Month: April 2021

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Key things to help you everyday Things to watch

Carers in your village: understanding, support and a policy

While many of our residents move to a village to continue living a full and independent life, their needs and capacity often change as they get older.

For some, the changes occur slowly, and for others, their health and wellbeing deteriorate more rapidly.

Regardless of when they happen, these changes are usually unplanned and result in the need for initial support until formal assistance or services are established. 

Delays in accessing services, reluctance to address needs and the long wait times for Home Care Packages, all contribute to the increasing reliance on informal carers.

Carers and complexities

In our communities, we see the benefits of the vital role that carers play in the lives of our residents, but we also see (and may need to manage) the complexities when the carer is a spouse, family member, friend or even another resident!

We see couples where one person cares for their spouse, and then the carer becomes exhausted or unwell.

Residents become reliant and often a burden on good-hearted neighbours or residents, with the best intent, take up the role of carer for a neighbour and then withdraw their support as they are unable to manage.

Then we have family members who become full-time carers and want to be a live-in carer or, alternately, those who don’t see the need for support or care and are happy to let the Village Manager pick up and do what they can for the resident.

Yes, as Village Professionals, we see it all, and it can be overwhelming for us too.

So, what can we do?

The best strategy is to have some established policies or guides that your Management Team endorses.

Develop a policy for carers to live in the village should the need arise considering:

  • Approval on a case-by-case basis
  • Evidence of medical / GP support
  • Rights of residency, voting, parking
  • The obligation of the carer to abide by the Village Rules
  • Residency ceases upon vacation of resident and consider the termination obligations of the contract and legislation
  • Documented approval rather than a contract addendum

You can also refer to agencies who specialise in carer support:

Carers Australia – https://www.carersaustralia.com.au

Promote services available for older people and their carers:

MyAgedCare – https://www.myagedcare.gov.au/caring-someone

Act now; don’t wait

It is always best to develop a policy when you are not under time pressure or you already ‘have a situation’, when raising new policy guidelines can be misconstrued to being in response to one case.

Preparation of a simple document to start the discussion with your Management Team and possible the Residents Committee is a great first step.

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Key things to help you everyday Latest industry developments Things to watch

Welcome to Year Three for the DCMI Village Management Professional Development Program

Thank you for supporting us!

What a huge achievement by the DCM Institute team to be moving into our third year with consistent and growing participation in the Village Management Professional Development program.

We are all very proud – and appreciative – especially with the significant impact of COVID on DCMI participants and the need to restructure the program to deliver workshop days online.

We had to ensure you continued to receive great value, professional development and new opportunities to feel connected to the wider industry.

Sally boosts participant support

Six months ago, we introduced a participant care service to our program to ensure that participants continue to be well supported.

Sally Middleton joined our team to fulfil this role and she has conducted over 250 individual participant check-ins to support our participants achieve their learning goals.

Sally has also onboarded or provided portal refresher sessions to over 140 participants, and supported over 20% of participants to find the information they are looking for either in our online portal or on industry-specific websites. 

Jacqui boosts sales and leadership

Whilst COVID put a temporary hold on the face-to-face workshop days, the DCMI team continued to innovate. We engaged Jacqui Perkins to lead Retirement Village specific Sales & Leadership interactive masterclasses. 

Jacqui brings fresh concepts – always important with sales. The feedback on these masterclass sessions has been great and we have seen a number of sales consultants join the program to access these masterclasses and the valuable information available on the online Knowledge Centre portal.  

Face to face networking is back

However, what we are most excited about is we are heading back to Face-to-Face activities! Village network meetings have already been held in SA, NSW, Vic and soon to be ACT, WA, QLD & TAS.

Even better, we return to Face-to-Face workshop days in June. 

The DCMI team will return to the capital cities to conduct these valuable Professional Development workshop days. We are so looking forward to getting back to these sessions and the added value of the shared learning we get to share together. 

Please join us; please invest in yourself

If you are interested in joining the VMPD program, please register here.

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Latest industry developments

Stockland confirms Four Corners is behind us: retirement village resale number best since 2017: 190 homes/3 months​

It would appear that the shadow of the June 2017 Four Corners retirement village exposé is finally behind us, with Stockland announcing they delivered 190 resales in the three months January to March.

This is 10% up on the same quarter last year and their best Quarter result since June 2017 when Four Corners did its damning and largely erroneous exposé on villages.

Stockland’s result is even better given they but made even better by the fact that this year it has four big villages less in its portfolio, having sold them to Derek McMillan’s Centennial Living in December last year.

Family home prices to surge

More good news for village sales, Stockland points out that COVID has driven 255,000 Australians to return home since March last year, driving demand for new housing, backed by stable, low interest rates.

See the consistency of new Stockland enquiries below.

Stockland further charts the decline in new builds in recent years and the lag that is coming in 2022 to 2025. Demand will be for 125,000 new homes a year while supply will be just 80,000 homes.

The pressure on existing family home prices will be great, generating faster sales to join a village.

The high level of demand for detached homes, represented by the light blue line in the chart above, while supply is the dark line and undersupply by units the dark bar.

Stockland land lease first month sales: 25 homes

At the same time, Stockland’s confidence in land lease communities is rewarded by achieving 25 home sales in one month in its first LLC development. See next story.

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Latest industry developments

Land lease move delivers Stockland 25 sales in five weeks

Stockland is expanding its participation in the Over 55s housing market with ambitions to open 10 land lease communities in the coming years.

As we reported HERE, ‘Thrive Nirimba’, located within its $5 billion Aura community near Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast, only began construction in October last year, and commenced sales in late February. They achieved 25 sales in the first five weeks.

It will consist of 244 homes and community facilities built on its 2,400ha AURA greenfield development. The LLC homes in the first stage will be sold for around $460,000, about $100,000 less than surrounding homes.

Stockland has a pipeline of 3,000 LLC home sites across 10 projects nationally and speaks to more acquisitions.

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Key things to help you everyday

Does your role include marketing? Is this your skillset?​

Village professionals wear many hats and require both the left and right side of the brain. But is marketing one skill you bring to the job or should it be outsourced?

Marketing, and especially ‘communication’ – using words to take your audience on a journey – requires writing skills. This is especially so now in this digital world where the reader is bombarded with messages and it is so easy to just flick past.

Meaningful connection with meaningful content

The best way to create meaningful connections with your customer/residents at every stage of their journey is to deliver well written, consistent and valuable information. In marketing terms, you may refer to this as content!

But when I browse the branding and advertising content of retirement villages, the information is repeatedly one-sided. 

It is very specific information about the village, about the offering, a house for sale or communal facilities. But as the reader, how do I interpret this as valuable information to me. WIFM – What’s in it for me?

People are not looking for a house that is apparently for sale. They are looking for the warmth and security of a home in a secure neighbourhood. It is expected that it will be provided in a house – that is a given.

A marketer will identify that a prospective resident is looking for companionship with other human beings, not the fact that the village has a community centre.

Is outsourcing a better idea financially?

Creating the words that create pictures in the mind of the reader is a skill, and we don’t all have that skill. If this is you, why not outsource the task to a Content Professional?

It costs money but so does your time and effort if you are not going to get the same results.

For the purpose of this article, we point to a service we know – Content Republic – to give an idea of the investment required.

They will write an email for you from $300. This may sound like a lot, but compare it to the time it may take you, and how important it is to get a good result. If it has cost $5,000 to create five sales leads, $300 is suddenly very economical to keep them alive and bring them closer to purchasing.

Over three months you may send out 3 emails which is $900 and you can be confident you have done your best.

The alternative is to create the emails yourself and you can be confident that perhaps you will not achieve the best result, and you will not know.

You can talk to Content Republic by clicking HERE. Alternatively use Google to search ‘Marketing Content Writers’ for a range of writers.

Test one or two emails and be freed to apply your real skillsets where they are best utilised.

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Key things to help you everyday Latest industry developments Things to watch

Retirement Living touches 14% of all people aged over 40 – this is big business​

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).

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Key things to help you everyday

More villages going vertical – what does this mean for village managers?​

Apartments are the new normal for retirement villages.

While many big operators have been building apartments for about five years now in capital city locations, we are now seeing the traditional ‘horizontal village’ operators branch out to apartments.

Expanding village operator Oak Tree has announced the opening of its Pelican Waters on the Sunshine Coast village. It is a $15 million development of 60 units over four storeys.

Oak Tree now owns and operates 31 retirement villages across Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, mostly horizontal villages around 80 homes.

Managing this type of development is vastly different to a traditional village. For instance, residents don’t have their own outdoor space so the focus on activities is different.

Building management is also very different, but the skills will expand your professional credentials across areas such as building and strata management. All good news.

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Jobs

Sales Coordinator (Full Time) Award winning Over 55’s Village in Cooranbong, Lake Macquarie region

Seeking an exceptional Village Sales Professional to carry the sales function of our award-winning retirement village forward.

You are a skilled sales professional with Retirement Living experience, an energetic can-do approach, caring attitude and have all the skills to convert a qualified lead into an extremely satisfied new resident in this exceptional and rapidly expanding retirement community.

Further details:

Tracey Palser
General Manager, Catalina Lake Macquarie
tracey@catalinavillage.com.au
0418 453 741

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Latest industry developments

Increased retirement village regulations spreading across Australia – now Victoria

It’s a fight between QLD and NSW on which Government is going to introduce a new round of village regulations first, with other states copying and catching up.

This week has been Victoria’s turn and the Government is looking to embrace buybacks, following QLD which first introduced them, but also NSW in having different buyback periods depending on whether it’s a metro or regional village.

Village operators now have just a month to respond to the latest options paper from the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs, Gaming and Liquor Regulation on the proposed reforms to the Victorian Retirement Villages Act 1986 (Act).

You can read the paper here.

The 88-page paper lists 19 potential reforms for consideration, including:

  • Mandated buybacks for retirement village units not re-sold within a specified timeframe.
  • Amending the RV Act to clarify the definition of a retirement village.
  • Improving disclosure obligations, including requiring all fees to be disclosed in advertising materials.
  • Improving understanding of retirement village payment models by defining ‘deferred management fee’ and introducing yearly contract check-ups on request
  • Reforming the contract process by requiring contracts to be in plain English and introducing a requirement that residents must get legal advice before signing contracts.
  • Amending the Act to clarify all maintenance and repair requirements.
  • Extend the cooling-off period for retirement villages and/or introduce a settling-in period.
  • Amending the timeframe for charging fees to departing village residents for personal services and maintenance charges.
  • Clarifying reinstatement and renovation requirements for RV residents and operators.
  • Regulating the share of capital losses and gains.
  • Enhancing internal dispute resolution procedures, including removing the role of residents’ committees in resident disputes and/or mandating a Code of Conduct.
  • A new mandatory Code of Conduct to spell out the rights and responsibilities of RV operators and residents.
  • Clarifying the arrangements for residents’ committees.
  • Improving staff qualifications with mandatory qualifications for retirement village managers and staff.
  • Developing a compulsory village accreditation scheme.
  • Reforming the external dispute resolution process with mandatory conciliation and the establishment of an Industry Ombudsman.

The Government acknowledges concern from operators that mandated buybacks “would present significant financial challenges for operators, particularly for those operating in regional areas.”

Unsurprisingly, residents and advocacy organisations supported their introduction, but the report states there were “mixed views” about the length of time that should pass before a residence is bought back.

“Timeframes of six, 12 or 18 months would provide a starting point to further develop this option,” the paper says.

Operators have two options to respond – by responding to the paper or completing a survey.

Find out more here.

If you want to participate you will need to be quick though – submissions close 11.59pm Friday 14 May 2021.

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Key things to help you everyday Things to watch

Your website is often your first impression

Our favourite marketing support is Joshua Hanchett. We asked him to write this piece on the very important subject of websites.

You only get one chance to make an excellent first impression.

In 2021, the website is usually the first introduction to prospective residents and employees so providing a consistent experience online that represents the organisation well is paramount. 

An excellent online experience starts with the following: 

  1. Keep your resident, not the organisation, in mind. Each page should keep them central in the written and visual content. 
  2. Make it easy to contact the right person in the organisation. If your organisation provides multiple services, have a direct line or email to the relevant person. 
  3. Be a guide to your website visitor on their retirement journey. Inform them to make a great decision. Don’t sell. 

With this in mind, what can you do every year to keep your website relevant and visitors coming back time and time again? Below is a short list, but if you don’t have the time, reach out to us. We are happy to help your organisation reach their customer online.

1. Safety and Security – Is your website safe and your organisation’s privacy policy relevant and accessible? Visitors are encouraged to take action on websites by filling in forms, and it’s reassuring to know data isn’t going to be stolen or shared. Security Certificates and Firewall software are easy to install and automate these days.

Tip: Make it a priority at the beginning of each year to ensure your certificates and software are installed, activated, and working.

2. Responsive experience – Does your website provide a wonderful experience on a desktop and a mobile device? With mobile overtaking desktop in multiple demographics, it’s important the user experience is consistent across devices.

Tip: Open the website on a desktop and your mobile device at the same time. How does it load? Is the experience consistent? Is it easy to read and take action?

3. Read and refresh pertinent information. Set reminders in your calendar to read through your website and other sites making up your digital presence, including Google my Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, and listing sites like Villages.com.au. Start simple. Are your Name, Address, Phone Number, and Email details correct? Is your pricing accurate on listing websites? 

Tip: Open an incognito window in your browser and do a Google search of your organisation’s name. What’s on display? 

4. Track search, time, and behaviour on your site. Use tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush. Answer these questions. 

Where are your site visitors coming from? Direct, organic, social, or paid? 

Are they leaving quickly or sticking around for a while? 

Where are they spending time on your site?

Tip: Allow this data to inform how you change your website. A better site experience will increase time on site and reduce bounce rate.

5. Focus on Quality content rather than Quantity. Organisations that know their customers well serve their customers well. Speak to their problems and display authentic images of your residents enjoying their newfound freedoms in the community. Quality content will rank well on search engines, keep customers on your site longer, and even keep them returning for more.

Tip:  Treat your website as a living, breathing asset to your organisation. Let your users search online for solutions to their problem. Focus your creative energy on providing answers in a meaningful way. Once on your website, share to your social channels and email list with links back to your website.

6. Ask website visitors to take action – a phone call, a form filled, a downloadable pdf guide.

Tip: Pop ups have their place, but they can often be overused and deter a prospect. Be creative and strategic with your placements of all buttons, forms, pop ups and pdfs. Remain customer centric.

With more and more people online and so many simple free tools available online, there’s never been a better time to pay attention to your organisation’s website – it’s so much more than a brochure.

Set a time to implement these things in your busy schedule. It will pay dividends and speak to your professionalism, credibility, and ability to provide solutions to the evolving needs of your customer.

If you need help reaching your customer online, please reach out to us.

Joshua Hanchett – Your Digital Partner

josh@myheartstudio.com.au