I’m looking at retirement in a year or so and am currently renting, which won’t be much of an option on the pension. I have a small amount of super, but if I use all that to buy a strata/torrens property, then there’s not much left. Retirement real estate has a variety of arrangements (village/unit, some >50s strata or community titles, some with leases of various types, etc); leasing doesn’t involve fees such as stamp duty, so are a cheaper option up front, and they have options for progressing to higher levels of care as aging proceeds 
. Choice has had some articles on this topic, but I’d also be interested in feedback from those who have made the choice of living arrangement, and how it has turned out for them. Can we learn from your experiences please?
Not us, but friends. They retired to a coastal privately owned “retirement village” of relocatable homes. They paid to buy the home and the right to stay there, and then had to pay a weekly service charge.
The owners were lovely people, the staff were friendly and willing to help with little things that weren’t strictly their job, there were recreational facilities - Mens shed, tennis court etc. Then 15 years later, they sold out. The new owners maximised the space putting new homes on all available land, including what was recreational, greatly increased the fees and restricted staff. What was paradise soon became unaffordable, with two new houses in their “backyard”, limits to vehicle numbers. The only way out was to sell through the Management (which had been a bonus with the previous owners) who, after being on the ‘market’ for a while offered a much reduced bid. Our friends, I think, were getting rent assistance with the Pension, but in the end they could not sell and took the offer leaving them with little capital to start again. They didn’t want the hassle of yard maintenance, so they went to a caravan park rental cabin.
It is a risk. However, if you can do it, there are very cheap houses in rural areas. We sold our house for $80k, next door $40k, but there was no public transport, only one doctor, small hospital with 10 beds for aged care, independent living units (but you had to be ‘homeless’ and poor under the State Govt regulations), a bus for Pensioners once a fortnight to the next biggest town for medical, dentist, hairdressing, shopping. It is worth looking into, unless you have to be close to family or specialists. If you need to move into care, the weekly rental of the house is a good return on capital, the proceeds of sale can go into Super.
We keep asking ourselves why we sold up and moved. We were both much happier there, although we were both in good health, if anything happened the hospital was just across the road, the independent units were one block away, the new supported care units were being built next door and the shops were half a km walk. I was heavily involved in community volunteering and we were both very active. I miss the friendliness and sense of community that comes from a town of 800, but there were hardships - drought etc. If you don’t want to risk buying, any one (poor enough) can rent an independent unit, and people did come from quite a distance to do so. Dept of Housing regulations said less than $70k in bank, not own a house or caravan - but check your State’s regulations first.
