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The aim of this article is to understand the meaning that retired people or those close to retirement, who are part of the generation that has largely been able to access property, give to the fact of being a homeowner. By examining the issues surrounding home ownership and the impact of home ownership on future residential trajectories, we explore how housing is part of a capitalisation process. Our discussion is structured in two stages. Firstly, we describe the trajectories of home ownership, their triggers, and the attachment to this status, in order to show the issues relating to the maintenance of residential capital. We then examine the time of retirement as a pivotal moment in the construction of residential strategies, between staying and leaving. These strategies reconfigure the forms of this capital and are caught in a tension between the challenge of financing one’s future dependence and the constitution of a transmissible capital. The article is based on a corpus of 30 interviews conducted between March 2015 and May 2016, in the Île-de-France, Nord and Pas-de-Calais regions, with homeowners or first-time buyers aged between 52 and 73 years (qualitative post-survey to the 2013 Housing Survey).