When Gail Shields decided it was time to make the move from an East York bungalow into a rented condo, she knew she had her work cut out for her.
It wasn’t the physical process of decluttering and culling decades worth of things that was intimidating. As the cofounder of Downsizing Diva, a business to help seniors with these kinds of transitions, she knew what she was getting into.
Convincing her husband, George, was the problem.
“I’m fond of saying he was attached to every blade of grass in our lawn,” said the 82-year-old.
He “collected every piece of paper that ever crossed his desk,” she added. “Even if it came in on his computer, he printed it.”
The act of downsizing, moving from a bigger home to a smaller one and sometimes from owning to renting, is a long-held right of passage for some Canadian seniors.
But with a slower housing market, a condo crash and global economic insecurity, there seem to be more Georges than Gails lately, as retirees hold on to their homes and delay the big change.
“Now, with the instability in our world, a lot of people are afraid to do anything,” Gail said.
The thinking is, “I’ve got a roof over my head. I understand it. I can pay for it. I’m not going anywhere.”
A recent survey from Royal LePage found that three in 10 Canadians (29 per cent) who plan to retire this year or next say they will carry a mortgage into retirement, and 47 per cent of respondents nearing retirement said they don’t plan to downsize within two years of wrapping up full-time employment.
Twenty four per cent of realtors surveyed by the firm in Ontario said that the majority of retirees are choosing to remain in their homes, tied with Quebec for the highest percentage of any province. In comparison, sixty-three per cent of real estate agents in Alberta who responded to the survey said there was an even split between downsizers and those staying in their homes.
“We’re seeing a little bit of a holding pattern,” said Shawn Zigelstein, broker for Team Zold, at Royal LePage Your Community Realty.
“And the survey alluded to that quite a bit.”
With more older adults still paying their mortgages, they’re more likely to stay in their homes, Zigelstein said.
But the general market instability, from a recent dip in Toronto home prices to the constant barrage of tariff news and lows in the stock market, is also impacting their decisions.
Recent data from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) revealed a frigid spring market, the lowest May for sales in two decades.
Prices dropped four per cent on average over May 2024, across the GTA.
“I think it’s just a general overall thought process with all financial markets,” said Zigelstein.
“Their investments have come down considerably in the last little bit, or they’re worried about maybe a family member moving back in.”
Seniors are also questioning whether they’ll get the same amount of money from selling their home than they would a few years ago.
Average prices for detached homes have dropped about 20 per cent since the 2022 peak across the GTA, according to the May TRREB numbers.
There’s a lot of Statistics Canada data that shows there wasn’t that much downsizing going on, even before the latest market downturn, said Diana Petramala, a senior researcher at the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Toronto Metropolitan University.
For example, census data from 2021 shows roughly eight to 10 per cent of households in the 65-plus age group had moved in the last five years, a much smaller share than the rest of the population.
Based on these stats, it’s clear that “downsizing is not going to be something that’s going to unlock a ton of housing any time soon,” she said.
One of the key reasons why, she added, is that if seniors have paid off their mortgages it’s hard to find something cheaper, especially in Toronto, whether they’re looking to buy a new condo or smaller home, or to rent.
And with home prices dipping, the math is even harder to make work.
“The price of everything else is coming down but so is the price of the thing that they’re owning,” said Petramala.
“They can extract a lot less from their homes.”
Her own mother sold her Toronto home a few years ago and is now renting a condo because she got enough money from the sale to rent for as long as she needs, with a nice buffer.
“But if she sold now and home prices were down, that would not have been the case.”
Jacqueline Watson, a GTA-based real estate agent who specializes in downsizing and seniors, said she often gets clients with “beer budgets and they want caviar.”
That might stretch a little bit further now that there’s more of a buyer’s market, especially for condos. There are less intense bidding wars and homes are not going for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the asking price as much, Watson said.
But if seniors get less money for their original home, there’s less to work with. For example, they might sell their detached house for $1.2 million. But if they’re going to need $700,000 to buy a condo in the same neighbourhood that also has high maintenance fees, then they might reconsider moving.
Like Zigelstein, Watson meets retirees who are “apprehensive” to downsize because they don’t know if they’ll be able to get the kind of money they want or need.
“People are fearful of the market,” Watson said.
Not everyone wants to buy another property. Some retirees dream of taking the money from the sale of their house and using it fund a long-awaited bucket list, cross-continent camper trip or world tour.
But the trade war, new restrictions on snowbirds and weak Canadian dollar are also making that option less attractive, said Varsha Singh, manager of operations and client care of GTA-based ClutterBGone.
“We’re seeing that investments have taken a dip,” she said.
“It’s worrisome to a lot of the older adults, because you know that they rely on that money,” she added, whereas younger people have more time to see the stock market bounce back.
Maybe they could make the numbers work if they traded a home in the GTA for a smaller community. But then they’d be far away from family and friends.
Being close to their community was a huge factor for Gail and George, who both sing with barbershop groups.
In the end, after five years she managed to convince him to make the leap to a rented condo on the 30th floor of a building in North York.
They’ve been happy and haven’t regretted selling their home over a decade ago, she said.
But that doesn’t mean the process wasn’t hard for George.
“When we actually started packing up, I discovered that we had 29 file drawers in our house, and one of them was mine,” Shields recalled.
“And even now? Yeah, he has 12.”
