Do your village contracts require you to charge a departing resident or their family or their estate ongoing weekly fees until their village home has been reoccupied? Most do.
But if you are in New South Wales the limit is about to be fixed at six weeks (42 days).
This means that after six weeks the operator is likely to have to pay the fees for the vacancy unit into the village budget.
This is really going to hurt a lot of operators, especially with slow sales and building vacant stock.
The average village home now takes over 300 days from when it becomes vacant to being reoccupied. That is 43 weeks, meaning in NSW the operator will be paying 36 weeks worth of village fees. At $100 a week that is $3600, or $36,000 for a 100 unit village that has a 10% turnover a year.
Is this new government ruling fair? On paper, no. If a normal lease tenant departs before the lease is complete they are responsible for the fees until the property is relet. However there is an argument that operators both take their time to relet and because they control the sale process the departing resident has no chance to intervene.
Irrespective, it is likely other states will follow the New South Wales government.
