A friend of mine finished a house project last month. He moved the bedroom downstairs, widened one doorway, and put a bar in the shower his wife can actually grip.
He is not moving to Florida. He is not touring the assisted-living place with the fountain out front. He is doing what three out of four of us say we will do: staying.
The moving trucks get the coverage. The Sun Belt towns, the 55-plus communities, the vans headed south. My friend never called one.
If you own a house and plan to keep it, look at the staircase on your way to bed tonight. Count the steps at the front door while you are at it. That is where the next ten years of this cohort’s housing money is pointed.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and where today’s read fits.
Now the part the moving-van story misses. AARP asked Americans over 50 where they plan to grow old. The trade calls the answer aging in place: keeping your house and rebuilding it around your body as the body changes. Harvard counted the houses ready for that.
75%
Americans 50 and over who want to stay in the home they live in now as they age (AARP, 2024)
3.5%
US homes with three basic accessibility features: a no-step entry, single-floor living, and doorways wide enough for a wheelchair (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies)
Tens of millions of households plan to grow old in houses built for thirty-five-year-old knees. Closing that gap is not an investment thesis. It is carpentry, on a deadline.
The money already knows. Harvard’s housing center counted 3.2 million households doing accessibility work on their homes in 2022 and 2023. A record, up from 2.3 million in the round before.
Owners 65 and over were the likeliest group to be doing it. We are also the fastest-growing group of homeowners in the country. And we put 88 cents of every improvement dollar into professional jobs. We have retired from the ladder.
Every one of those jobs lands inside the remodeling business, the paid work done to existing homes. That business now runs above 600 billion dollars a year. The roof, the furnace, and, more each year, the ramp.
Now the honest catch, because a read this clean needs one. Remodeling is a local trade, not an empire. Nobody builds a moat out of bathroom jobs. A good crew one county over competes the day it shows up.
Harvard’s report names a harder squeeze: the industry is short of skilled hands. From the contractor’s chair, that shortage is pricing power. From the family’s chair, it is the winter your mother waits for a safe shower.
And the money for the work is often locked inside the walls being fixed. Home equity is easy to admire and hard to spend. That ceiling is real. It caps what anyone in this trade can charge.
The arithmetic
AARP, 2024 Home and Community Preferences Survey (published December 2024): 75 percent of adults 50 and over want to remain in their current home as they age; 43 percent expect to need modifications. Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, Improving America’s Housing 2025: owners 65 and over spent 27 percent of the nation’s home-improvement dollars in 2023, up from 14 percent in 2003; 3.2 million households made accessibility improvements in 2022 and 2023, up from 2.3 million in 2018 and 2019; owners 65 and over put 88 percent of improvement spending into professional projects; the market runs above 600 billion dollars a year, with a named shortage of skilled trade labor. The 3.5 percent figure is the Joint Center’s count of homes with a no-step entry, single-floor living, and wheelchair-width doorways.
So skip the moving vans and watch the building permits. When the wait for a bathroom job in your county runs from weeks into months, the schedule has arrived. My friend’s invoice already did. Same house tomorrow, one doorway wider.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
|