retirement changed from this awkward thing people dreaded to something they looked forward to and worked toward."
Bill Feinberg, an architect in Voorhees, N.J., who has done extensive focus group research on baby boomers, says, "Affluent baby boomers want a certain level of lifestyle for themselves as they get older and downsize, but they believe they can get that lifestyle in several different ways." And active-adult builders aren't the only ones courting them.
For example, home-building firm Röhe & Wright in Houston doesn't label its developments "adult," but it targets this group with urban and semiurban locales, high-end customization, and $1 million price tags. The firm is almost done building two dozen townhouses near the city's premier medical center and not far from its business and entertainment districts. "All but one of the 25 buyers are empty nesters," says Andrew Suman, a partner with the firm.
Feinberg says that a few years ago, adult-community builders began to worry that boomers wouldn't gravitate to their homes at all. In response, they began branching out of the Sun Belt to urban and suburban communities, where they'd never built before. According to J. D. Power & Associates, Phoenix is still the top destination for people buying into 55-and-over communities, but fewer than a fifth of recent buyers in a fall 2006 survey chose that area. The other top markets for active-adult communities were Chicago, "Inland Empire" (southeast of Los Angeles), Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Party on. In addition to building where prospective buyers already live, developers began brainstorming how to make their homes and clubhouses irresistible to them. Trilogy, which began building its communities in 2000, has been tinkering with its formula almost perpetually in response to its own market research.
The company's attempt to appeal to boomers is everywhere as perspective buyers tour the model home gallery at the Vineyards. Beatles and Fleetwood Mac tunes waft across a landscaped cul-de-sac where each housing style evokes a different wine region. Inside a "Napa-style" one-story home, O'Brien enthuses, "Is this a cool party space or what?" A large open kitchen, dining room, and living room wrap around a patio with a stone fireplace and glass doors on two sides. It is indeed easy to imagine your life as one long series of wine soirees and bunco nights.
advertisement
