Home care is not a significant factor in people’s lives until they actually need it, according to the 2,271 people aged 60+ surveyed for DCM Research by Monica Gessner at Australian Online Research (AOR).

Conducted in July, it found only 12% had given extensive thought to their future home support needs – a majority of whom had previously received such services for themselves or their partner, and were aged over 70.

As we learned in our in-depth interviews, generally home care/support is not something that people think about until they need to.

A lot of this is because there are too many unknowns in terms of what will be needed, for whom, when etc to be able to plan for these needs in advance.

Another 38% of respondents had thought about their future support needs only somewhat, while 50% had not thought about it at all.

For village marketers, there are two messages. The first is that care is not the main value proposition (independence and control is). And the market size of people actively considering their futures remains small in percentage terms.

Our full Prospect Profile research identified the number of people actively considering their future accommodation is just 3% of the population, and when looking at couples being 70% of customers, the actual number of customers searching at any one time is just 72,000.

But this is okay, given just 22,000 village homes are available for sale each year.