Financial Times advice on downsizing
Posted on March 24, 2022
Very interesting article released by the Financial Times on the benefits as well as advice for mature buyers looking to downsize their current home. Highlights below:
- A survey by investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown survey this year found that 22 per cent of respondents planned to downsize.
- In a recent poll of 2,000 people aged 60 plus and calculated that on average people living in family houses could see a potential £150,000 windfall.
- Savills reported that sales of detached houses netted their owners an average profit of £465,000.
- A typical down size move costs £13,500.
- The advantage of downsizing as far as estate planning is concerned is liquidity: if you can afford to, you can gift cash released to children or grandchildren during your lifetime. Such gifts are counted as Potentially Exempt Transfers.
- The (traditional) retirement housing sector has been widely criticised with regard to hefty exit and other fees levied by the management groups.
Read the full article here: FT downsizing article oct 21
Simon Westray, Sagehaus Living’s Managing Director, views; “This article highlights the scale of people looking to downsize as well as the many advantages of making that move. It also highlights some of the barriers to people willing to make that important step mainly concern about the costs of downsizing and concern about hefty management and exit fees if they move to a traditional retirement community. At SageHaus Living we are actively removing these barriers for instance all of our units are SDLT exempt, there are no estate agent fees and legal fees are nominal. In terms of management fees we do not have them and no exit fees are built into our model. This demonstrates how we as a business are looking to make the retirement options for downsizers a lot more transparent and genuinely attractive option for the 14 million people over the age of 65 in the UK’
