Seniors Housing & Healthcare Trends

LOS ANGELES: Developers are slowly abandoning the creation of age-apartheid estates and are embracing multigenerational communities.

Gone are the days when aged care and retirement living was annexed off in a quiet suburb and forgotten about.

Retirement and aged care providers—the original build-to-rent developers—are now focusing on integrated communities to provide a better experience for their customers.

One of these developers is BaptistCare NSW & ACT., which has been working on a major masterplan for its existing site in the development hotspot of Macquarie Park.

BaptistCare chief executive officer Charles Moore says his predecessors invested in the site back in 1962.

“Back then it was pretty much cow farms, which is how we’ve ended up with a 6.5ha site close to a major regional shopping centre, transport links and Macquarie University,” he says.

“As we’ve held it since 1962, a number of those assets are at the end of their life and don’t have the capacity to deliver the high quality care that we pride ourselves on, so it’s time for renewal.”

Currently at the end of its exhibition stage, the $1.9-billion development will deliver much more than aged care and retirement living—it is poised to be a case study into experienced developers are rethinking the way they operate.

“Ultimately our view is that we live and grow up in a community, but suddenly when you get to aged care you get segregated from a wider community,” Moore says.

“We’ve intentionally planned Macquarie Park as an inter-generational mixe- use development site, which will blend aged care alongside student accommodation, affordable housing, build-to-rent, schools and some retail.”

According to planning documents, the site will offer around 190,000sq m of residential and retail at 157 Balaclava Road, Macquarie Park, 13km north-west of the Sydney CBD, across 11 superlots, including 11 and 19-storey build-to-rent towers.

“We believe that aged care and retirement are a great fit for the location,” BaptistCare development director Steven Ball says.

“But in its current low and medium density form it won’t work.

“So our first cab off the rank is a vertical retirement village—we’re hoping to commence in 2025, and be operational by 2029.”

BaptistCare’s Stage 1 vertical village will consist of a 96-bed residential care facility with an additional 149 independent living units in a 13-storey tower.

Charter Keck Cramer director Richard Temlett warned to not underestimate the Baby Boomer segment of the market.

“They’re not actually impacted by interest rate rises. So a lot of them have paid off big detached houses,” he said.

“They’re aging and they’re working against the clock in the sense that they need to start to downsize to get more appropriate forms of homes, and there’s a significant opportunity to provide right size of products.”

As the Boomers comes of age to retire in the next two decades, they will be expecting a step change in the style, typography, quality and amenities in their retirement living.

Vertical villages can contribute to this change of approach, and new entrants to the retirement market such as UrbanLife have similarly invested in vertical lifestyle villages integrated into the surrounding communities, such as the $105-million Altona North development.

According to the Property Council of Australia’s Retirement Living Census released last year, 59 per cent of new villages to be developed will be vertical or combination.

BaptistCare says its is investing in vertical villages to futureproof its business.

“The vertical setting is inevitably due to scarcity of land and growing population,” says Ball.

“You need to care for as many people as you can in a smaller area—we’d all like to be on the ground but city living doesn’t allow it, so we’ve moved towards vertical design, and we have worked to understand what peoples’ needs are going to be in that environment.”

These needs are inevitably different from other sections of society, and mobility and ease of wayfinding will be key, especially as this vertical village will be the first of its kind in the BaptistCare portfolio.

“When you’re creating that intergenerational vibrant ground plane, it’s important to be thinking at a masterplan level about accessibility and signage … how are you introducing those mixed zones, how is traffic going to work?

“You need large amounts of open space with great sight lines because as people age they might get disorientated or not have as much confidence on their feet.”

To encourage intergenerational integration, the development is interspersed with different types of housing.

“Around 20 per cent of GFA we’re dedicating to affordable and student accommodation which will lead to a diverse and vibrant community,” says Ball.

Retirement living is the original build-to-rent development group, and Baptis Care will bring this hands-on approach to its actual build-to-rent at Macquarie Park.

“We’re not taking a traditional aged care and seniors approach, we have the opportunity to introduce these things and figure out what kind of place do we want to create,” Moore says.

“How do we break down what is a dedicated seniors and aged care environment and widen it, to become a diverse, vibrant, inclusive place where everyone is welcome and everyone can share in the services available?

“We want to normalise this in what will be an ageing-in-place location, where the continuum of care can be offered in a place that feels more normal than all-of-a-sudden moving into an aged care.”

It is also a strategic move having build-to-rent in a wider development that is anchored in retirement and aged care.

“Build-to-rent is not a foreign concept to us and we think it’s an opportunity to provide a different product onsite for a different demographic,” Moore says.

“We’d like to see affordable build-to-rent at scale, so our key workers are able to access employment as well as living opportunities on the site in our own centres and villages and in and around the Macquarie Park area.

“This is a larger project in the BaptistCare portfolio, its a key project at one of our oldest and most important sites, so we absolutely are committed to getting it right and we’ve taken our time.

“Slowing down to speed up has been important for us to find out what we’re trying to do in this site and now into the future, because we’re committed to getting this right.”