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Retirement housing options: something to suit everyone

Equity-rich with active lifestyles, today’s 50-plus generation are making adventurous plans for retirement

Whether you downsize or prefer to live among like-minded folk in purpose-built communities, there are many options to consider.

Retirement isn’t what it used to be. These days, rather than sitting back and watching the roses grow, more of us want to use the extra time, energy and any cash released from the sale of a property to travel the world or fulfil some other lifelong ambition.

Nowhere are these changes reflected more sharply than in our choice of living arrangements.

Back in the Seventies, utilitarian Eastern European-style blocks of sheltered flats – “granny stackers” as they were known – were virtually the only kind of retirement property available, or if you became ill you went into a nursing home.

Today, more of us are opting to downsize – or if we opt for the purpose-built route, what we’re after is the Waitrose or Marks & Spencer equivalent of retirement housing: high quality, choice and style.

“About 20 years ago, many people were less affluent and didn’t have such wide social and travel horizons,” says Kevin Collins, marketing director of English Courtyard, which at prices starting from £350,000, provides the crème de la crème of retirement housing.

“Today’s retirees want somewhere they can perhaps travel from and entertain. The health issues are still there but people now stay fit for longer and, certainly at our end of the market, they often have private health insurance.”

The generation that grew up in the Sixties has both the spending power and the force of numbers to drive change, and a whole new market is growing up to meet its varied demands.

Peter Fletcher, a housing and care consultant who once ran the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Task Group for Housing and Care for Older People, says: “It’s very much a developing market which is evolving to cater for people’s different economic circumstances and preferences. Some like to live in a separate retirement community, others prefer to be in the heart of their own community.”

At the top end of the market there are luxury estates offered by companies such as Beechcroft and Audley Court, which has three developments in sumptuous grounds in Tunbridge Wells, Harrogate and Devon, and six more planned. In the middle area there are firms like Pegasus, while at the lower end of the market there are still the three-storey blocks offered by developers such as Churchill and McCarthy & Stone.

As yet, there are only a few US-style retirement villages aimed at catering for both “the fit and the frail”, aged from 55 to over 90, offering as much or as little care as you want or need. They include the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Hartrigg Oaks in York, St Monica’s Trust’s Westbury Fields in Bristol and the ExtraCare Charitable Trust’s Ryfields in Warrington, one of a number of cheerful village communities offered by the Trust that provide a choice of buying a lease, renting, or part-rent, part-buy.

Peter Fletcher says, “What’s interesting is that we are seeing people moving into retirement care villages earlier and not waiting until they need them. They might move in and then spend part of their time in their holiday home in Gibraltar, say, but come back and live in a village permanently if they need a higher level of care.”

In the early days of the Queen’s reign she sent about 300 telegrams to centenarians – in a few years’ time there will be more than 30,000. Within the next 25 years the number of pensioners in the UK will soar, from just over 11 million today to a staggering 15.3 million.

Healthier though we all are, one in 10 of us will eventually spend some time in a nursing home – so whatever your retirement plans are, thought has to be given to possible help, care and nursing.

The breadth of choice today is extraordinary: the next few pages should give you a taste of the choices available.

Written by Patsy Westcott

This article was created: 11 October 2006.
This article was last edited: 16 January 2007.

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