Third Act, First Move for Reed & Co.
John Caruso learns that the best forever homes don’t happen by accident. They happen because someone, somewhere along the way, had the wisdom to plan ahead.
Most of us spend the better part of our lives working towards the perfect home. The right suburb, the right size, the right price. But somewhere in our fifties and sixties, a quieter and more deliberate question begins to surface: where do I want to spend my third act?
Jane Fonda talks about it. That stretch of life from sixty to ninety, your third act, is not a winding down. It is, if you plan it well, the richest chapter of all. The catch is that the planning part takes more thought than most people give it, and the window to do it well is shorter than people realise.
Kate Cox and her team from Reed & Co Noosa, has spent years watching what happens when people leave this conversation too late.
“People wait until they’re eighty and then decide the stairs don’t suit them anymore, or the yard’s too big,” she says. “By then, it’s too late. You should start looking at your forever home before you’re seventy, and even if you’re not ready to move, that’s the time to start working out what your needs will be.”
The language matters here and Kate is deliberate about the words she uses with clients, and she sidesteps the term ‘downsizer’ with good reason. In her experience, a surprising number of people in this life stage are looking for more space, not less.
“We deal with a lot of people who want a bigger home,” Kate explains. “They want their family to visit.”
Far from retreating, these people are building a home that can hold a full life, a base for family from around the world.
Kate encourages clients to think deeper than floor plan and location, though those matter enormously. Practical considerations such as single-level living, wider hallways, step-free access from the garage, walk-in showers without a bath to climb over.
“If you look for those things when you’re a bit younger, you’ve got time to make changes,” Kate says. “There’s time to make your showers wider, to look for two bedrooms that are light-filled.”
The point is not to catastrophise about the future, but to remove its friction before it arrives. Automation, she says, is one of the great unsung advantages of planning ahead. Voice-operated systems, electric gates, features that make life easier.
“Automate now rather than finding it too hard and confusing later,” she says.
Then there’s the garden. Not just the size of it, but the potential. Whether there’s room for a pool if you want one in a decade. Whether there’s space for hedging that gives you privacy, or a lemon tree that makes the back corner feel like yours. These are small things that can compound into something meaningful over the years.
Location is perhaps the most personal calculation of all. Some people want to be walking distance from the beach or the river, anticipating a day when driving is no longer appealing. Others want to be close to shops, to their children, or to a community they already love.
Kate herself, who recently celebrated a milestone birthday, is already running through her own options, not urgently, but with the quiet focus of someone who knows the value of thinking ahead.
“I’m working out where I want to live and am looking at options,” she says.
The value of community is one Kate returns to with warmth. Moving into a neighbourhood while you’re still active, able to meet the neighbours, strike up friendships across generations, become a known and knowing presence in the street, is something that cannot be manufactured later.
Relationships that are forged early, tend to look after you in ways that are hard to quantify. The young family next door who end up mowing your lawn. The neighbour who checks in. A community you’ve grown into rather than arrived at as a stranger.
Kate is equally clear about what this kind of planning protects against: the loss of choice.
“If you do it while you’re young enough, you’re making the decision, not somebody else making the decision for you,” she says. “Whereas if you leave things too late, others take over.”
There is a generational shift at work here, too, and Kate sees it in her clients. The sexagenarians she works with today are not the same as previous generations.
“We’re young at heart now. We’re fitter. We’re not in our sixties looking at traditional retirement villages,” she says.
“We’re looking at alternatives because we are healthier than we’ve ever been. We’re seeking options that our families are comfortable with, that we’re comfortable with, that allows us to live our lives with our own choices,” says Kate.
That word, ‘choices’, is the one that keeps returning. Your third act, Fonda would say, is where you get to write your own lines. The homes that support that, the communities that sustain it, the planning that makes it possible: none of it happens by accident.
The best time to start thinking about your forever home is probably earlier than you think.
