Downsizing Dreams Delayed

Many empty nesters, the aging baby boomers are being forced to wait for a real estate market upturn

RISMEDIA, November 28, 2006?(MCT)?Denise Acampa, 54 and divorced, knows precisely what to do when she buys her Boston condominium. She will try a different North End restaurant every week, meet her girlfriends for cosmopolitans, and frequent the theater.

With her youngest child nearing graduation at Harvard College, Acampa is gung-ho about recapturing a lifestyle relinquished in 1982 for a husband, two children, cats, and a 42-foot swimming pool in her back yard. “When the kids come along, you live at soccer fields and baseball diamonds,” said Acampa, who paid $35,000 last spring to reserve a corner loft in the Broadluxe condo project downtown. “Now my activities are going back to the city.”

One thing stands in the way of her empty nester’s dream: a three-bedroom house in Saugus on the market since August.

Many empty nesters, the aging baby boomers whose kids are grown and out of the house, are being forced to wait for a real estate market upturn, deferring dreams of abandoning the lawnmower and suburban serenity for condo life, agents and developers said. Falling sales of single-families in Massachusetts?September sales were 24 percent below a year earlier?have produced a glut of houses for sale, enough to last 13 months. The resulting 5.3 percent price decline has been magnified by a demographic bulge of baby boomers trying to sell the family home and downsize.

“There’s a lot of reevaluation going on,” said Mark Lippolt, executive vice president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, one of the state’s biggest agencies. “The reason is a slowdown in the market.”

Empty nesters are on the leading edge of the baby boom generation, which comprises more than one-fourth of the US population and more than one-third of all real estate buyers nationwide, according to the National Association of Realtors and US Census Bureau. Lippolt compared the rush by empty nesters selling homes to “the pig in the python.”

Baby boomers fueled retirement-home sales during the recent housing boom. In downtown Boston, they are among the largest groups driving a mushrooming condo market, and real estate agents and specialists predict they will continue to do so as more of them age and become empty nesters.

Statewide, they were also behind plans for or development of 322 projects for people over 55 since 2000, said Aaron Gornstein, executive director of Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, an affordable housing organization. Cities and towns approve these projects “to keep the cost of schools down by favoring age-restricted development over family developments and to meet the needs of the baby boom generation that is aging.”

In downtown Boston, luxury projects target baby boomers with Internet advertising. Broadluxe.com asks: “What is your dream? What will you create?” The answer: Three out of four empty nesters do not or will not miss parenting tasks such as coaching and helping with homework, according to a 2004 survey of 1,174 people born between 1934 and 1964 by the nation’s largest home builder, Pulte Homes. And 44 percent of those leaving their family home said that they want a smaller house and that maintenance was their top priority.

But a slowdown in Boston-area house sales is crimping condo sales, which dropped 20 percent in the third quarter, compared with a year earlier, and pushed prices down 7 percent, according to Listing Information Network, which tracks the downtown market. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this story,” said Paul Turcotte, owner of Re/Max Destiny in Cambridge and Boston. “All these people in the suburbs want to move into the city, but they’re hung up because houses are staying on the market so long.”

The typical empty nesters’ condo costs between $700,000 and $1 million or so. These buyers are successful baby boomers with substantial equity in homes owned for decades?but it’s equity they need to pay for the luxury condo. Super-rich buyers of, say, $3 million condos “aren’t bothered by” the market downturn, said Diane Maloney, president of Marketing Group of New England, whose clients include Broadluxe. But typical empty nesters “bought a house before 1/8it was worth3/8 $500,00, and it’s now worth $900,000,” she said, and “they have to have that money to get into” the condo.

The slowdown also is delaying empty nesters’ plans to buy suburban condos. Susan Piracini, sales manager for Spicket Commons in Methuen, accommodates empty nesters having difficulty selling their homes, but she recently had to disappoint two prospective buyers who couldn’t, selling their units to buyers who were ready to go. Contingencies remain on three condos. “Anyone who’s unencumbered buys right away,” she said. Of the project’s 164 units, 111 have sold or have sales pending, and developer El Ad Group Florida just dropped asking prices by 15 percent, Piracini said.

Denise and Patrick Famolare, both in their early 50?s, got their deposit back on a condo at Spicket Commons, where their daughter and her fianc? recently purchased a unit. The Famolares had hoped downsizing from their four-bedroom, four-bath town house along the Saugus River to a two-bedroom condo would cut their mortgage payment by $800 a month. The move would have eased the financial strain caused by Patrick Familiar’s on-the-job injury at Massachusetts General Hospital and resulting job loss, said Denise Famolare, a travel agent. A smaller mortgage also might have freed money for a cruise or allowed her to work part time.

They had one buyer for their home, listed last December for $419,000, but he withdrew his offer days before the spring closing. Before they pulled the house off the market recently, the asking price was $329,000. “No reasonable offer will be refused,” she said. A Spicket Commons condo “is still our dream.”

Determined not to let the slowdown stop her, Acampa is eager to negotiate with a serious buyer for her house, winner of a 1960 design award. She calms her nerves by remembering her Broadluxe condo won’t be finished until February.

“I’m selling it,” she said. “I am going to start phase two of my life.”

For more information about Broadluxe condominiums, visit http://www.broadluxe.com.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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