Several communities marketed as “55+” in Cary are not age-restricted at all. There is a real legal distinction, and it changes what you are buying.
The first thing to sort out is that “55+” is used two ways in this market: as a legal restriction written into the covenants, and as a marketing description of who a builder had in mind. Only one of them binds anybody.
Age-restricted communities operate under an exemption to the Fair Housing Act’s familial-status protections, set out at 24 CFR Part 100, Subpart E. The 55+ exemption requires three things at once, not one:
Two things follow that people get wrong. The 80% figure is a floor for keeping the exemption, not a description of how any given community runs — most Triangle covenants restrict more tightly than the federal minimum. And the separate 62+ exemption is genuinely stricter: it requires the community be solely occupied by people 62 and over, with no 80/20 allowance at all.
A number of communities in and around Cary are built and sold to older buyers — one-level plans, low maintenance, small lots — with no enforceable age covenant behind any of it. That is not a criticism. It is a materially different asset, because the resale pool is the whole market rather than a restricted slice of it.
The test is not the brochure. Ask for the recorded covenants and look for the three requirements above: the 80% policy, the published intent, and the verification schedule. A community that markets itself as “active adult” and cannot produce those is age-targeted, and anyone can buy there.
A restricted community’s buyer pool is smaller and older, which makes it slower in a soft market and unusually stable in a hot one. Days on market inside these communities behaves differently from the surrounding town, and the gap is the thing to understand before you assume the neighborhood comparison applies.
For how the rest of the town breaks up, start with the Cary buyer’s guide.
