Definition of "Retirement Home"
Everyone knows what is a retirement home, but if we were to give our best most concise retirement home definition it would be of something like: real estate facilities that cater to retired and elderly people looking for housing that accommodates the senior lifestyle needs.
However, due to a lot of factors, the real estate industry has increasingly looked at retirement homes as an interesting niche for real estate developers to make a lot of money. Why? Due to the advance of medicine, humans have been living longer than they’ve ever been. Biologically, that is. Socially, with their kids growing up and starting their own families, empty nesters feel the need to fill their void with a busier lifestyle. Some continue in the workforce for a while longer, but some don’t. With those that don’t and also the ones who require special attention due to medical issues, developers have been increasingly diversifying the retirement homes supply and making it sexy.
Long gone are the days where the most common retirement home definition was of “a place where you go to get old and die bored”. That’s far from what a retirement home is nowadays. Depending on how much the residents are willing to spend, they can enjoy their “golden age” golfing, drinking mimosas and fine dining, attending weekly activities like movie watching and ballroom dancing without leaving their senior citizen housing facilities.
Health and wellness are major components of retirement homes too, so most of them have spa, saunas and gyms, plus in-house nursing care and constant transportation to health centers for any resident’s medical needs. Transportation is a big issue for the elderly. Even with ride-sharing apps - especially because most elders do not get along great with smartphones - it can become a burden on the family to drive around the elder, so retirement homes normally provide this service to make sure the retiree’s mobility is conserved and, more than that; stimulated.
Has your idea of what is a retirement home changed? If not, if you’re someone that prefers to be by yourself, on your own as long as you can… get a real estate agent to help you that specializes in the niche of buying homes for the elderly. It might seem like an easy task, but there are a lot of accessibility and location factors that weigh-in that decision and he (or she) will be able to figure it out for you!
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