For 11 years, Alene Crook has built her dream nest in a 1954 two-bedroom home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Dana Point, a charming beach community in Orange County, California, and just a two-minute drive from the sand. She keeps her son’s paintings hanging throughout the house, and on the wall of the guest bedroom is a framed American flag that belonged to her father, a World War II and Korean War veteran.
Last summer, she and her partner of 20 years, with whom she owned a home, realized their elderly parents needed them.
“That’s something we didn’t expect,” said Kruk, a retired special education teacher, which is what led to her unexpectedly finding a home at age 66.
Another surprise came when her partner told her he was moving an hour away to look after his parents, leaving her to go hunting alone (or, rather, with her dog, Stella).
The couple put their house on the market and Crook decided to relocate south to San Diego County, where his 97-year-old mother, son, son’s wife and 2-year-old son lived within a short drive.
“Being close to my grandchildren was very important to me,” she said.
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Her next wish was to stay close to the ocean. “There’s no way I’d ever leave the beach,” she said.
Crook grew up in Katonah, New York, and later moved to Atlanta, which she describes as “a long way from the ocean,” but she developed a love for the sea as a girl, spending summers on Cape Cod with her family in a rented bungalow “ten steps from the beach.”
She discovered Southern California in the 1980s, during summer breaks from her teaching job to visit her parents, who had moved out west. “Oh, if I lived here, I could go to the beach in October,” she thought to herself.
Last year, there was limited supply of homes in the San Diego area at her target price, and while Crook could comfortably shell out $500,000 to $600,000, she could get a small loan and have a bit more time to find the right place. Even if she had to move inland, she at least wanted an ocean view.
Crook drives a Tesla and needed an outlet to charge his car, he preferred a garage over outdoor parking, and he wanted an open kitchen so he could host parties.
Senior-friendly amenities such as single-storey living and shower bars were lower on the priority list. “They’re not big factors, but they’re a big plus,” she said.
To help with the search, Crook hired a longtime real estate agent: Alexa Devaney, his daughter-in-law and the mother of his young grandson. “Luckily, my daughter-in-law is in real estate and knows me well, and she said, ‘I know what you want,'” Crook says.
Ms. Devaney, a real estate broker with The Oppenheim Group in La Jolla, California, initially encouraged her mother-in-law to look at homes at the higher end of her budget because “in the area she was looking at, the homes under $700,000 hadn’t been renovated and were in pretty original condition,” Ms. Devaney says.
Devaney changed strategy and encouraged Kruk to consider a 55-and-over community, where neighbors would have time to socialize and the prices were more affordable.
After looking at a few homes, they narrowed it down to two-bedroom condos of roughly the same size (1,000 to 1,100 square feet) in two coastal cities: one in Carlsbad and two a little further north in Oceanside, in the same 55-and-over community.
Among her options are:
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