When the baby boomers start to sell

BY MARY HOLM

Q. Love your column and your book, of which I have bought many for gifts.

I have built an $880,000 portfolio largely from your advice and am pretty happy with it, having replaced property investments (of which I still have some) with shares, bonds etc.

Quoting the 'quote' in last week's column, "When the baby boomers' children leave and they (the parents?) retire, then they will have to sell their homes to raise money to live on."

Where are all those children going to live?

You refer to all the children. The trouble is, there aren't that many of them, relative to the number of their parents.

Baby boomers were often in families of three, four or five children. They've given birth to none, one or two.

There have always been many people who retired with little more than their homes and then moved to smaller homes or units, to free up some cash.

Increasingly, though, there will be too many boomers doing this and too few younger people wanting to buy their old, larger homes.

Whenever the number of sellers goes up and the number of buyers goes down, prices fall.

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