Your Next Chapter in Idaho: Is It Time to Rethink Your Home?

As life changes, your housing needs change too. Garrett and Shelby discuss the biggest reasons Treasure Valley homeowners begin considering a move and introduce the four housing paths available for the next stage of life.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

And welcome to the Idaho Life Show Real Estate in Community. I'm Garrett Thill here as always with Shelby Matson, a top producing agent here in the Treasure Valley and the VP of operations here at Idaho Life Real Estate. Shelby, today we're doing an episode that I've been wanting to do for a long time because we have this conversation in our office, it seems like almost weekly. So it's about time we bring this on the air.

Speaker 1 0:22

Yes, we're talking about getting older in the Treasure Valley. Not retirement planning in the financial sense. That's a different conversation altogether with a different professional. We're talking about housing piece. What changes when you're in the 60s or 70s, what your real options look like in this market, and how to make the next move on your own terms instead of having the decision made for you by a fall, a hospital stay, or property tax bill that finally got way too big.

Speaker 0:52

All not good things. And I want to put one thing on the table right at the top. And we're not going to spend this hour talking about reverse mortgages. I'll just lay that out right now. And I know that's the first thing that a lot of people kind of associate with senior housing decision because there's a billion dollars of advertising behind it. Again, nothing wrong with reverse mortgages. We're just not going to talk about that. There's a much bigger and frankly a little bit more interesting conversation to have about what your real options are in this valley right now, Shelby. And we're going to spend this full segment on that instead.

Speaker 1 1:24

Yes. So let me put a few numbers on the table to frame the picture. The Treasure Valley has aged dramatically in the last 15 years. The share of Ada and Canyon County residents over the age of 65 has grown faster than almost any other age group in the region. Wow. We're now home to tens of thousands of homeowners who bought their houses in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s and who are now sitting on staggering amounts of equity in homes that may or may not still fit the lifestyle they're looking at living in today.

Speaker 2:00

Yeah. And another piece that shifted is that 20 years ago, when somebody hit 65 in Boise, the common move was to sell the home. You buy a home in Arizona or Florida, and you know you're kind of chasing those warmer winters. And that pattern that we've seen here in the Treasure Valley has weakened a lot. The grandkids are now here, right? The community is here. The Treasure Valley has built it out so much of the last 20 years, 25 years, that the appeal of leaving to someplace like Arizona or Florida, it's not just what it used to be. And most of the folks that we're sitting down with weekly, they want to stay actually right here in the valley. They just need the housing to make it actually work for them for that new chapter that they're in.

Speaker 1 2:45

Absolutely. And the chapter they're in now usually starts with a kitchen table conversation that goes something like this the kids are grown and out of the house. You're still in the four-bedroom, two-story home that you bought to raise a family in, right? The upstairs, it's mostly storage now. Exactly. Right? They're not using it. The yard takes a whole Saturday to keep up. The stairs to the basement aren't a problem yet, but you started thinking about them in a different way. The property tax bill that came in the mail this year was the biggest one you've ever paid. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the question quietly surfaces: does this house still fit us?

Speaker 3:25

And that question is one of the most consequential housing questions that a person asks their whole life. And most people are answering it alone. They're answering it, you know, without a real estate advisor next to them with incomplete information. Sometimes they're actually making these decisions from a place of maybe grief or anxiety. And our goal this hour is to put the four real paths on the table in front of you so that you can think through them with clear eyes, your eyes, not somebody else's.

Speaker 1 3:57

Yes. And let me name those four paths so people know what we're walking through. Path one is right sizing, selling the family home, and moving into something that fits the next 20 years better. Path two is aging in place, staying in the home you love and making thoughtful changes so it works for the chapter ahead. Path three is moving into a community designed around this this specific stage of life, right? And can be going from an active 55 plus community all the way through independent living, assisted living, and continuing care. And path four, which intersects with all of these, is family-coordinated housing, bringing the kids and grandkids closer, often with an ADU or a multi-generational arrangement, like we've talked about in previous episodes.

Speaker 4:48

Yeah. And we're gonna walk through every single one of those paths. But before we do, I just want to spend a few minutes on the five things that quietly compound and they push people towards that conversation in the first place. Because almost every family that we sit down with, Shelby, with name, they name some kind of combination of these five. And most folks don't realize that how many of them they're already living with one of these five things until somebody asks the right question.

Speaker 1 5:16

And so true. Number one is stairs. Yeah. Yep. Almost no one thinks about stairs at 55. By the time you're in your late 60s or early 70s, stairs go from a non-issue to a daily calculation. Yeah. Yeah. How much am I carrying? Did I leave that thing upstairs? Should I just sleep in the spirit room down here tonight? I mean, these are all questions that are being asked. The stairs don't get steeper, but the calculation around them gets sharper every year.

Speaker 5:45

It does. And we hear that all the time. And then number two is the square footage that you just simply don't use. You know, you got the four-bedroom house that was perfect for the kids. This is 20 years ago. The four-bedroom house with two people in it means that you're heating, you're cooling the entire thing, cleaning it, vacuuming, dusting, you're paying property taxes on rooms that literally are just sitting vacant. You got the door closed, closing the vents, there's nobody sleeping in them. And most folks don't notice it at first because it happens gradually. It's not something that happens overnight. But at some point you realize that you've kind of been this curator of these empty rooms for the better part of a decade. It just happens like that.

Speaker 1 6:24

It really does. And number three is the yard. The yard you took such pride in at 40 becomes the thing eating your weekends at 70. Mowing, edging, sprinkler maintenance, snow removal in winter, leaves in the fall, right? Oh, leaves. Oh my gosh. That's a lot of work. The back fence that needs stained again. It is real work and it doesn't get easier. A lot of folks bought a quarter acre lot specifically for the yard, right? And 20 years later, the yard is no longer a pleasure. It's an obligation.

Speaker 6:55

You just don't want to do it anymore. That is literally the case. So number four is just your general maintenance. So when you think about it, there's a lot of things that that you know, you age quickly. You know, you life happens in the blink of an eye. And then before you know it, that roof needs to be replaced. The furnace that's now 18, 20 years old, excuse me, the exterior paint job that needs to get done, that deck that's slowly failing, that you need to replace those posts. The repairs, as you know, Shelby is a homeowner of multiple homes, investment properties too. The repairs don't stop coming. And the cost of contracting these out, they keep climbing. They don't go down as well. So we always need help to get those things fixed. So you've got the house is aging at the same time you are, and there's only so many years where both of you are well equipped to handle the deferred maintenance list, which keeps adding up.

Speaker 1 7:46

It sure does. And number five, and this one has shown up in the last few years in a way it never did before, is property taxes. Home values in the Treasure Valley have appreciated so dramatically over the last decade that property tax bills on long-held homes have moved in ways that genuinely strain fixed retired incomes. A retiree on a fixed budget who bought their home in 2002 is paying property taxes on 2026 valuations. The math gets really uncomfortable and is it doesn't get better on its own.

Speaker 8:23

Would you agree? It doesn't at all. And every year, as we know, here in Idaho, we get reassessed and reassessed, and it just feels like, oh my gosh, it keeps going up higher and higher, which is it's a good thing and a bad thing. I mean, that's great that the home values are going up, but it doesn't help if you're not going to be moving. You're just paying more in taxes. So, anyways, of these five things that we talked about, when you get any two of the five hitting at the same time, the conversation about what happens next, it needs to get serious. And when you get three or four of them hitting at once, the conversation usually becomes okay, you know, what does the next move look like? What does it cost? And how do we do this on our own timeline instead of it being this emergency timeline?

Speaker 1 9:05

That's where this whole hour is going. Stay with us, Treasure Valley. When we come back, we're walking through the right sizing path. What your real options look like in Boise, Meridian, Cuna, Eagle, Nampa, Caldwell, and the rest of the valley right now. And what the equity picture actually looks like when you sell a home you've owned for 20 or 30 years. You're listening to the Idaho Life Show, Real Estate, and Community.