Opportunity: new real interest in retirement living accommodation in our post-COVID world drives interest back to pre-Four Corners levels

The rapidly increasing interest in retirement villages is real.

Check out the graph above and the Google Analytics graph below.

The above graph shows that in May last year 6,200 people clicked on a retirement village or land lease community phone number on our website villages.com.au. Last month, May 2020, 9,150 people made the same action. That is an increase of 48%!

At the same time, the number of people clicking on a website link in May 2019 at 6,950 increased to 7,900 – an increase of 12%.

From the graph below, which details traffic over five months from January to June 2020 with a peak of 4,044 searches per day in February just before COVID, we are back to 3,711 searches yesterday – just 8% below the February peak.

In fact, our traffic for May 2020, with around 100,000 visitors, represents a 2% growth year-on-year compared to May 2019.

Importantly, and tellingly, the growth in website conversions – the number of people who wanted a telephone number, clicked through to a village website or sent an email, grew in May to 17,500 in total, a 26% growth year-on-year from May 2019.

This is the best conversion rate we have achieved in three years – which not surprisingly coincides with the month before the Four Corners program (aired 27 June 2017)!

Why is this occurring? Our hypothesis, backed by conversations with people in the field, is that the new breed of ageing customer seeking a safe harbour in these uncertain times is genuine.

Logically, now is the time to capitalise on this new customer and the underlying sentiment. But is this what the retirement village sector in particular is doing? Sadly ‘No’.

As we also reported last week, we are experiencing a significant number of operators who are reducing their marketing spend and, sadly, retrenching marketing and sales staff.

Basic marketing says the first step is for the sector to understand this new consumer need and then shape its value proposition to satisfy the need. This needs to be done now, not in 2021.

Fortunately, the first steps have been taken. With the backing of the four peak industry associations (ACSA, LASA, RLC and RLLA), our 2020 Research Program is already identifying new trends – and conversations.