Geoffrey and Mary downsize their home with Spring

Downsizing your home and moving to a retirement community, comes with many advantages. Not only do you have assistance, security and a ready-made community on your doorstep, downsizing can also remove the costly shackles of maintaining a larger home, giving financial freedom to fund retirement, pay off mortgages, take more holidays, or even help children get on the property ladder.

For Geoffrey and his wife Mary, their downsizing journey started after 10 happy years living in their Lytham St Annes bungalow. “Our property was in a great location and so spacious; it was what first drew us to the property. We loved the area as it was very quiet and secure,” explains Geoff. “But, with a larger home, comes more maintenance and upkeep. So, after careful consideration, we took the decision to downsize to a retirement apartment that would better suit our needs and be easier to manage.”

Taking the first steps

Geoff contacted his local estate agent to get their bungalow on the market. “We had 8 viewings in total and got an offer in the space of a month. We accepted the offer as we’d already found a 2-bed apartment in a nearby McCarthy development,” said Geoff. “The apartment had everything we were looking for, including the location in Lytham St Annes which meant we didn’t have to move away from our friends and family. However, our joy was short lived, as not long after we accepted the offer, our buyer dropped out, leaving the entire move in jeopardy.”

A way to help

With no buyer for their bungalow, Geoff and his wife could no longer proceed on their dream apartment. “When our sale fell through, we visited the McCarthy Stone website and discovered they offered a Part-Exchange and Chain repair service via their partner Spring. We visited the Spring website and found case studies from other McCarthy Stone customers who had experienced similar circumstances to ours. Spring’s website was easy to understand and had lots of information on how Spring would be able to buy our bungalow directly from us, meaning we wouldn’t have to wait for another buyer, or lose the apartment we wanted”, said Geoff.

Moving forward

Geoff contacted the team at McCarthy Stone who quickly put him in touch with Spring. “The team at Spring where great and all the staff where very friendly and approachable,” compliments Geoff. “We decided to go ahead with Spring who agreed to buy our bungalow, and we particularly liked the complimentary license to occupy feature available to us. This allowed access to our bungalow and the new apartment at the same time for up to 28 days post completion; this was very convenient and allowed us to do a lot of work whilst our new property was empty.”

Now happy and settled in their new apartment, Geoff and Mary are delighted they made the decision to downsize. “We love our new apartment; it’s a great size, and the views we get to enjoy every day are amazing. The overall service we received from Spring was very good and we would certainly recommend Spring to family and friends.”

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