Is Support at Home a game only giants can play, asks Anglicare
The most telling part of Anglicare Sydney’s sale of its home care business to HammondCare is not what it sold. It is what it kept.
Anglicare will transfer approximately 1,800 Support at Home clients and 1,400 Commonwealth Home Support Program clients located across Greater Sydney and the Illawarra. But it keeps the Support at Home business that services its own 25 retirement villages, which it calls its For Life program.
In making the announcement yesterday, Anglicare CEO Simon Miller (pictured on the right with HammondCare CEO, Andrew Thorburn) was direct: Support at Home requires a scale Anglicare “cannot naturally reach in the community”. HammondCare can spread its workforce, technology, compliance, rostering, and administration across thousands more clients. Scale creates efficiency.
The acquisition will take HammondCare’s home care and CHSP client base beyond 11,000, making it the largest home care provider in Greater Sydney.
It is a catch that suggests there are two distinct strategies emerging.
The first is super scale.
The second strategy is to deliver care within a controlled village environment, and not lose money.
It is not merely home care. It is a lifetime customer strategy.
The numbers support this strategic distinction. StewartBrown’s December 2025 survey found EBITDA had fallen to just $760 per client per annum - down 29% from the previous quarter. Its March quarter survey, due next week, will provide the first financial picture of a full quarter under Support at Home.
The Support at Home Senate inquiry hearings this week didn’t paint a positive picture, revealing that providers face rising compliance and administration costs, reduced care management funding and consumers cutting back services because of co-contributions.
Put simply, delivering support at home in the wider community may be risky business without extraordinary scale.
Anglicare’s decision should catch the attention of every executive and board member in the sector. It has sold the dispersed customers and retained the concentrated ones.
As The Weekly SOURCE reported in 2023, Anglicare invested $20 million in LDK Seniors’ Living to learn its Private Aged Care retirement village model. Anglicare has now begun applying its “full deck of care” model at Woolooware Shores and other villages.
The operator already has the relationship, the infrastructure and, critically, the customer.
For HammondCare, the answer is scale. For Anglicare, it is a lifetime customer strategy.
The confronting question is what happens to providers with neither?
