Get into the Active Minds of Baby Boomers — 8 Things to Learn

Baby Boomers represent the “Age Wave” that is looming.  The first Baby Boomers will turn 85 in 2031 (less than 15 years away). The seniors’ residences we are designing and building today will by a mere decade old by the time this wave starts to hit. It’s important to get ahead of the curve, so we will be ready to go.

Understanding the importance of Baby Boomers to those working in the seniors housing industry, Century Group’s Bob Ransford, VP Acquisitions and Investments and Brett Walsh, Director, Corporate Finance Partnerships share interesting learnings from the premier seniors housing investment conference held annually by The National Investment Centre for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) in United States.

Presented in a two-part series, we will shed light on how the seniors housing industry is progressing based on trends found on Baby Boomers and how they interact with technology. This part in particular will take us into the trends, behaviours, and how Baby Boomers think.

8 THINGS TO LEARN FROM THE MINDS OF BABY BOOMERS

1. Baby Boomers want ‘life on demand’—they want to have it all and own none of it. Health care will be on-demand when they need it. They will embrace the sharing economy.
2. Baby Boomers are going to be a captive market as they age as 70% of them live in care-dependant suburban neighbourhoods where they will be trapped at home when they can no longer drive. Seniors’ residences can start serving them long before they move in by taking services to them.
3. The biggest bulge in the Baby Boom generation are those that were born in 1961. That bulge will begin to arrive in seniors’ residences about 20 years from now.
4. A complete overhaul of how the industry sees itself and move away for words such as ‘retirement’ and ‘seniors’ as not appropriate for how Baby Boomers want to live the post-career stage of their lives.
5. Baby Boomers will want variety, will not age quietly, want to be seen and heard, they will be active in the community in different forms including continuing to work in a new field, they want small personal specialized offerings.
6. Baby Boomers will benchmark the services offered by seniors operators against other services from other industries – movement to making things Fun, Easy, ‘Having it all and owning none of it’ and Baby Boomers are not club joiners like their parents were, had less children and have less trust in institutions generally.
7. The gap between the number of American seniors and the number of “adult children” who look after them is expected to narrow dramatically in the coming years.
8. 1/3 of Baby Boomers in the US won’t be able to retire. Another large cohort will find retirement boring and unchallenging. Baby Boomers will want to make career shifts at what we once considered “retirement age”. Their 70s will be their “encore years”, during which they will be looking for a less arduous path to success and one with more meaning—“to live for a calling”. They will be looking for an “emotional pay cheque”