Mounties Group CEO Dale Hunt has told the DCM LEADERS SUMMIT MASTERCLASS in Sydney how club retirement communities have boosted Mounties’ membership, assets and profits.
Speaking at Doltone House on Darling Harbour, Dale told Masterclass guests that, where most retirement living developments start with a village and build a community around it, Mounties’ club-based villages have started with existing communities and built villages for them.
“Our business model is not hard – everybody else needs to worry about all the complications and all the rest of it. For us, we only exist for one reason, and that's to improve the lives of our members – so we simply look at the members’ life cycle and work out where we can improve.
“We moved into property because our members started to say, hey, I need a place to retire – so we built a retirement village,” he said.
Mounties has more than doubled its membership from 101,175 in 2018 to 209,549 this year; at the same time, net assets have increased from $251M to $388M, net profit from $6.9M to $24M, and cash on hand from $16.8M to $43M, while debt has gone from $90M to zero.
According to Dale, the club business model has helped Mounties profit from what, in a traditional retirement village, would be areas of additional cost.
“Retirement village operators have to pay for services such as courtesy buses, swimming pools, community rooms. We run all of those as part of a club.
“So, when we run a swimming pool that becomes a cost centre in a traditional village, we have three and a half thousand children learning how to swim and all of a sudden that cost centre becomes a profit centre,” he said.
Mounties has also invested in medical services, and in March purchased home care service Carers & Companions.
