Ahead of the Retirement Living & Care Homes Conference, we asked Henry Lumby, Founder of Haven Group, to set out why senior living has struggled to scale, why he has changed his mind on rental, and what investors really need to see before the capital follows. Henry has spent more than twenty years in operational real estate and senior living, and you can catch him on the panel at the conference, where he will be making the case in person and inviting challenge from the floor.

Yesterday’s Budget put £4.7bn behind people buying their first home. It put nothing at all behind the people living in the houses they want to buy.

That is the sector’s problem in one line. We spend a great deal of public money and private energy at the bottom of the housing chain, and almost none at the top, where 55.9% of households headed by someone over 65 are under-occupying by at least two bedrooms (English Housing Survey 2024/25) and have nowhere obvious to move to. Research published this week by ARCO and Boomer + beyond, covering 353 homeowners aged 70 and over, found that 73% feel settled where they are, 76% worry that retirement properties are hard to resell, and 81% think moving would be more hassle than it is worth.

They are not wrong on any of those points. That is the uncomfortable part.

Where has the retirement living sector gone wrong?

I would argue it hasn’t failed so much as been overtaken.

The for-sale model with a deferred management fee was designed for a particular customer: someone in their early seventies, in good health, moving by choice, trading down from a house that had become too big. It is a good model for that person. It works in Australia and New Zealand, where I have seen it do exactly what it says it will.

The customer arrived about a decade later than the model assumed. Today’s resident moves in their eighties, and usually because something has changed: a fall, a diagnosis, the loss of a partner, or simply the realisation that the stairs have become an obstacle. They are not trading down. They are solving a problem.

Almost everything the sector finds difficult follows from that gap. Lease-up takes longer because you are waiting for events, not decisions. Average length of stay is shorter than the model was built for. And the fee structure, fixed at the point someone moves in, has to carry a cost base that has moved considerably since.

It is also worth separating two things that get lumped together. In much of what is sold as retirement housing, the money is made on the new-build premium at first sale. After that, the lease recovers the full running cost from the resident, and nobody retains a stake in what the flat is worth when it is sold again. That, to my mind, is the root of the resale problem the sector keeps being criticised for. Integrated Retirement Communities at least defer part of the value to resale, which puts the operator and the resident on the same side.

Is the future in rental?

I think so, and I should be upfront that this is a change of mind. For most of my career I believed in for-sale. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and I had seen the model work overseas. I am now a rental convert, and it was the operating floor that converted me rather than a spreadsheet.

But I would caution anyone against claiming the customer is asking for it. The research I referred to above found 33% would prefer to buy, 11% would prefer to rent, and 56% simply don’t know. The honest reading is not that older people want to rent. It is that most of them have not yet been given a reason to decide, because nobody has offered them good rental at scale, across the country and at the price points they can afford.

The case for rental is what it delivers rather than what it is called:

• Certainty. A rent that rises each year by a stated formula, utilities metered and charged at cost, and no bill that arrives as a surprise. Ninety-five per cent of those homeowners said they want costs to be simple and predictable.
• No burden on the family. The home never becomes an asset somebody has to deal with.
• Closure. Give notice and leave. There is no resale to wait for, which matters a great deal more to families than the sector seems to think.

And for the people funding it, rental does something a deferred fee cannot. It reprices. Rent resets when an apartment is re-let, rises annually by formula, and passes energy costs through. A deferred management fee is fixed at the moment someone moves in, so if inflation runs hot or the average stay lengthens, the operator and the investor carry the difference. We have watched that happen.

What can we learn from care homes and from BTR?

From care homes: say what you do.

Care homes describe themselves plainly and run close to full. Occupancy across the whole market was 89.9% in the third quarter of this year. Senior living, which is coy about care, reaches about 0.6% of the UK’s over-65s, against 5 to 6% in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Two products serving broadly the same people. One is honest about need and full; the other is careful about it and under-occupied.

From build-to-rent: everything about delivery. BTR has standardised its product, learned to build at volume with housebuilders, and gone regional, while senior living has largely stayed in the South East arguing over unit mix. It has also professionalised operations in a way our sector has not. Whoever pairs BTR’s delivery and scaling discipline with genuine senior living operations will get a long way ahead, and in the United States the operators doing both are already the ones at scale.

What do investors want to see?

Less than people assume, and more rigour than they expect.

They want rental, because that is what their mandates can underwrite, and because in Canada and the US seniors rental is now a core allocation rather than an alternative.

The evidence that the capital exists is not hard to find. In October last year, Welltower, the largest investor in senior housing in the world, put £6.4bn into UK care home real estate in a single move, buying the property behind Barchester and HC-One: more than 600 homes between them. It did that because UK care homes are an institutional asset class. There is a lease or a management agreement, a trading record, a rent that can be underwritten, and operators large enough to transact with.

Senior living has none of that at scale, and it is not because the appetite is missing. Savills’ investor survey in March this year covered 56 investors holding €540bn of real estate, with around €45bn to place in operational real estate over the next three years. Forty-two per cent named senior living a highest priority, and 42% named care homes, making care homes the fastest riser of any operational sector, up from 25%. The UK and Ireland came top of their target markets.

Knight Frank’s European survey suggests why the money still doesn’t arrive. The barriers investors name across the living sectors are limited operational stock, limited development opportunities, and too few operators they trust. Not pricing. Not demand. Supply and operators.

Advisers came back from EXPO Real telling the same story. UK seniors came up in nearly every conversation, everyone was talking rental, and nobody could point to anything to buy.

That is the position we are in. You cannot deploy institutional capital across fifteen bespoke schemes, six operators and four tenure models. The shortage is not of capital. It is of product.

Which is why they want one standard scheme, repeated, rather than fifteen bespoke ones. They want a lean head office, because on exit a heavy central cost is simply deducted from the value of the business. They want evidence on lease-up, re-let rents and retention, which is to say they want evidence about operations.

That last point is the one I would press. The real estate underneath matters, but the operations is the magic. Value comes from how well residents’ lives are supported, which drives occupancy, which drives income, which drives the exit yield. Everything else is a building.

What does the model look like in the long run?

A pathway rather than a product. Active adult rental for people who want fewer responsibilities and no care at all. Care-led rental for the person in their eighties who needs help to stay independent. And a good care home for the point at which an apartment is no longer the right answer. One group can run all three, and the resident never has to start again with strangers.

Priced for the middle of the market, which is where the volume is and where almost nobody is building. Built to one design, repeated, with housebuilders, in regional towns and cities rather than only the crowded South East.

And the thing we don’t say out loud

The sector’s own marketing may be part of the problem.

The same research found that 88% of over-70s would not want to live somewhere that feels like a care home, rising to 92% of the over-75s. The industry’s instinct is to read that as an instruction to hide the care. I think it is the reason our buildings are half empty.

If the brochure promises a lifestyle and the product is care-ready housing, the enquiries come from people who are not ready to move, and the person who would move tomorrow never hears that the building is for them. Ronseal had it right. Say what it does.

The trick is not less care. It is honest words and invisible delivery: care described plainly in the marketing, and delivered in the apartment rather than performed in the lounge. The people who view at 79 and decide they are too young are the same people who come back at 81 after a spell in hospital. We should stop designing for the first visit.

What it’s for

Maya Angelou wrote that the object is not merely to survive, but to thrive. That is a reasonable test for a sector whose customers have, on average, a few good years to spend with us. Most people move to us because something has gone wrong. The job is to make sure what follows is better than what they left.

That is what I am building with Haven: care-led rental senior living, and a care home group alongside it. I will argue the case at the conference, and I would rather be argued with than agreed with.

Henry Lumby is the founder of Haven Group. He has worked in operational real estate and senior living for over twenty years, as an adviser at Savills, a developer, a founder and investor, and an operator.

Sources: ARCO and Boomer + beyond, “Confidence to move” (353 UK homeowners aged 70+, October 2026); Cushman & Wakefield care home occupancy, Q3 2026; English Housing Survey 2024/25; HM Treasury, Budget 2026; Savills Investor Survey, March 2026 (56 investors, €540bn AUM); Knight Frank European Living Sectors Investor Survey; Welltower acquisition of Barchester and HC-One real estate, completed October 2025.