For some time now, we have been explaining the retirement village sector is a two-speed economy.
25% of operators are delivering sales records while 75% are behind in sales year on year.
What is the difference? Our observation is commitment to marketing, and operators supporting salespeople.
To demonstrate that the buyers are interested in our retirement village value proposition, check out the graph above.
This is the traffic to villages.com.au for the past five years. You can see growth every year, despite negative media.
In August we had 114,700 visits which is 26% up on the previous year and 11% up month on month.
We have been ‘marketing’ villages.com.au and the results are immediately evident.
Our major initiative is a strategic partnership with talkback radio stations across Australia through Macquarie Media (2GB, 3AW, 4BC, 6PM and 200+ regionals).
We are investing our own money to educate their market which is men and women 50+. (Did you know that talkback listeners average 15.25 hours of talkback radio every week?)
Are these villages.com.au visitors real buyers? There is only one reason they are on villages.com.au – and that is to investigate retirement villages. They are not buying cars or checking out cat or puppy photographs.
On average they spend 3.5 minutes and check out three villages. That’s an average, so across-the-board they visit between one and two and eight and nine villages as they compare their options.
All up we now have close to 900,000 unique individuals searching each year. This compares with the fact just 20,000 retirement village homes are available to buy each year.
The message is: demand exceeds supply and strong marketers who have a clear value proposition are attracting buyers and making sales.
