Retiring members of Vancouver’s business elite have new options for where to live thanks to a trend toward high-end seniors homes.
Buildings where all residents are 65 or older now offer temperature- controlled personal wine cellars, multiple restaurants and chauffeur-driven Bentleys at residents’ beck and call.
Operators call these residences “communities” and cringe if they hear someone call them “old folks’ homes” or “rest homes.” They insist, justifiably, that the facilities are made for active living and are more like resorts, with rent ranging up to $10,000 per month and no government subsidies.
“The expectations of the wealthy population are changing,” said Pacific Arbour Retirement Communities president Peter Gaskill, whose 129-unit Westerleigh opened a couple months ago and is already half occupied.
Westerleigh residents have a room to practise piano, a theatre and several restaurants, including one with a maitre d’.
Gaskill added that it also offers residents personal temperature-controlled wine cellars.
Across Vancouver, other developers propose to build similar resort-style seniors’ residences or already have them under construction.
Legacy Senior Living recently opened its presentation centre for a 91-suite complex under construction on West 41st Avenue across from Oakridge. The community is slated to be complete by mid-2014 and so far has nine confirmed residents.
Legacy’s managing director Carol Omstead touted her company’s plans to have a chauffeur-driven Bentley to whisk residents around town. She added that, unlike Westerleigh, her building will have a nurse on call.
She stressed, however, that the Legacy community would not be a nursing home.
“The home will be for living. Let’s push away the stereotype and perception that we’re a nursing home – a place where you go when you need to go. We’re a place where you go to enhance your ability to live independently.”
Westerleigh and Legacy compete with two Tapestry-branded homes: one on Yew Street and the other at Westbrook Village near the University of British Columbia.
Tapestry’s owners – Concert Properties, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) and Sun Life Financial – seek to build more resort-style seniors living, said Bill Rankin, who is general manager of the Tapestry on Yew Street, which opened in 1993.
Rankin said Tapestry residences are run like boutique hotels specifically for seniors.
Samir Manji, Amica Mature Lifestyles Inc.’s (TSX:ACC) CEO, told BIV that his company, which is Canada’s largest operator of luxury seniors residences, plans to redevelop its Amica at Arbutus Manor.
“Through CBRE, we are soliciting expressions of interest from developers because that home sits on a four-acre parcel of land in the west side of Vancouver that we think has substantial densification potential.
“We’re looking to attract a developer who would like to take the site through that densification process.”
Amica would sell most of the site to a developer for cash while also requiring that it provide at least 110,000 square feet of density with which Amica could build a new high-end home on the remaining part of the property.
Not everyone is targeting high-end seniors, however.
Edgemont Seniors Living senior vice-president John Kuharchuk told BIV that the high-end seniors niche is so small and well served that the mid-market is a better target demographic for a home that his company proposes to build in North Vancouver. •
