Locating retirement living villages to meet demand

A prominent retirement living provider was looking to make a substantial investment in capacity across Victoria and NSW. They needed to be able to anticipate demand and invest with confidence.

Working collaboratively with the client, .id developed more reliable and transparent predictions of future retirement living demand, as well as robust models of client catchment and take-up. The visualisation tools built into .id Placemaker also enabled the client to communicate clearly the basis of their investment decisions to relevant stakeholders. The client said,

“They are passionate people focused on one specialist area – demographics. The result was a highly focused piece of work which provided us with the evidence-base to make rational, confident and consistent investment decisions.”

The business challenge

The client was looking to make a major investment (some hundreds of millions of dollars) into retirement villages across Australia. They needed a robust assessment of potential demand, as well as an evidence-base for planning their supply response.

At the time, little modelling had been done of aged care demand, especially spatially, as it is effectively a small, niche, highly age-and-background specific segment of the housing market.  Yet the business was planning to make serious investment decisions.

Ultimately, the client was looking to build greater confidence in their investment decisions, throughout the organisation.

The .id solution

The client appointed .id based on the credibility of their client list, connections with local government and reputation especially in the area of population forecasting.

.id worked collaboratively with the client throughout the project – from scoping to delivery, making sure they understood exactly what the client needed to know to invest with confidence. Going beyond data and analysis, the client emphasised .id’s ability to “work through the problem together” as a key to the project’s success.

From there, .id was able to construct a detailed picture of both current and future demand, keying off not just population by age, but detailed target market criteria, as well as demographic indicators for propensity to choose a retirement village, current penetration rates, ability to pay and site desirability.

.id was also able to model catchment areas for retirement living villages, enabling the client to test existing rules of thumb – that people wouldn’t travel more than 15km to a retirement village, or that people were prepared to relocate further when moving to coastal villages, for example.

Figure 1: Demand for retirement villages, overlaid with existing villages, Greater Sydney, focusing on the catchment for Central Coast villages.

.id also helped the client identify areas where the current take-up of retirement living was low, potentially pointing to a lack of supply in the area. This ruled out areas with high demand which were already well serviced by existing supply.

With a nuanced picture of demand, id used their powerful location analysis application, .idPlacemaker to deliver the results, layering existing supply (both the clients’ and their competitors’) onto detailed maps of potential target markets (e.g figure 1).

.id provided the high-level analysis, but the simplicity of the .idPlacemaker application empowered the client’s analysts to delve deeper into the data as required.

Outcomes – data driven success

The client reported that .id’s strategy “was definitely the most efficient way to get to the answer.”  The results were clear and easy to understand and communicate, there was transparency to the results, and .id people were on hand to help as required. The confidence that this process, and the relationship with .id, generated was in their words, “invaluable.”

“Delivering products and services to people is the basis of any business. The more you know about them, the better off you will be. As demographers, .id knows about people – that’s their area of expertise.”

.id – the population experts

.id is a company of population experts – demographers, spatial analysts, urban planners, forecasters, census data and IT experts who build demographic information products for Australia & New Zealand.

We understand how cities, towns and regions are growing and changing. Name a place and we can tell you about its population’s past, present and future!

We use spatial data to tell this story in powerful web applications.

We share this knowledge with our clients so they can make confident decisions about when and where to provide services and invest in infrastructure.

Learn more about how .id’s expertise can help your business with location decisions.