“ARCO Conference – Regulation”

Posted on August 7, 2016 by john graham

This is my fourth report from the ARCO conference – July 2016. (See my earlier blogs “ARCO Conference Demographics”, “ARCO Conference Dementia” and ARCO Conference Marketing” in the archive dated July/August 2016.)

Regulation

The discussion on this subject was made up of a number of talks which embraced not just regulation but also funding models.   It’s the use of different charging approaches, many of which can be difficult to understand, that has led to the increased interest of the regulators.

The first problem is that there is no clear definition of where retirement communities fit in to the historical regulatory structures.   Many of the providers use different models and different terminology to describe their provision, but at the same time there are significant overlaps between providers.  This make comparison of schemes difficult.

The size and shape of schemes provided by different developers varies enormously.   As do the level of services offered.   This all makes it doubly difficult for the Regulators to see how accommodation provided by the ARCO members should be regulated.  The Care Quality Commission has in the past been preoccupied with residential care homes.  More recently they have broadened their remit to include hospital accommodation and at the other end of the spectrum, domiciliary care provided to people in their own homes.

Although many retirement housing and care providers now go beyond the provision of sheltered housing, they generally stop short of providing 24/7 care.   This means that essentially they are only providing domiciliary care to a limited number of residents, who continue to live in their own homes.

The Regulator seems to have concluded that in these circumstances they only have a “domiciliary care” remit and should not be involved in the physical fabric of the homes themselves.

However, where things get more difficult, is when you start to look at how people are charged to live in this accommodation.    The different financial models have in some cases led to criticism and claims of exploitation by residents who have purchased homes without realising the financial commitments they were entering into.   This has attracted the attention of a different Regulator, namely The Law Commission.

Different providers have all sorts of different ways of maximizing their charge for a property.   There are a host of different terms used which come under the collective title of “Events Fees”.   These can include:-

  • “Exit Fees” or “Transfer Fees” – this refers to charges made when you leave the property either to move elsewhere or when you die.
  • “Deferred Management Charges” – these usually relate only to the deferred charge for planned maintenance which has the effect of lowering initial service charges.   Providers charge these out at different rates, some of which are seen as punitive.
  • “Assignment Fees” – this is a charge that goes to the freeholder whenever a property is sold on.  It is usually a charge of 1% of the purchase price although there seems little justification for this.
  • “Sub Letting Fees” – this is a charge if someone chooses not to live in the property but to let it to someone else, or more frequently perhaps to sub-let it if relatives are unable to sell the property after the owner’s death.  Again these are typically charged at 1% of the rental value.

There is more information about these charges in my earlier reviews of some retirement housing providers which you can find by clicking on RETIREMENT HOUSING in the TOPICS LIST and looking for Retirement Housing Reviews.

My observation on the whole of this subject is that there is little appetite by the Regulators for more regulations in the sector.   However, there needs to be much more transparency about charges, particularly those where there is an element of deferment until the property is resold.   As the market stands currently, it is wide open to exploitation by unscrupulous developers who have their eye on immediate returns rather than long-term value for money for their customers.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 2 Comments

“ARCO Conference – Marketing”

Posted on July 31, 2016 by john graham

This is my third report from the ARCO conference – July 2016. (See my earlier blogs “ARCO Conference Demographics” and “ARCO Conference Dementia” in the archive dated July 2016.)

Marketing

This was an extremely interesting talk by Doctor Margaret Wylde, the Founder and CEO of Promatura Group – a marketing consultancy that specialises in retirement communities.   Her presentation focused on the large retirement communities that have developed in the USA over the last 25 years and her insights were drawn from the lessons of a mature market in the USA.

The next two slides say it all about some of the retirement communities in the USA.  The first slide is a retirement community developed by the Del Webb Corporation in 1960 in Sun City, Phoenix, Arizona.   It shows a host of individual houses built around a central hub of facilities, all designed for older people.

Sun City

However, that only shows half the story.  The slide below gives you the even bigger picture. Sun City is made up of a host of retirement communities, to the point where this particular community now houses 38,000 older people and covers an area of 37 square kilometres.

Sun City 2

The photograph looks lovely doesn’t it.  It makes a nice pattern from the air!  But I’m not sure I’d like to live there.  Talk about ghettos for the elderly, this must be the ultimate in ageing communities.   What’s more, the Del Webb Corporation has gone on to build many similar, albeit slightly smaller communities, in many other parts of the USA.   They have also been emulated by many other retirement community developers.

What it does illustrate is the enormous desire of many older people in America to cash in some of their wealth, downsize and move away from the big cities and into sunnier climes. It’s like the move many older people made in the UK, to relocate to places like Torquay and Brighton or for the more adventurous, to retire to the Costa Del Sol or the Costa Brava in Spain.

Everything in America is bigger and land is a heck of a lot cheaper.   I’m not sure we could learn too much from this experience other than what not to do.   That’s not to say that we shouldn’t build retirement communities in the UK, but they certainly are unlikely to ever reach the American scale.

Some of the key marketing messages, which are relevant however, are:-

  • Firstly, that it is the quality of lifestyle in the retirement community that creates customer satisfaction, not just the properties themselves;
  • Secondly, the premium on property purchase prices can be up to 30%;
  • Thirdly, don’t push service charges too high or risk losing 20% of the market;
  • Finally, there is a great desire for a new life in retirement, providing the options closely reflect the customers needs, which requires sophisticated market analysis.

More to follow in my next blogs.

 

 

 

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 3 Comments

“ARCO Conference – Dementia”

Posted on July 24, 2016 by john graham

This is my second report from the ARCO conference – July 2016.

Dementia

The first thing to say of the prominence of this discussion on the agenda is that it leads you to feel that beyond demographics, this was the most important issue facing retirement communities at the current time – which I don’t believe it is.   From a panel of experts, the most knowledgeable speaker on this topic was Jeremy Hughes who is the Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Society.   Understandably he wanted to raise the profile of this illness, given that 850,000 people in the UK are estimated to have dementia.  One third of these live in residential care homes with the majority still living in their own homes in the community.  Obviously Mr Hughes wanted to ensure that as much retirement housing as possible is made available to people with dementia.   Although they were not represented at the conference, this is very much the message reinforced by Social Service Departments who have to deal with dementia in the community and would very much like to refer many of the more difficult cases to retirement housing providers, particularly those providing extracare accommodation.

The three other panel speakers who represented retirement housing providers were keen to emphasise how they provided for, or should I say coped with, people with dementia in their schemes.   They all accepted that they would look after people who developed dementia whilst living in their schemes but were rather more circumspect about how much they welcomed new residents into their scheme who already had dementia.   One of the providers was very positive about the Alzheimer’s Society’s “Dementia Friends Initiative” which promoted the use of volunteers to support people with dementia.   Whilst this is a great initiative, it’s not, in my opinion, a substitute for paid carers.   The speaker from The ExtraCare Charitable Trust talked very positively about their Enriched Opportunities Programme which is led by Locksmiths.   This is a very innovative form of personalised support pioneered and funded by the charitable trust.   Only 11% of ExtraCare Charitable Trust residents are thought to have dementia.

I’ve written a lot about dementia over the years and you can find all my posts on the subject by clicking on DEMENTIA in the TOPICS list.   More specifically you can find my post on Dementia Friends by clicking in the ARCHIVE for the 27 Jan 2013 .   There is also an explanation of  the ExtraCare Charitable Trust model of the dementia support in the ARCHIVE dated 13 July 2011.  

The elephant in the room at the conference, with the whole of this discussion is that, in my opinion, retirement housing is not designed for dealing with people with dementia.   I say this having managed a number of nursing homes which specialised in caring for people with dementia.   Dementia is an illness that gets progressively worse and therefore, whilst its possible to cope with people in the early stages, the behavioural changes of many people in the later stages of dementia are rarely accepted by other residents in the community.   They can also require a disproportionate amount of staff time.

I’ve seen this happen twice before.  Firstly when I managed lots of sheltered housing schemes; when in a community of elderly people living independently in their own homes, as individuals developed dementia and were no longer able to cope on their own, there was reluctance from Social Services to provide support in anything other than critical cases.   Secondly in extracare schemes which had additional care staff, there was a tendency for Social Services to understate peoples’ dementia support needs when they referred people.   Over time, as peoples’ dementia progressed, the whole character of the scheme changed and became more like a residential care environment rather than an active retirement housing scheme.

It’s for these reasons that I think retirement housing providers should be very clear about the limits of their ability to look after people with dementia.   Failure to do this will mislead prospective residents, may raise expectations of care and support that can’t be delivered and ultimately lead to people having to move on in later life from a retirement community where they had hoped to age in place.

More to follow in my next blogs.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 3 Comments

“ARCO Conference – Demographics”

Posted on July 17, 2016 by john graham

ARCO stands for Associated Retirement Community Operators.   It was formed in 2012 and is a diverse collection of providers of retirement housing in the UK.   They represent 27 operators who between them provide more than 50% of the current provision in the UK.   In July of this year I went to their first annual conference which was attended by nearly 300 other delegates all from around the UK.   This in itself is an indication of the substantial level of interest there is in this area.

The full conference programme papers have not yet been released so these are very much my first impressions of the discussions by the conference speakers.   It was an interesting programme with speakers from Brazil and America as well as the UK.   The main themes emerging from the conference topics were Demographics, Dementia, Marketing and Regulation.  I’ll talk about them in my next few blogs:-

Demographics

The keynote address was by Professor Alexandre Kalache, who is the Co-President of the International Longevity Centre Global Alliance.   He is also the former head of the World Health Organisation, Global Programme on Ageing.   The title of his speech was “Living Longer / Living Well” and that summed up the reality and hope of most of what he had to say.   It’s well-known that there is an ageing population in most of the developed countries in the Northern Hemisphere but less well appreciated that there is an increasingly aged population in China, Japan, India and Brazil.    Whilst people are living longer and healthier lives, many older people still live in poverty.   Loneliness and social isolation is a major issue for older people in many countries including our own.

One interesting fact he quoted was that “70% of US wealth is in the hands of baby boomers”.  Whilst this might seem like good news, it only is if they can convert their wealth into a tradeable resources to purchase support services and appropriate housing.   Professor Kalache was the instigator of the Age Friendly Cities initiatives which is intended to ensure that older people in their “golden years” have a happy life.   It’s yet to be seen whether this initiative achieves very much for people in later life.  (You can see in the TAG CLOUD by clicking on Age Friendly my earlier blogs on this subject).

His ending words of caution, which were no doubt coloured by his experience of the huge elderly populations living in poverty in Brazilian cities, but also by the very large retirement communities in places like the USA and elsewhere were:-

“Don’t build ghettos”

This seemed a rather strange thing to say to an audience of people whose desired intention is to build more retirement communities.   Nonetheless they are wise words which were repeated later in the conference by the speaker talking about marketing.

One final thing that the Professor did was to involve the audience.   We were asked how long we thought we would live and whilst a minority of people thought they would die before they reached 80, the majority thought they would die between and 80 and 90 years of age and a hopeful few thought they would live beyond this.   The Professor was able to confirm that the majority were correct.   His next question was more challenging when he asked what you were most likely to die from.   A few thought cancer, rather more thought Alzheimer’s would lead to their demise, some thought they were likely to die from a chronic illness such as congenital heart disease.   The majority hoped to die a sudden death from something like a heart attack or quietly pass away at home in their sleep.   This time the Professor had to disabuse the audience of their wishful thinking.    He confirmed that statistically only about 10% of people die a peaceful sudden death.   The majority of us are destined to die in hospital after a period of  illness.

The sobering message from this quick survey of professionals in the field of retirement housing is that our elderly customers generally do not set aside enough money to provide for care and support in their later years.   Nor indeed in the UK at least, does the pensions industry and insurance market provide appropriate financial products for end of life care.

More to follow in my next blogs.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | Tagged | 5 Comments

“Getting Plastered”

Posted on July 11, 2016 by john graham

It’s been a lovely week, the weather has been good and I have been out in the garden catching up on all the weeding, pruning, tying back and pottering.   These are the constant everyday challenges of the cottage gardener.

It is good exercise and not generally a hazardous occupation.   Just a few scratches from the thorns on the roses.   No need to call out the air ambulance!

Although, after a few days your hands and arms do look a bit like you have been in a serious fight with a rabid animal that stalks the garden jungle.   In my childhood days I would have got a sweet for the injuries sustained in my battles in the garden.   Still, the wounds heal over with crisp dark scabs after a day or two.

Then, like all little boys, you can’t resist picking off the scabs.   That’s where my story begins………

I am off to a business meeting – no more scruffy garden clothes – today is a day for my suit and a freshly pressed clean white shirt.   Washed, shaved and about to get dressed, I notice one last time I remaining scab on my arm.   Nobody would see it under my shirt sleeve, but the little boy in me can’t resist.

I pick off the scab like it is the last chocolate in the box.   Surprise, surprise it starts to bleed.   Just a drop at first, but enough to mark my clean white shirt, then more of a raging torrent.   At this rate I will soon look like a returning war hero.   Not quite the appearance I want at my business meeting.

I go looking for a plaster.   We have a house full of plasters.   Boxes of them everywhere, but nowhere when you’re in a hurry.   The first box I find is a Sainsbury’s washproof dressing strip.   Ideal if you want to wrap yourself in 30 feet of continuous plaster like an Egyptian Mummy.   But useless if you can’t find a pair of scissors!

So I hunt down another box in the kitchen cupboard leaving a few drops of blood in a trail behind me.   The forensic team will have no trouble finding out what happened if I don’t survive.   The box I find is Marks and Spencer who usually can be relied on for good quality, but not for plasters evidently.   Each individual plaster is wrapped in an outer paper protective cover designed to stop people getting into it.   At least the outer cover works, especially when you only have one useful arm.   I give up on M & S before I bleed to death.

plasters

At last, I find the brand leader – Elastoplast.   A new box full of “water-resistant plasters with non-stick pads” which seems a bit of a contradiction.   But still I wrench open the box, although I have to use my bloody hand so the box now looks as if it has been in an accident.   Inside the plasters are just like the M & S ones, all double wrapped, hermetically sealed, water-resistant, childproof, adultproof.   No safecracker has even been able to break into them – they will probably be around and unused for the next thousand years!

I finally resort to every shaver’s tried and tested solution…….a piece of toilet paper stuck to the wound soon dries it up.   Then all you have to do is put all the boxes of unused plasters away, clean the blood off the carpet and

DON’T PICK THAT SCAB AGAIN!!

Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 4 Comments

“Assisted Living”

Posted on July 3, 2016 by john graham

This is an American term applied to retirement housing, which I have never fully understood.   It tends to be associated with grab rails, hoists, Zimmer frames, mobility scooters and emergency call systems.   That’s all good stuff but it doesn’t go even half way to providing the assistance many older people need in later life.   Most everyday things that become problems may be only little issues individually, but their cumulative effect can be a debilitating reminder of how old you are getting.

A small amount of assistance could go a long way to keeping people more independent and create a host of new jobs for young people.   Here are a few ideas to be going on with:-

  • Childproof top safecracker assistant – to open all those pills you get from the chemist.  The ones you haven’t taken as prescribed because you can’t open the plastic pill-box 😦
  • Impossible package opener assistant – to remove all the hermetically sealed, vacuum packed, double shrink-wrapped plastic film used on almost everything.   To keep it fresh for years to come or to ensure it is tamper-proof, even by the customers who bought it in the first place.   Goodness knows how many injuries have happened when you take a pair of scissors or a sharp knife to your weekly shopping.   I wonder if you can claim compensation for over-wrapped goods?
  • Sealing resealable packages assistant – to put your cheese back into the packet – if you managed to open it in the first place.
  • Jam jar and fruit can opening assistant – for those easy to open tops where all you have to do is press down with the strength of an Olympic weight lifter and the top just pops off.   More old people need to take up weight-lifting otherwise marmalade sales will plummet.

(For other blogs about my trials with “Packaging” click on it in the TAG CLOUD).

It is not all about packaging.  Here are some other everyday tasks where assistance might help:-

  • TV Remote Control switching assistant – to master the three different TV controllers and two video thingy’s, oh and the sound bar operator widget.   Also to navigate the 150 channels – most of which we never watch.   There will, no doubt, be a £10 call out charge for this service and an extra charge by the hour if you have already pressed all the buttons and the TV has to be “reset again.   There will also have to be a special emergency call out service, obviously costing a lot more if you need the assistant to arrive within 5 minutes – say for instance if the football is about to kick off or maybe your favourite detective programme is about to start and you don’t want to miss the beginning in case you don’t understand the plot for the next two hours 😦
  • Finally, a reading assistant and gobbledygook translator – initially to read aloud the unreadable 10 point font that all newspapers have adopted these days.   No wonder less and less people are buying daily newspapers.   They could also speed read the news scrolling across the bottom on the screen on the 24-hour news channel or scrolling up the screen at breakneck speed, with the credits at the end of the film.   The translator part of the job is not about a foreign language, it’s about the latest politically correct “buzzwords” and the computer geek language of “new speak”.   The first is to ensure you are “on trend” whatever that means – using words like sustainable, counter-intuitive or even intuitive if you are talking about computers.   The techy stuff is designed to ensure that only a few hundred people in the whole world understand how computers and the internet works.  Everyone else either just pretends to understand or has given up trying.  Bits and bytes and gigabytes seem to be important since you have to pay more for more of them.   Band speed is also significant, which I think has something to do with how fast musicians play?   I am not even going to talk about clouds, I gave up on them after learning about Cirrus, Cumulonimbus and Cumulo Stratus in A-level geography.  Phishing is no longer fishing for fish, it’s now about phishing to catch people on-line.   The tech jargon is never-ending, always trending and for older people, mind-bending.

So there will probably never be enough assistants to support older people in assisted living.

A better way would be to design products with the elderly in mind !

(See earlier posts on this subject by clicking on “Small Prints” and “Old Geek” in the TAG CLOUD).

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | Tagged , | 3 Comments

“Retirement Housing Review – Churchill Retirement Living”

Posted on June 26, 2016 by john graham

I started this thread about retirement housing when I wrote a post a few weeks ago on a very upmarket scheme in London.    Following that I wrote about the key issues that are driving the future of this market (you can see my earlier posts by clicking on “Retirement Housing” in the Topics list).

This is my third in-depth look at one of the major providers in the retirement housing sector:-

Churchill Retirement Living

This organisation is literally the son of McCarthy and Stone.    It was set up in 1994 by Spencer and Clinton McCarthy – the sons of John McCarthy.    It is still a private company run by the McCarthy family.  Their product has not changed substantially in the last 40 years – it is still essentially sheltered housing for sale.  They have not moved into providing an assisted living option.

The website is fairly good but it has a number of omissions which makes comparison with other providers difficult.   Here are some of the key facts drawn from their website:-

  • They operate schemes mainly in the South of England, although they have moved into the Midlands and towards the North West.  They have a highly focused product with standard one and two bedroom flat types in schemes of between 25 and 50 units.
  • Communal facilities are minimal with only a small communal lounge and a guest suite.
  • Individual properties are based on the footprints of one and two bedroom flats.   They seem quite small, although there’s no reference to the overall size.    The flats are generally narrow frontage which mean all the main rooms are deep and narrow.   If there are balconies at all, they are Juliette type with no outside space.    Kitchens are also small and wet rooms are provided with showers rather than bathrooms.
  • Purchase prices obviously vary with location.    Here are some examples:
    • Hampshire          – one bed          £191,950
    •                                – two bed          £318,950
    • Warwickshire      – one bed          £228,950
    •                                – two bed          £348,950
    • Dorset                   – one bed          £246,950
    •                 Surrey                   – one bed          £255,950

There is no charge on exit which presumably means service charges are higher to cover long-term maintenance cost.     If you wish to sub-let there is a charge of 1% of market value which seems high and difficult to justify.

  • They seem coy about service charges and no figures are provided on the website.    This is a strange stance to take because with their “no frills product” you would assume their charges are lower than their competitors.     There is also no charge for car parking, probably because they provide a minimal number of spaces on site (12 for 25 units on one site I looked at).  Their design standard is to provide 1 car for every 3 residents, which is not going to be adequate for a baby boomer future.
  • Domiciliary care and support is not included on any of their sites, although there is a concierge.    They provide a helpful location map showing the nearest medical centres / libraries / supermarkets etc.

Overall, these schemes are what they are.    Basic, no frills, sheltered housing.   They obviously produce schemes that are well-regarded and sell successfully.   So you could say why change a winning formula?

I would say it’s rather disappointing that with all their experience they have not developed the retirement housing model any further, although to be fair many other providers are in a similar position.

 

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 9 Comments

“Wine not ?”

Posted on June 19, 2016 by john graham

Chief Medical Officers are obviously not party animals.   In November last year I was looking forward to a few drinks at Christmas, and a few more on Boxing Day, and a few more in the days that followed.   Then the curmudgeonly party-poopers issued new guidelines on the intake of alcohol.   The new advice reduced the recommended level to 14 units a week 😩

The advice was aimed at middle-aged people worried about dementia and explicitly warned them to reduce their drinking.   Of course I am not middle-aged any more so maybe it doesn’t apply to me.

Still, to be on the safe side, I decided to shop around and see if I could find some more cheerful advice.     Fortunately, researchers at the University of Reading are a happier bunch.    They examined over 100 research studies and concluded that phenols, particularly in red wine and champagne, can help preserve brain cells, even when they are under attack from Alzheimer’s.       They found that people who drank a glass and a half of wine every day had a lower risk of dementia than teetotalers.

Wine Cartoon

I think I prefer to take their advice than listen to the Government miseries.

 

ManSmilew-BIGboard Cropped 179

Posted in HEALTH, SMILES | Tagged , | 4 Comments

“Retirement Housing Review – McCarthy & Stone”

Posted on June 12, 2016 by john graham

I started this thread about retirement housing when I wrote a post a few weeks ago on a very upmarket scheme in London.    Following that I wrote about the key issues that are driving the future of this market (you can see my earlier posts by clicking on “Retirement Housing” in the Topics list).

This is my second in-depth look at one of the major providers in the retirement housing sector:-

McCarthy & Stone

This organisation has been the private sector market leader in retirement housing for many years.    They were the first house-builder to move into the sheltered housing sector over 40 years ago.   What is somewhat surprising is that their market offer has hardly changed in all that time and is still essentially selling the same product.   They now have sub-divided their products into three basic divisions.  “Retirement Living” which seems to be their original offer and is still the majority of their schemes.   Secondly “Assisted Living” which is an enhanced offer which provides some degree of support.  Finally, what seems to be a re-branded model obscurely referred to as “Ortus Homes”, which although it’s claimed to be a pioneering concept, seems only to be a stripped down version of their original sheltered housing model.

Their website is very substantial which you would expect from such a large organisation.   They provide a lot of the information you might need to consider purchasing one of their properties, but you do have to be fairly adept at searching the website to find it.   Here are some of the key facts drawn from their website:-

  • Their schemes are provided over a wide area of the UK although annoyingly you can’t find a map showing you where they are all located.   The retirement living schemes and the new Ortus projects are typically between 20 and 40 units.  The assisted living units, which are similar to Category II sheltered housing tend to be around 50-60 units.
  • Communal facilities in the retirement living schemes are fairly basic but generally have a communal lounge and a guest room.   The assisted living projects would also include a restaurant and lounge areas.  The Ortus Homes projects seem to have taken out all these communal facilities and only offer a basic independent living option which to me appears to be a backward step.
  • Individual properties are generally a mixture of one and two-bedroom apartments.   Strangely although they provide individual plans and room sizes, there’s no reference to the overall size of the flats.   I suspect that the earlier retirement living accommodation and possibly also the assisted living flats are quite small.  No doubt the new Ortus Homes which are described as luxury “right sized accommodation” are significantly larger.
  • Purchase prices vary with each scheme location and when they were built.   Here are some of the one and two-bedroom apartments currently available:-
    • Wolverhampton – one bed          £160k to £200k        Retirement Living
    •                                – two bed          £240k to £255k        Retirement Living
    • Ashby                    – one bed          £170k to £200k        Retirement Living
    •                                 – two bed         £245k to £260k        Retirement Living
    • Swindon                – one bed         £205k                          Retirement Living
    •                                 – two bed         £301k                          Retirement Living
    • Leicester               – one bed         £200k to £211k          Retirement Living
    •                                 – two bed        £281k to £286k          Retirement Living
    •                 Leicester                – one bed        £143k to £163k           Assisted Living
    •                                                  – two bed        £238k to £288k         Assisted Living
    •                 Nottingham           – one bed        £227k to £300k         Assisted Living
    •                                                  – two bed        £278k to £481k          Assisted Living
    •                 Harrogate              – one bed         £264k to £274k         Ortus Luxury Homes
    •                 Swanage                 – one bed        £350k to £400k         Ortus Luxury Homes
    •                                                  – two bed        £421k to £526k          Ortus Luxury Homes
    •                 Buckinghamshire – two bed       £575k to £595k          Ortus Luxury Homes
    •                 Essex                      – two bed        £620k                          Ortus Luxury Homes
    •                 Hampshire            – two bed        £380k to £650k        Ortus Luxury Homes
    •                 Poole                      – two bed        £595k to £769k         Ortus Luxury Homes
    •                                                 – three bed     £1,425k                        Ortus Luxury Homes

In addition you pay an annual ground rent of circa £500.   They also have a 1% of capital charge on resale plus a small sales admin fee of £324.

  • Service charges vary from scheme to scheme but seem to average around £200 per month.   One hour of domestic support is provided within the service charge for assisted living.   You may also pay an extra charge for a parking space.
  • Domiciliary Care and Support.  A firm called YourLife provides care and support in the assisted living schemes.   It is provided on an individual basis but there’s no indication on the website as to how much these charges are likely to be.

Overall McCarthy and Stone still seem to be trading on their historical market leader position.   Their new brand of Ortus Homes seems to have abandoned any pretension of providing of any degree of communal living so I’m rather confused as to how this accommodation can in any way be described as pioneering in terms of retirement housing.  What is obvious is the intention to move upmarket with better located sites in terms of “sea views” and presumably, but not clearly, larger size accommodation.

These guys have long become followers not the market leaders they once were.

I maybe doing them a disservice so I will endeavour to go and see some of their newer schemes in the next few months and I will report back after that.

 

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 60 Comments

“Retirement Housing Review – Audley”

Posted on June 5, 2016 by john graham

I started this thread about retirement housing when I wrote a post a few weeks ago on a very upmarket scheme in London.  Following that I wrote about the key issues that are driving the future of this market (you can see my earlier posts by clicking on “Retirement Housing” in the Topics list).

I am now going to have a more in depth look at some of the options currently on offer.   My first example is one of the market leaders in the luxury end of the market:-

Audley Retirement Villages

This is an organisation I have known about and worked alongside for many years.   I first met their Chief Executive – Nick Sanderson when he was developing “Close Care Housing” with Beaumont Healthcare.   They had an upmarket, high quality approach to housing with care as an alternative to residential care.

They have now moved in to luxury retirement housing and currently have 12 schemes around the country from Kent through the Midlands and up to Yorkshire.   They provide leasehold flats and houses, often centred around an historical building which forms the focal point of their developments.

Their website is very comprehensive and gives most of the information you might need to consider purchasing one of their properties.   Here are some of the key facts drawn from their website:-

  • Their schemes range in size from 80 to a 100 units; they’re generally constructed in a series of phases over several years;
  • Their communal facilities are extensive and include a lounge, library, bistro/restaurant, fitness centre and a swimming pool;
  • Individual properties are mainly two-bedroom apartments of around 800 sq. ft. which is a very generous size.   There are a few smaller one-bedroom apartments and some larger two/three bed flats with study/office rooms.   On most sites, they also have two storey houses / cottages, which I personally don’t like because stairs are a barrier in future years;
  • Purchase prices vary with each scheme location and when they were built.   Here are some of the two-bedroom apartments currently available:-
    • Leamington Spa                 £410k to £435k
    • Yorkshire                             £380k to £495k
    • Derbyshire                           £395k to £450k
    • Buckinghamshire               £555k
    • Berkshire                             £595k to £635k
    • Birmingham                        £614k

In addition you pay an annual ground rent of £500 and a Deferred Management Charge when you leave / die, it is 1% of the resale price for every year you have lived in the scheme.     So the initial capital cost is quite high for a two-bedroom flat and rises significantly in areas further south.   Also there is a considerable exit price, albeit that this should enable Audley to charge a lower annual service charge.

  • Service charges vary from scheme to scheme but seem to average around £700 per month.   You may also pay an extra charge of £100 annually for a parking space.   So at £8,500 a year this is relatively expensive, although it does include an allowance which pays for some meals in the restaurant.   The website has a useful price calculator that enables you to make a comparison to your current household costs.
  • Domiciliary Care and Support.  Audley are relatively unusual in employing directly their own homecare team.   They provide everything from housekeeping to personal care right through to escorting people to appointments and social activities.   All of which is personalised and charged by the hour.

Overall I would say Audley has a distinctive niche at the luxury end of the market.

They have recently announced their intention to develop a “medium range offer”.   It will be interesting to see how this differs from the current provision.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 1 Comment