Residential behavior and housing choices of retirees

The aim of this paper is to study the housing characteristics and the location preferences of the elderly in France. The paper first analyzes how individual characteristics impact the type and the location of occupied dwellings. Second, it explores the differences in the residential behavior between retirees and examines the influence of residential mobility during retirement. This work builds upon a dataset from the 2017 Insee French population census, which provides information on 28.551 million French inhabitants including 8.407 million retirees. By studying how personal attributes affect housing choices, through a series of empirical models, the paper delivers evidence that retirees behave differently than the rest of the population. Retirees tend to occupy larger and older houses, are more likely to live in urban areas and in individual houses rather than in apartments. The paper also shows a difference in behavior between young (less than 80 years old) and older retirees (80 and above). All retirees feature a higher probability to live or to settle in a city, but this probability is clearly higher for those aged above 80. The latter are also more likely to live in apartments as opposed to young retirees. Finally, the results of the probit models highlight the differences in housing between mobile retirees and non-mobile retirees, thus assessing the real preferences of this population when they decide to move. Mobile retirees occupy often new dwellings in urban areas. The former socio-professional category is also a key element of analysis for understanding disparities in housing choices of the retirees.