Low Maintenance Lifestyle does not mean Moving to the Senior Center - For the past couple years I have focused
my attention on low maintenance lifestyles for down sizing baby boomers and empty-nesters. The biggest reason is that this is exactly where my wife and I are at in our lives. We are both early 50's and are at a point in our lives where we want to spend much less time on home maintenance and yard work and more time enjoying each other, our adult children and their children (if they ever decide to have any), travel, golf, boating, long walks and just being able to lock the door and go away for a few months if we feel like it.
A low maintenance lifestyle is not about an age specific target, although when I first started to focus our marketing on this area it seemed natural that our target would be the 50-60 year old audience, we have discovered that many young couples, singles etc are also thinking that they do not want to be "tied" down to a home doing yard work on the weekend, they would rather be out enjoying the 300 days of sunshine that Colorado offers.
What does it look like to live in a low maintenance home? Never having to paint the exterior, no yard work, I currently spend 3-4 hours every Saturday morning (during the summer) mowing, pulling weeds, watering, trimming the trees. If you have snow to shovel it takes minutes instead of hours, raking leaves, no thanks, I spend 5-6 weekends from mid September to mid October raking these annoying things. Then comes the bigger issues $$$, replacing a roof $10K, new sewer line $10K, painting the exterior $6K-8K, staining the deck an entire weekend and several hundred $$, or in our case rebuilding the entire flagstone deck because it was improperly installed, 600 square feet of flagstone with a hot tub built into the middle of it, needs to be pulled out and thrown away and the flagstone needs to be re-set, an entire weeks worth of work.
One of my favorite things to do is relaxin with friends.
So how many homes fit into this category, well in the south metro Denver area, everything south of Hampden to Castle Rock there were 506 low-maintenance homes available, priced from $55K-$1.869M and of those 23 were on golf courses. There are probably a few more patio homes and low- maintenance single family detached homes that are also available, many times an agent will over look this when inputting all of the data into the MLS system, another reason why it is important to work with someone that is very familiar with this type of property, they can be listed in so many different categories and if they happen to be placed in the wrong category, the perfect buyer may never see it. As a prime example, as I was doing this research I came a cross a $5M 400 acre ranch that was listed in the "attached" homes category, I let the agent know so that it would be seen by the right audience to help get it sold, but it is a very simple mistake that happens much more than most agents would like to admit, especially in the low- maintenance homes that can be listed under so many options
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