At times we need to take a step back and think of the sector we work in and the impact it makes on our community.
Our sister publication The SOURCE has been publishing some interesting analysis lately on how many people retirement living actually touches, and also how many new customers we need to bring on board each year.
See the chart above. You can see that across land lease communities and retirement villages we have 300,000 residents across Australia.
Our residents have placed their faith and wealth in our hands, so to speak, a great vote of trust.
At the same time, each resident has about three people that they are closely involved with, as friends, carers and supporters. Many of them will also be a beneficiary of the transition of wealth in the village home at some stage. So there is a financial ‘touch’ as well as an emotional touch.
This adds 900,000 people to a total of 1.2 million Australians that we have a touch point. Given all these ‘direct touch’ people will be aged over 40 years of age, we reach 14% of all people over 40, which is very powerful.
35,500 new sales a year required
In our own bubble, we don’t think of the big picture sales effort that is required to keep our sector humming.
From the chart below you can see that with rollovers and new builds, we need 35,500 new customers to sign up each year, or if you like, 97 every day of the year, including Christmas Day.
With an average village and LLC home now valued around $450,000 to buy in, we need to generate $16 billion in sales a year or $44 million every day.
We are BIG business! If each family home sold to buy into our sector is valued at say $600,000, then $21.3 billion in family home sales have to take place. Imagine all those young families upgrading – it is exciting we think.
As village professionals, we are vital to this ongoing sales process. We are the face and the brand of our community within our local community. It’s a big job.
(If you do not receive The SOURCE newsletter on a Tuesday, you can ask for a free subscription HERE – it’s the best news source on retirement living).