The baby boomer demographic is growing every day, and for apartment owners, its great news. Baby boomers, much like millennials, are moving to cities and urban cores, and they are generating incredible demand for multifamily product. We sat down with Nat Kunes, VP of product management at AppFolio, to ask how landlords should be capturing baby boomers, and why this is the demographic to watch.

GlobeSt.com: Why is the baby boomer demographic important to watch?

Nat Kunes: Baby boomers are huge segment of the population—and they are aging. They're retiring, they're becoming empty nesters, they're becoming grandparents and they're downsizing. In fact, people who are 55 plus in the U.S. are expected to reach over 120 million by 2050. The baby boomer impact has always been massive on the market, but there is a shift ahead.

GlobeSt.com: Where does this demographic want to live?

Kunes: Interestingly, apart from senior living communities (which there is a tremendous need for), many in the 55 plus population are, instead, choosing to move back into metro areas from the suburbs, competing with Millennials for prime rental units in desirable metro locations. That's a whole generation of people who may be overlapping with Millennials now in terms of rental expectations, but also a population that's, generally speaking, looking for more luxury living as they downsize and have a larger base of savings or dispensable income to go toward housing.

GlobeSt.com: How should landlords be preparing to capture this demographic?

Kunes: Boomers moving into an apartment are often doing it for accessibility to a metro area, but also for easier living and quality of life. For rental units, this equates to amenities, great service/property management and things that make life easier (like tech). When it comes to tech, Baby boomers are not like the generations before them. They've been living in a tech-dominated world for well over a decade and many of them are just as tech savvy as a “Snapchatting” 17-year-old, if not more. Tech amenities are incredibly important to this group. Some interesting tech perks that come to mind are voice-activated rent payments systems. This cuts down on delivering hand-written checks to property management teams and/or the struggle of navigating an online payment system, which might be completely foreign to older generations. Another tech amenity is Chatbot communication for maintenance requests. There is nothing more frustrating than having maintenance requests fall by the wayside. Chatbots give tenants the ability to not only communicate their maintenance concerns but also receive real-time updates.

Instant Insights /

Forget Millennials, Focus on Baby Boomers

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