Sydney - Retired couple Lyn Gardiner and Rob Gay are selling their Melbourne home, buying a camper van and joining the tens of thousands of older Australians perpetually on tour in the wide brown land.

It's a lifestyle change that warms the heart of sociologist Bruce Bradbury of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. His research shows that lots of pensioners have little money in the bank but are living in houses worth a fortune.

Bradbury is urging more to sell up, take out a reverse mortgage or opt for any other way they can find of turning bricks and mortar into dollars and cents.

"There are things that policy makers can do to make it easier for people to do those things," Bradbury said.

Cutting taxes on buying and selling property, making it easier for people to sell their house in instalments through a reverse mortgage and promising to look after those who miscalculate and run out of money before they die, are ways the government could help.

Finding ways of levering older people out of houses too big for them - and too expensive for them to own in relation to their income - is also on the mind of Martin Fahy, the head of the Financial Services Institute of Australasia.

He reckons that all-too-incumbent older people are depriving their children of the joys of house ownership. They bought cheaply, and have now borrowed heavily against the higher value of their house, thereby increasing the value of property and other asset classes.

Young people, he says, "have felt the burden of increasing property prices, which the wealth of later generations has actually driven up."

In fact, over the last decade, as the proportion of younger people with a mortgage has fallen, the proportion of older people with one has risen.

Not only are some older people hanging onto the big house, they are using the deeds as collateral to buy more property as well. (dpa)