<b><b>John Stewart suggests Britain&amp;’s maturing population offers new marketing opportunities for housebuilders, but they will have to act thoughtfully to exploit these opportunities.</b></b><br><b>Britain&amp;’s population is ageing. You will have heard this claim at conferences. Marketing gurus talk about the grey market, implying we face a boom in the retirement population. We do, but not yet. Of more immediate significance is an explosion in the number of middle-aged home owners.</b><br><b><b>baby booms</b></b><br> During the 20th century, Britain experienced four baby booms. The first, which lasted up until the first world war, represented the tail end of the high birth rates of the 19th century. A slump in births during the war was followed by a sharp increase for four or five years, and then a period of relatively low births lasting up until the end of the second world war. The post-war baby boom, like its counterpart after the first world war, was short-lived, lasting from about 1944 until 1949.<p></p><p>After another lull, births once again soared from the mid 1950s until the end of the 1960s, the fourth and final baby boom of the century. Annual births then steadily declined to 657,000 in 1977, the low point of the 20th century. New …