Portable Rooms and The Rise of the Boomerang Generation

As parents, when adult children leave home, we often mourn the loss of our parenting years, our youth as well, and while they might be missed at first, life goes along and empty nesters start to enjoy a new quality of life.  Think, privacy and a more relaxed way of living and let’s face it, the house stays much cleaner for longer. And then……they’re back!

Adult kids moving back home is on the rise and they are being dubbed the Boomerang Generation. The number of young adults still living with their parents has grown by an incredible 50% in the last three decades, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with a third of everyone over 20 yet to fly the coop. By the age of 30, nearly 10% of men are still living at home (for women, it’s just 5%).

Further during the past year, 13 percent of Australians have either moved back home with their parents or had an adult child return home, according to a survey of 1058 respondents conducted by Australian comparison site Finder.

The total number is equivalent to 858,000 households across the country that now have an extra room to find to accommodate their grown children.  People are turning to buying portable rooms to get them through this time and keep their sanity.

So why are kids moving home? It is due to necessity rather than want and this is due to, a number of factors:

·       Increases in the cost of living continue to bite, new research has found that more and more people are struggling to pay the rising costs of rent and be able to live a reasonable quality of life.

·       Breakdown of relationships, many young people cannot afford to live on their own after a relationship breakdown and move home as an interim measure while they get back on their feet both emotionally and financially

·       The cost of real estate has gone through the roof and saving for a deposit is impossible if also paying high rent and living expenses. Moving home with parents allows for time to save that house deposit.

There is no doubt that we love our kids and we want to help them and often miss them, but there are a few disadvantages to having them home again.

The main one is the lack of privacy that is created when there is another adult in the house, for all parties involved.  Most parents who have had a child move out have managed to repurpose their old room into an office, hobby room, extra living or storage space, which is hard to part with when someone wants their room back.

Of course you can renovate the house to add on an additional room but this is time consuming, expensive and permanent. What happens when your child leaves again and you have more house than you need?

A great solution is hiring a portable room, which is a cost-effective way to create some extra privacy for the household, a bedroom for the returnee, or if you are turning your office back into a bedroom then it is the perfect solution to get that home office back. Your hobbies don’t need to be abandoned again, and a portable room is private, fully airconditioned, lockable at the end of the day and removable for when you no longer need it.