What’s in a name?

After tantalising his audience for the best part of 20 minutes, ARCO executive director https://healthinvestor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/logo-social-1-2.png Voges made his grand reveal. Presenting at the industry association’s annual conference, Voges announced the new ‘official’ name to describe the service-led operational model ARCO represents.

The outcome of 600 interviews with 55 to 75-plus year-olds across England, in response to research that suggested current terminology is outdated and confusing for consumers and investors alike, is that Voges urged the UK’s housing with care sector to adopt the new term ‘Integrated Retirement Community’ (IRC).

The sector has long struggled with this issue. Known variously as retirement villages, seniors housing, assisted living, retirement apartments, extra care housing, sheltered housing (the list goes on and on) – the concept of age-specific accommodation with care and other services delivered on-site has been around for some time. From an investment perspective, however, the sector has never been more active. As capital floods into the market, simplifying the messaging around what the product is makes a lot of sense.

The challenge for the integrated retirement community, as it shall be known, is the number of stakeholders it needs to influence. JLL’s Anthony Oldfield estimated the current market size as approximately 90,000 housing with care units and a further 665,000 housing with support units. For context, this represents a penetration rate among the over 65s market of 0.7%. America, Australia and New Zealand all range between 5.2 and 6.1% by the same analysis.

For ARCO chair and Audley Group founder Nick Sanderson, changing the name is just part of the puzzle. “There’s significant unmet demand. We need government to work with us, introducing clarity of terminology that recognises and propagates ‘integrated retirement communities’. Sector-specific legislation is also needed; it will help providers and planners meet demand for these communities and support consumers who are seeking to move into them.”

Following up from the conference, ARCO set out in its ‘Putting the ‘care’ in housing-with-care’ report how IRCs could help reduce the care staff shortage by 60,000 if the sector was given the backing to grow.
Voges said: “Our country is facing huge workforce challenges in social care, and if a sector can provide high-quality care with tens of thousands fewer staff, we should be doing everything we can to boost that sector and free up staff to so desperately needed by other parts of the social care system.”
Whether or the not the new language falls on deaf ears remains to be seen, but with investor momentum gathering behind the integrated retirement community space getting the message right has never been
more important.

Vernon Baxter,
Managing director,
Investor Publishing