Last week I argued in this column that the great baby boomer downsizing wave isn’t coming to save Australia’s housing market. 

Judging by the conversation the column sparked when I shared it on LinkedIn and X, the argument touched a nerve. 

One question kept coming back: If baby boomers aren’t going to downsize, what eventually happens to all those big family homes? 

Well, eventually everyone leaves home. For most boomers, it won’t happen because they downsize into a lovely two-bedroom apartment at 78 – it’ll happen because they die. 

That sounds rather grim, but demographically it matters enormously. 

Many boomers will spend the rest of their lives in the family home. Eventually there is only one person left in it. Usually that person is mum.

Australian women live several years longer than men on average and are married to older men, so the surviving parent is disproportionately female. She might spend years living alone in what was once a busy family home. 

Then comes the real transfer. The property doesn’t disappear. It enters the estate. 

I have written about this before.

In an earlier column I used a deliberately simplified demographic model that counted Australian women from the baby boomer and older generations and assumed they represented the last surviving parent.

I suggested that the 2030s and 2040s would mark the great period of intergenerational wealth transfer. 

Most baby boomer homes won’t be released by downsizing. They will be released by death. 

The chart uses ABS population projections to track the annual change in the number of Australian women born in 1963 or earlier. 

Think of this as a rough proxy for the last surviving parents of the baby boomer era. 

It isn’t literally a forecast of deceased estates. Some women won’t own homes. Some will still have partners. Some will have already sold their house or moved into aged care. The chart is a simplification. What matters is the shape of the curve. 

In 2021 there were about 3.3 million Australian women born in or before 1963. The annual decline in this population accelerates through the 2020s and 2030s before peaking at roughly 107,000 in 2041. There will be fewer than 1.5 million left in 2041. 

The 2030s and 2040s will therefore be the big decades for deceased estates, inheritances and the eventual release of homes occupied by today’s older Australians.  

This is the baby boomer downsizing wave we were looking for. It just comes later than expected, and the boomers themselves aren’t necessarily doing the moving. 

Imagine a straightforward case that will be repeated hundreds of thousands of times in the next 15 years. 

Mum dies owning the family home outright. There are about two adult children. 

Neither particularly wants to move back into the house they grew up........

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