What baby-boomer buyers want Boomers - born between 1946 and 1964 - are reaching age 55 at a rate of 7,000 a day. Yet they have only begun as a home-buying phenomenon.

It isn't age that motivates the aging baby-boomer home buyer. At least not as far as Margaret Wylde is concerned.

"There are age-based influences on buying preferences," said Wylde, a consultant to the National Association of Home Builders Seniors Housing Council. "But the decisions on what kind of home to buy, where and when, are based more on how they've grown up and what they are used to."

Bob Karen, president of Symphony Development Group in Owings Mills, Md., said that the longer people remained in a particular area, the less willing they were to move away.

Karen gave as an example boomers who grew up in postwar suburbs such as Levittown and have remained there.

Many experts contend boomers are not a market at all, but are as diverse as any other age-based consumer group, Wylde said.

"Age really doesn't have that much to do with it," she said. "But lifestyle - who you are and what you think and what you want - does."

Although baby boomers - those born between 1946 and 1964 - are reaching age 55 at a rate of 7,000 a day, "they remain on the horizon" as a home-buying phenomenon, said Wylde, president and chief executive officer of ProMatura Group in Oxford, Miss.

Karen said the housing industry's active-adult market now was dominated by people ages 62 to 64, "and it has bounced around in the same range for the last 20 to 30 years." But, he added, "it's time to start planning for the boomers."

An important way of preparing is by "thinking young," Wylde said. Boomers are into health and beauty, and they make up the largest share of users of liposuction and botox.

"If you don't build a house with sex appeal," she said, "you'll attract an older buyer and not a boomer."

If location is the main mover of real estate, then you will find baby boomers gravitating to the rural edges of the suburbs or to close-in suburbs, she said, but "very few are looking at city living."

To track the trends among boomers, Wylde's firm analyzed information obtained by National Family Opinion in a September 2000 survey of 890 55-plus households.

"The survey was not of all 55-plus families, but focused on those who either had bought a house in the previous two years or who were planning to buy a house in the following two years," Wylde said. "So the data are not representative of all 55-plus families. Remember, too, that some trends change relatively rapidly."