With increasing competition from land lease communities, Community Apartment Projects (CAPs) and other residential developments targeting downsizers, providing a continuum of care will benefit retirement village operators moving forward, according to Ansell Strategic Director Amber Cartwright.
Amber conducted the operational due diligence on the $987 million sale of Stockland’s village business to EQT, which has outlined a new continuum of care strategy for the retirement village operator (see the latest issue of SATURDAY).
The Director forecasts that there will be greater interest in the integrated care model, which will see more residential care providers dip their toes into retirement living and vice versa.
“It’s important to remember that [village operators] are still only servicing a very small portion of the market, with another 90-odd per cent of people not in retirement villages,” Amber told SATURDAY.
“Retirement living operators need to ask the question: ‘how else do we start to differentiate our product offering from what else would be available to this market?’”
Ansell Strategic already has some clients that are offering respite care and on-site care staff and nurses to support village residents that require episodic care.
“A number of the residential aged care providers and clients that we speak to are starting to explore home care and retirement living or assisted living, not only because of the challenges of the last few years, but also in terms of how they can best meet consumer needs and demands, and have less exposure to some of the reform and regulation that has come in and is continuing to roll out.”
This will be driven by the new Support at Home program, due to commence in July 2023 – just over 15 months away.
“Several years ago, we saw many operators looking at expanding into home care, but the Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP) is still the program where most services are delivered and that has been a very limited market in which to access any funding,” said Amber.
Read the full story in the latest issue of SATURDAY here. SATURDAY is moving to a subscription model from Saturday, 2 April – subscribe here for access.
