It’s a sensible approach. For decades, developers sold retirement homes on golf courses and sunny climes. As boomers age, however, the market is diversifying, and builders are ditching one-size-fits-all designs to target narrower groups.
That means projects centered on such activities as community service, agriculture, and wellness, said Margaret Wylde, chief executive of ProMatura Group, a research and advisory company focused on older consumers.
But selling homes by signaling to a niche group cuts two ways, attracting some while warning others to stay away. You don’t retire to a dude ranch if you don’t like the smell of manure. You probably don’t buy a home in Latitude Margaritaville if you don’t think you’ll fit in with Buffett fans.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love to party,” Wylde said. “The crowd I imagine being attracted is not my crowd. It would not be something that would attract me.”
Joe Lombardi didn’t really consider himself a fan when he went to his first Jimmy Buffett concert in 1986, at the Jones Beach stop on his “Floridays” tour—but then Buffett started singing, and so, it seemed, did everyone in the stands. In the years since, Lombardi has seen Buffett more than 70 times and spent countless hours doling out concert tickets and organizing his club’s charity events.
Maybe it’s that sense of belonging that has helped Buffett’s fans wryly stomach the recognition that their idol is always selling them something. They don’t mind being suckers for the brand, because they’re having fun.
“We joke about how soon he’ll be selling us Margaritaville Depends or LandShark Ensure,” said Larry DeGennaro, 57, a longtime parrot head who’d made his annual pilgrimage to Buffett’s Jones Beach from his home in Pearl River, N.Y. Sure, it’s silly to buy a house, or even a deck chair, because a singer’s name is on it, but Buffett fans tend to give in to the pull. “We all want to live vicariously through him.”
“My kids were like, ‘Mom, go there.’”
DeGennaro and his wife Denise own a townhouse in Hilton Head, and in the weeks before the Jones Beach show they’d driven around the site of the future Latitude Margaritaville. Denise, 57, was showing off photos of the development site to a friend, Michelle Moffitt, when a group of younger women interrupted, looking for “the guy with the shot stick.”
You mean the “shot ski,” the parrot heads corrected her, describing a tailgating innovation consisting of four shot glasses affixed to a ski, allowing a group of friends to throw back shots at once. (The guy with it wasn’t around; the women moved on.)