The Retirement Living Council (RLC) has released, Retirement ready: National planning report card, which analyses and ranks state-based planning systems and recommends areas for reform.
The report card has been prepared in conjunction with leading national urban consultancy Urbis and has made the following key findings:
- 67 per cent of development applications for retirement villages take more than 12 months to receive a determination, while 23 per cent take more than two years. This timeframe balloons out to 33 per cent in NSW.
- Retirement living is unable to compete with other land uses due to higher upfront costs and complexities in design and built form requirements, leading to lower financial returns for operators.
- Outside of NSW, retirement living and seniors’ housing is missing from key strategic planning documents across the country.
- There is a distinct lack of understanding of the retirement housing product with 70 per cent of operators believing assessor understanding is poor or very poor.
- South Australia has topped national rankings, with 58 points out of 100, followed by NSW, ACT, VIC, QLD, TAS and WA.
Accessing the report
The Retirement ready: National planning report card is now available to Retirement Living Council and Property Council members only, through their online membership portal.
Members, follow these steps to access a copy of the report:
- Go to the Property Council website > propertycouncil.com.au.
- Select the profile icon in the top-right corner to login.
- Enter your email address and password to login.
- If you can’t remember your password, select ‘Forgot password’ to reset.
- If you don’t have a profile, select ‘Join’. This will take you through the steps of creating a profile which will link to your company/organisation.
- Once logged in, select ‘Downloads’ from the menu on the left.
- Select ‘Download File’ under ‘Company downloads’ to download the report.
By downloading the report, members agree to not distribute outside of their organisation.
Become an RLC member
If your organisation would like access to important work being done by the RLC, including this report and the annual Retirement Census, get in touch with the team to sign up as a member today.
The RLC is the national leadership group for the retirement living sector, championing policies that deliver age-friendly homes and better services in retirement communities across Australia.
The RLC sits within the Property Council’s national advocacy team and is the most powerful voice of the sector, representing for-profit and not-for-profit owners and operators of retirement villages and seniors’ living communities.
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