Amongst house builders in this market, McCarthy & Stone is still the major supplier. Other major players are Bovis, Pegasus and Churchill, with a number of other specialist house builders. New stock has been built at a rate of about 3,000 units per annum in recent years.

The market is segmented. McCarthy & Stone’s mainstream middle market product is just as popular as ever. Companies such as English Courtyard and Beechcroft have aimed at the top end of the market with larger bungalows and houses. Extra care or assisted living schemes offering a greater level of services have been developed more frequently in the last few years by amongst others Bovis, McCarthy & Stone and Retirement Security Ltd.

Retirement villages are the current flavour of the month. Probably the first retirement village in England was built 20 years ago by Wates and is owned and run by Retirement Villages Ltd. Care Villages Limited has been building schemes for over 10 years. With greater interest and acceptance by planners of villages new companies are successfully developing schemes including Extra Care Charitable Trust, Hica Life and Raven Audley Court. Retirement Villages Ltd is also under new ownership and plans to develop new villages.

The management of retirement housing is dominated by organisations that are members of the Association of Retirement Housing Managers (ARHM).

The Association of Retirement Housing Managers

The Association of Retirement Housing Managers (ARHM) was founded in June 1991 and has developed an important role in the management of retirement housing. The ARHM represents 63 organisations that, between them, manage some 94,000 out of the total 110,000 retirement properties in the UK.

The ARHM regulates its members with a government approved code of practice. An updated version was approved in January 2006 which incorporates the latest legal references for managers. The ARHM has also set new standards of best practice for managers to attain in the code. Two of the most important are that all ARHM members must give their residents access to independent dispute resolution, and the annual accounting statements for service should meet the format that the Government wanted in the 2002 Act, but whose implementation has been delayed.

The market for the management of retirement housing is different from that of other residential leasehold blocks in two ways. Firstly, most of the managers are also long term landlords of the property they manage. This long term view of ownership and management allows for the creation of better customer relations. Secondly, about 40% of retirement housing is managed by housing associations. There has been competition between private managers and housing associations in this sector for 25 years which has been good for all. The two types of managers have been able to join together in the ARHM to agree common high standards which have improved standards for all. The Right to Manage was launched in 2003 but has had little or no impact on retirement housing. The ARHM knows of only two schemes where a successful claim is going ahead.

There are 60 specialist managers of retirement housing, all members of the ARHM, with perhaps another 20 or 30 organisations managing one or a few schemes each. Peverel dominates with about 40,000 units in management followed by Retirement Care Group, and then Guardian and Hanover (the last two being housing associations). There has been some consolidation over the last few years with the smaller companies or non-retirement specialists transferring schemes to ARHM members.

The concentration of management and freehold ownership on relatively few organisations, the mix of private companies and housing associations, and the reach of the ARHM into 90% of the market have all contributed to successful voluntary regulation. With rising consumer expectations the standards of management cannot remain static and continuous improvement is essential. The framework for good and improving standards in retirement housing is in place.