Retirement village owners are being encouraged to provide a continuum of care, with the latest Retirement Living Council PwC Census 2021 stating 28% of surveyed villages had co-located aged care facilities onsite.
However, they may completely turn off the people flocking to land lease developers, such as GemLife, Lincoln Place, and Lifestyle Communities.
“When we first started (1997), we were selling to the war generation, and they were much more negative trigger buyers concerned about security, health and finances. They are a wonderful cohort but it’s pretty tough to market this season types of triggers. Our average moving in age then was 72/73,” said James Kelly, Co-Founder and Managing Director, of South Melbourne-based Lifestyle Communities.
“Then is about 2014 we started meeting the Baby Boomer generation and we came up with the tagline ‘downsize to a bigger life’! This increased our addressable market and they were far more positive trigger buyers looking for a bigger life, to travel, to free up equity and to spend it on all the possibilities they always dreamed about.
“The result was that the age of our homeowners moving into a community started to drop as the appeal increased. Our average moving is now 65 to 67 and our product has changed to meet the needs of the group.
“Our homes have increased slightly in size and we have made the clubhouses even more aspirational as this cohort will reward us for this. We are selling more 2.5 bedroom/3-bedroom homes as we have evolved the house specification as well.”
Lifestyle Communities has 22 communities in operation or being built. It told the ASX in May it expects to sell between 390 and 405 new homes and between 14
and 150 resale settlements attracting a deferred management fee in FY22.
James knows the good times are far from over. The Census 2021 last week revealed there as many Millennials as Baby Boomers.
“The really exciting thing is that as we increase penetration rates and the average age moving keeps reducing, the addressable market continues to grow exponentially and as a result we so welcome new competitors to Victoria – like Ingenia and Stockland who are so good at what they do.”
