Deciding what is the right timing to buy your home for retirement has its challenges
Finding the right timing to buy your home for retirement has its challenges. Delaware real estate Broker, Kathy Sperl-Bell of Active Adults Realty discusses the options for timing your retirement home purchase and the issues some home buyers face when relocating and buying new construction.
What’s the best time to buy your retirement home?
Hi, this is Kathy Sperl-Bell at Active Adult’s Realty in Delaware. And in this series, we have talked about what’s the best time to begin planning for your retirement, how to deal with information overload, what to do if the community you’ve fallen in love with is almost sold out. And today we want to talk about timing. One of my agents likes to start with this question. When’s the last time you retired and relocated to a new state about which you knew very little all at the same time? The answer is almost always never. And that’s why there’s no one road map. Some people are planners. And we all have a friend like this that always knew when they retired exactly where they wanted to live. Perhaps they were even fortunate enough to buy that retirement home ahead of time before selling their current home. In the meantime, they can use the retirement home as their vacation home and get to know the area very well. By the time they retire, they’ve got built-in friends and neighbors and a built-in social life. But not everybody can do that. So what are some other options?
An option for you could be sell now, buy later. If you live in an area that’s selling like hotcakes, take advantage of it. Get your house ready, list it, and sell it. Put the money in the bank and relax. Now you have the time to search around, take some trips, look at the different possible locations because that’s most important. First, you have to decide on the location. And when you’ve already sold your home when you find the right location, find the right house, you’ll be in a much better position to proceed with the purchase. So that’s another option. But if you can’t do that, if you need to wait and try to sell and buy in about the same time period, we’ve handled those cases many times over the years. It can be challenging, especially if you want to buy new construction. We’ve talked about that before and you can go search our blog for new construction. But it can also be a challenge depending on where you now live. If you now live in New York, for example, that can be tricky because settlement dates are kind of mushy in New York and trying to coordinate things to sell your home and settle in the morning, come down to Delaware and settle on the purchase in the afternoon, that can be very difficult in some cases. But we’ve worked through it with many people and we’ll work through it with you.
We see so many different scenarios, let me give you a fun example. This happened last week when a large group came into the office to meet with one of our agents. And it was three couples. They’ve been friends forever. And they had an objective of finding a community that they all would like in which they could all buy new construction. But here was the challenge. One couple was going to be ready in a year. The second couple was not gonna be ready for three years. And the third couple was not gonna be ready for five years. Hmm. So an existing community, even if they’re still building new homes, might be tough because that couple in five years, there may not be any lots left. So the agent … The plan was to take them to three or four relatively new new home communities and see if that would work. So off they went. And they came back at the end of the day and reported success. They had all found a community, brand new community that they loved. They not only liked what the amenities would be in that community, but they also liked the location. It put them near all of the things that make living in coastal Delaware such a great option.
So our agents are here to work with you whether you’re ready next year or not for five years. And we hope that we’ll be able to help you make a good purchase decision.
If you are seeking to relocate in your retirement and have a move to Delaware in mind, be sure to get your copy of our Relocation Guide by requesting one here.
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