Sarasota Chosen Top Place to Retire

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More good news for the Sarasota-Bradenton area. Portfolio.com, the national business news site, named the Sarasota-Bradenton market as the most desirable community for retirement. I pasted the article below or you can read it here - Sarasota-Bradenton Chosen Top Place to Retire.

Portfolio.com, the national business news site, named the Sarasota-Bradenton market as the most desirable community for retirement.

The ranking is welcome news in a region that is still getting over the effects of the Great Recession and clearly banking on a rebound in the influx of retirees to fuel its economy.

In fact, many of the communities in the upper range of the list of 157 communities compiled by Portfolio.com represent economies heavily dependent on the real estate industry that are now struggling with some of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

Charlotte County was ninth of the top 10 retirement communities, which included six other Florida communities.

The rankings were based on an analysis of data from the American Community Survey, conducted in 2009 and released by the U.S. Census Bureau in September. The communities analyzed by Portfolio.com were from the top 157 metropolitan and “micropolitan” areas that had at least 40,000 residents who could be classified as seniors.

“The study explores a wide variety of markets, both in terms of size and geography,” said G. Scott Thomas, a demographer who created the analysis for Portfolio.com. “The markets that ranked the highest in the study were areas where the population of seniors is already substantial and growing rapidly.”

The combined Manatee and Sarasota county market was the largest on the top 10 list. Portfolio.com said that senior citizens represent 26.81 percent of the population of 688,126, or more than double the national average of 12.9 percent.

The business site said that “more than 95 percent of seniors residing in Bradenton-Sarasota were born out of state compared to only 53 percent of the elderly residents of a typical U.S. market who were born out of state.”

Second and third on the list were two communities in Arizona, another traditional retirement haven: Prescott and Lake Havasu City, respectively.

The next seven were Florida communities: Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Naples, Palm Bay-Melbourne, Homosassa Springs, Ocala, Punta Gorda (the Charlotte County metropolitan area) and Port St. Lucie.

Four other Florida markets — Tampa-St. Petersburg, Daytona Beach, Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Lakeland — were included among the top 20.

Also on that list were Seaford, Del.; Barnstable, Mass.; Santa Rosa, Calif.; Reno, Nev.; Phoenix; and Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.

“Beginning next year, an unprecedented three million Americans will turn 65. While most of these seniors are expected to stay in their current homes, a significant number will decide to seek new places to live in other parts of the country,” said J. Jennings Moss, Portfolio.com's editor.

“In addition to warm cities, we've also seen that seniors are attracted to communities that already have a significant population of retirees,” Moss said.

“This demonstrates that seniors will go to places that already have a comfortable infrastructure in place.”

Discussion

#1 By Luke Bouman at 8/20/2021 6:23 AM

That's great news for your city. A couple years ago our city Holland Michigan was rated as the best place to retire. We were also ranked as the 2nd happiest town. Good luck with your real estate business.

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