Most people buying a retirement home think about it as one of two things: a place to actually live, and an asset they’ll eventually pass on to their kids. What gets overlooked is the question in between those two: is that asset actually going to still be an asset by the time it transfers, or is it quietly turning into a liability your heirs inherit along with it? Inherited property made up nearly 9% of all property transfers in 2025, a record high, as a wave of the roughly $120 trillion boomer wealth transfer starts moving through real estate rather than cash or investments. A growing number of families are about to find out the hard way that a home isn’t automatically worth what they assumed when the time comes.
The Villages Is the Clearest Example of What Can Go Wrong
If you want to see this risk playing out in real time rather than in theory, look at The Villages in Florida, the largest age-restricted retirement community in the country. Home values there have fallen for three straight years, in a community that’s still growing. The Wildwood-The Villages metro added residents fast enough to be the fastest-growing metro in the country as recently as a couple of years ago, and the developer reports more than 150,000 residents overall. And yet Sumter County, the core of the community, has posted a median sale price of $289,000, down 4.4% year over year as of this August, following annual value declines of 2.2% in 2024 and 1.4% in 2025. Right now, 695 homes are listed in the county, more than a third of them have already had at least one price cut, and the average listing takes 71 days just to go under contract.
That’s a genuinely strange pattern on its face: a community growing in population while home values shrink. The explanation isn’t the broader Florida market, it’s how The Villages itself is built and sold. The entire community is controlled by a single developer, and that developer keeps opening new sections indefinitely, each one marketed with a full-time sales force, staged model homes, fresh floor plans, and in-house financing that an individual resale seller simply can’t compete with. Every new phase pulls fresh buyers away from older sections, and because the buyer pool is drawn from the same narrow demographic, age-restricted retirees, there’s no broader base of buyers to absorb what the newest phase doesn’t take. A home you bought fifteen years ago in an original village is now competing against a brand-new one the developer is actively selling with better financing terms than you can offer your own buyer.
The Insurance Layer Makes It Worse, Not Better
If falling resale values were the only issue, that would already be worth a serious conversation about what you’re actually planning to leave behind. But Florida’s property insurance market adds a second, compounding problem. The state already carries the highest average homeowners insurance premiums in the country, nearly three times the national average, and at least 16 insurers were forced to drop policies, declared insolvent, or stopped writing new business there in the past year alone. Citizens Property Insurance, the state-backed insurer of last resort, recently passed one million policies for the first time since 2013, and many of its policyholders are facing further rate increases.
This isn’t an abstract statewide number for Villages residents specifically. One longtime couple there, in a home about 20 years old, received a renewal notice with a 69% premium increase, a jump their fixed Social Security income obviously didn’t come close to matching. The age of a home is one of the specific factors insurers weigh most heavily, which means the exact same older sections already struggling to compete against new construction on resale value are also the ones facing the steepest insurance cost increases. That’s a genuinely difficult combination for a family thinking about inheriting that property: a home that’s harder to sell and more expensive to insure, at the same time, in the same inventory.
What This Actually Means for a Wealth Transfer
Financial advisors who work with families through this exact transition point to the same handful of risks, and The Villages scenario touches nearly all of them. Heirs inherit the costs along with the equity, property taxes that can jump after a reassessment, ongoing insurance, and deferred maintenance that doesn’t wait politely for probate to finish, an $18,000 roof repair doesn’t care whose name is on the title yet. A large, illiquid asset sitting in a market where more than a third of comparable listings already have price cuts and homes sit for over two months before going under contract isn’t the kind of asset a family can convert to cash quickly if they need to. One advisor who works with families on exactly this kind of planning put it simply: the home is an asset, but people tie a lot of emotion to it, and it needs the same clear-eyed conversation as any other major asset, ideally well before anyone’s actually settling an estate under time pressure.
Why the Grand Strand’s Structure Is Genuinely Different
We’re not going to pretend the Grand Strand carries zero risk, it’s a coastal market, and hurricanes are a real consideration here just as they are anywhere on the Atlantic or Gulf coast. But the specific structural problem driving The Villages’ resale decline doesn’t really exist here in the same way. Horry County’s growth comes from dozens of different builders across dozens of distinct communities, not one master developer with an endlessly expanding, single-source sales and financing operation competing directly against every resale seller in the market. The buyer pool here is broader too, retirees, yes, but also full-time relocators, second-home buyers, and younger families, rather than a single age-restricted demographic that only grows by pulling in exactly the same kind of buyer from somewhere else.
The insurance comparison holds up the same way. Standard homeowners coverage along the Grand Strand typically runs $2,500 to $4,500 a year, against $6,000 to $7,100 for comparable coverage in Florida, and South Carolina hasn’t seen anything resembling Florida’s wave of insurer exits or its Citizens Property Insurance policy count crossing a million. That’s not a guarantee costs stay flat forever, insurance markets shift everywhere, but it’s a meaningfully different starting point than a market already showing the kind of strain Florida’s has.
What to Actually Do With This If You’re Planning Ahead
If leaving something to your kids is part of why you’re buying a retirement home in the first place, it’s worth asking a more specific question than “is this a good community” before you buy: how does resale actually perform in this exact section or phase, not just the community-wide average, and is the builder or developer still actively competing against resale inventory in a way that could keep eroding it for the next twenty years. It’s also worth having the blunt conversation with your own kids now, what they’d actually want to do with the property, whether they’d want to keep it, rent it, or sell it, and what costs they’d be taking on along with it, rather than leaving that conversation for whenever the time comes.
Browsing what’s currently available across Myrtle Beach is a good way to see what the market here actually looks like right now. If you’re weighing a retirement purchase with an eye toward what it leaves behind for your family, reach out to our team and we’re happy to walk through how a specific community or property actually performs on resale, not just how it looks today.