She Bought Her Mom’s House To Help Her Age in Place. Then Came the Repairs

Alyson Austin was stranded at her mother’s home in Maine when she began to see how much the house had aged.

It was March 2020, and Austin had come east from California for her mother Gail’s 85th birthday. But as pandemic shutdowns stretched her visit longer than expected, she noticed a roof past its useful life, siding that needed replacement, and smaller repairs beginning to stack up.

When she asked her mother about it, Gail said she didn’t see much reason to invest in the work. “A roof lasts 20 years,” she told her daughter. “I don’t think I’m gonna last 20 years. Why would I replace it?”

“That was the moment I decided to invest in purchasing her home,” Austin tells Realtor.com®.

The decision placed the mother and daughter duo at the center of a growing family dilemma: Older Americans may have substantial wealth tied up in homes that need costly work, at a point in life when the time, money, and capacity needed to manage those repairs can shrink. Their adult children, meanwhile, are left to decide whether to wait for the house to pass down, or step in early and take on the cost of preserving the home along with their aging parents’ quality of life.

For Austin, buying her mother’s house did all of the above—and more. It gave her mother a way to remain in the place she knew as she aged; while giving Austin, who had been priced out of ownership in California, a path back into the market.

A fair-market sale—and a house full of work

Austin wanted the sale to be a real purchase, not a symbolic family handoff.

“I didn’t just buy it for a dollar the way that sometimes some children may buy that from an elderly parent,” she says. “I bought it for fair market value so I could maintain a mortgage.”

She had sold her California primary home several years earlier, after a roughly $5,000 monthly mortgage and nearly $1,000 homeowners association fee became unsustainable. Austin previously described the decision as devastating, but it shaped how she approached buying again.

“Each home has helped purchase the next home,” she says.

In Maine, those lessons shaped the deal she made with her mother. Austin put down 20% and took out the 15-year mortgage her broker recommended, keeping her payment at $2,4000 per month—well below the $3,000 monthly ceiling she had set. Gail agreed to the sale, as did Austin’s siblings.

Then came the work.

Austin had bought the house as it was entering its most expensive years, at a time when the cost of those repairs were also rising fast.

Owners of older homes spend close to 50% more on improvements and repairs compared with owners of newer homes, while the average home-repair costs increased 16.7% from 2022 to 2024, outpacing inflation, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Structural repairs rose 21% over that period, while plumbing repairs climbed nearly 32%.

In rural Maine, even finding help could be difficult.

“My additional challenge in a small rural state of Maine is finding contractors, finding reliable help to service the roof or service some of the appliances inside the house,” Austin says.

She tackled the work as money became available: roof first, then siding, then a new back deck and front porch. And for months at a time, she and Gail lived without usable outdoor space while one project gave way to the next.

A house can be home without being age-ready

In the beginning Austin says living with her mother felt like sharing a home with “a great roommate.” They made dinner together most nights, and Gail joined her daughter on weekly grocery trips.

But that changed after Gail fell at night last October. At 90, she broke her wrist and suffered a serious injury in her shoulder.

The fall exposed a complication at the heart of aging in place: A house can be the place an older adult most wants to remain, while still becoming harder for them to move through safely.

Three-quarters of adults 50 and older want to remain in their homes and communities as they age, yet only 1% of U.S. homes have the full set of accessibility features identified in AARP research. Gail remains mentally sharp, Austin says, but she has become more tentative on her feet. She now uses a cane downstairs, a walker upstairs, and an Acorn stair lift to reach the second floor.

Austin had deliberately avoided major interior renovations because Gail had spent years learning the home’s layout. “I can’t go moving walls while my mom is still navigating this home,” she says.

But that left the pair trying to make an aging house work around Gail’s changing needs. The stairs are still there, and the chair lift became more essential—and Austin is now the person filling the gaps between what the house can provide and what her mother needs.

“I have now become a caregiver,” she says. “It is more being responsible for all of the meals, all of the grocery shopping.”

The price of staying home

Austin says the arrangement might not be possible if her circumstances were different.

As the founder of a public relations agency, she can work from home and step away when her mother needs her. And because she does not have children of her own, she saw herself as the family member with more capacity to take on Gail’s care.

“Both of my brothers have children and even grandchildren,” she says. “I made the equation work for me because I have the bandwidth to give.”

Her family’s calculation is becoming more common. An estimated 63 million Americans now provide care for a relative or other loved one, a 45% increase over the last decade, according to AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving. Nearly half say caregiving has hurt them financially, including by forcing them to pause saving, draw down emergency funds, or take on debt.

The purchase gave her access to the tax benefits of homeownership while allowing her to invest in repairs that could protect the property’s value over time.

But it hasn’t come without financial implications. After Gail’s fall, local agencies required at least 12 hours of paid help a week—more care than Gail needed and more than made sense in a small home where Austin was already working nearby.

So Austin absorbs the hours that fall between full-time agency care and complete independence: meals, grocery runs, rides to appointments, household bills, research into medical equipment and insurance coverage, and the ability to step away from work when Gail needs her.

But Austin doesn’t describe the life she has built with Gail as one of sacrifice. They take drives past neighbors’ flower gardens. They go to the beach, where Gail can sit in the car while Austin walks nearby.

“We are friends,” Austin says. “We’re as much as we are mother and daughter.”

And while the house has appreciated since Austin bought it, she says, that’s not the return that matters.

In her words, “The value for this home for me right now is this is the right place for my mother.”