Retirement rental homes are a new concept to the UK; it has long been thought that people in retirement prefer to own their homes. Therefore, PegasusLife, a retirement homebuilder who traditionally construct homes for sale off plan, is rather stepping into the unknown with their plans to build 133 Cotswold farmstead flats by August 2017. If the scheme is successful, PegasusLife have lots of great additional sites lined up for development, such as Portishead, Somerset and the larger Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands site, where 200-250 new flats may be built for a mixture of sale and rent.
Eugene O’Sullivan, a director and surveyor at Morgan Pryce explains that “Although retirement rental homes are a new thing for the UK, the model has been tried and tested in the United States and Australia; it’s a natural progression for the market with an aging population where capital is being diluted from generation to generation. The success of the ‘build to rent’ sector has many similarities, and has attracted billions of pounds of investment; this seems like the obvious next step”.
Many of the large developers of retirement homes such as Audley and McCarthy & Stone have shown some interest in following PegasusLife into the unknown. If Pegasus have success in the Cotswolds, we will surely see a flurry of new investment in the retirement rental home sector.
This news was brought to you by Morgan Pryce, a specialist tenant acquisition agent with offices in Oxford Circus and the City. Morgan Pryce specialises in search, negotiation and project management and works exclusively for tenants.
