From June through late October, Traverse City boasts "near-perfect weather," making it an ideal place to live for anyone who wants to enjoy an active retirement, according to Realtor.com.
Photo provided/Alan Tsai/Getty ImagesA northern Michigan city was ranked the premier affordable place to retire in the United States Monday.
Realtor.com ranked Traverse City as the best place for retirees to enjoy their golden years "without draining their savings," in its 2022 edition of a report called "The 10 Best — and Most Affordable — Places to Retire in America."
Popular retirement meccas, like living in a sunny location with great weather, are less affordable than ever, according to George Ratiu, manager of economic research for Realtor.com. Cities in California and Arizona are not in the top 10 because home prices were "so prohibitively high in these states."
Traverse City, however, from June through late October, boasts "near-perfect weather," making it an ideal place to live for anyone who wants to enjoy an active retirement, according to the report.
And the median home list price in Traverse City, taken as an average over the past 12 months, is $390,000.
"E-bikes are everywhere. Boating, swimming and (of course) pickleball are huge," Realtor.com wrote in the report. "Locals regularly go to wine tastings, check out the sand dunes and paddleboard on a variety of lakes. There are multiple inviting senior centers in the area, a couple of which are right on the waterfront, some offering free tennis and shuffleboard daily as well as $5 exercise classes on cardio drumming to Zumba to yoga on the beach."
"If it was 80 degrees all the time, there would be a million people living in Traverse City," Bart Ford, real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Schmidt Realtors said in the report. "We have a lot of snowbirds who go South when the weather is bad, and then they come back and are here for those months when the weather is nice."
House hunters who want to get into the snowbird life, or enjoy the cold, can find "great homes that are well-priced" in Traverse City, according to the report.
For instance, a wheelchair-accessible three-bedroom manufactured home is asking for $234,000. And a downtown three-bedroom bungalow with a great front porch is asking for $399,900.
Below is Realtor.com's top ten list of the best, affordable places to retire:
- Traverse City, Michigan
- Portland, Maine
- Salisbury, Maryland
- Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
- Bloomington, Illinois
- Port St. Lucie, Florida
- Syracuse, New York
- Wilmington, North Carolina
- Concord, New Hampshire
- St. Louis, Missouri
To determine the ranking, Realtor.com's data team focused on metros and looked for affordable places with the most "senior-friendly amenities" in local homes for sale. The team confined the list to one metro per state to "ensure the list’s geographic diversity," according to the report.
For affordability, the team factored a year's worth of median list prices from June 2021 through May 2022. And it capped the 12-month median list prices to $500,000 to ensure the top 10 places are still "reasonably affordable," according to the report.
To figure out places already popular with retirees, the team focused on metros with the highest populations of residents aged 60-plus using U.S. Census Bureau data. And it included metros with the highest number of businesses appealing to seniors in the ranking, using additional census data.
