Are you an executive in the retirement living sector? If yes, I strongly urge you to join our ‘Ask a visionary anything’ breakfasts in September (Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane).
We are a media group and get to speak to a wide range of executives and government about the future. It is obvious to us that the retirement village business model as it stands today is going to be disrupted. It is inevitable. Within the next three to five years.
We have discussed it before and now it is an emerging reality. ‘Private aged care’ under the Retirement Village Act will be a significant model of the future.
Customers are going to hijack the village business model and upend it, because customers and their families increasingly understand five things:
- Government funded home and residential care is increasingly hard to impossible to get
- It is increasingly expensive and decreasing in services provided
- Marooned at home alone is grim
- Retirement villages deliver a safety net with the ever-present management
- You can join a village and can’t be thrown out – right up until death
Within five years we reckon up to half the village beds will be quasi aged care beds, with non independent, high frailty occupants. Let’s call it private aged care.
The law prevents operators fighting this process; its called Duty of Care. The Victorian Government is currently sealing it into new regulations under their Retirement Village Act.
The simple independent living model where the village has maybe three staff (Manager, Maintenance, Gardener) will be replaced with 20+ staff that have to be organised to be efficient, and have to be paid for. This will require new income streams etc.
The visionary leadership of LDK, Odyssey and Anglicare saw this coming up to seven years ago and today are delivering exemplary care support under the Retirement Village Act, and achieving sector leading sales growth. The customer is speaking.
The ramifications for existing village operators across operations, finance, sales and marketing, contracts and law, and more is biblical…but possible.
At the Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane breakfasts the experts and the visionaries will deliver a detailed overview of these drivers and the operational facts. And you can ask them the deep questions across all topics. Do yourself a favour and join us.
Check the announcement in this issue of The SOURCE.
