Renting is not only for millennials. More and more baby boomers are choosing to forgo home ownership for apartment leases.
Take for example Lawana Kelly, who traded in her four-bedroom house in Lenexa for a one-bedroom apartment at the new Centropolis in downtown Kansas City.
Her home sold in a matter of days, but even before putting it on the market, Kelly knew her next move was going to the city. She admitted to missing her garden but is not looking back.
“My day off was spent mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, and the rest of the week was spent worrying about the garden and the house," said Kelly.
Local realtor Christina Boveri estimates seeing noticeable growth in the last five years in the 55 and over demographic for the rental market.
“Probably eight to 10 years ago, mostly the biggest demographic was the young professional,” said Boveri.
The search engine Apartment List said the rate of baby boomers renting property is up by 34 percent over the last seven years.
Credit: Apartment List
Marnie Sauls at One Light listed a few reasons for the uptick.
“They're looking for a carefree lifestyle," said Sauls. "They don't want to worry about anything. They want to make sure maintenance is doing everything for them. They want to have planned activities."
One of those tenants is Debi George, who after owning a home with her husband for 25 years, decided to live the apartment life.
“We feel like we know our neighbors because we meet them down here and socialize," said George."We don't look at it as money thrown away. We don't pay property taxes. Anything that goes wrong in the apartment, they're right there to fix it for us so we're not spending that money so we only see upsides to it, we're happy."
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Jane Monreal can be reached at JANE.MONREAL@KSHB.com.
