• Canada’s guide to retirement living and care

Retirement townhouses

Ideally suited to empty nesters

Senior’s townhomes or townhouse complexes offer affordable living in a community of people your own age. Places listed here also offer shared community services and amenities that encourage you to remain active and to build friendships with people in the neighbourhood. These are an ideal way to downsize out of your traditional family home and move into a new lifestyle that is more properly sized to who you are now. For many, the opportunity to downsize can mean being mortgage free (or at least mortgage-reduced), opening up chances to invest in other things, travel more, whatever’s on your mind.  

Advantages to townhouse living for seniors

Senior townhouse communities listed above offer much more than just a place to live. You’ll find a ready-made community of peers, people your age, who have gone through many of the same things and who cherish the same freedoms you do.  These shared communities also offer a wide variety of amenities and features ideally suite to the lifestyle of people 55 and older. Features of communities listed above may include onsite golf course, tennis courts, and a clubhouse full of communal activities.

The great advantage of these is that you also need not worry about a lot of maintenance that you have grown tired of at this point of your life. Everything from snow shoveling to lawn maintenance will be handled by someone else. This is ideal for seniors or couples who travel often or winter in the south.

An increasing number of senior townhouse complexes are in fact adult living communities, where the lifestyle is very relaxed, paced properly for people who like the good things in life and have earned time to enjoy those. You can find a townhouse in a community where there are the shared amenities get you involved with fellow community members, help you grow relationships and facilitate new areas of growth in your personal life.

Townhomes versus senior apartments

These are larger than seniors' apartments and smaller than many typical single-family homes you have outgrown. Our listings of senior townhomes are similar to our senior condos, but condos includes a wider variety of homes including places in towers or other options beyond a townhouse.  Townhouses have the benefit of being smaller in size, properly sized to couples or singles who no longer have kids living at home.

Of course, townhouses offer you the privacy of your own home, too, where you can create a new nest (albeit an empty one), one that fits you and the lifestyle that you are living now.