Senior Living is a slightly tricky business in India. The market dynamics are completely different in comparison to the socially developed countries.
At present most senior living projects are concentrated in cities like Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Coimbatore and parts of Kerala. This basically shows that the concept is more acceptable in South than North.
In my personal opinion, there is a difference in mindset of senior’s of South India as compared to Northern States. In South, elders are relatively more open to shifting to a retirement community, whereas up North the ideology is somewhat different.
In the Northern belt, the stigma associated with the term “Old Age Home” is still haunting the growth of the sector. Mindset of families, “What will friends and relatives think if I shift to a retirement community”, becomes the deciding factor rather than the actual need.
India has approximately 60-70 thousand beds under different formats of senior living. While majority of them fall under the free/charitable basis, however over the past 15 years around 9-10 thousand units have come up in the middle and upper middle income group segment. This works out to 1 bed for 1600 people above the age of 60.
On one hand the well-established senior living brands tend to get sold out faster whereas others have to struggle for getting in the residents.
The dilemma of the middle class is even more complicated, they can’t live in charitable homes due to social status issue, yet they don’t have the resources to afford the middle segment facilities.
Another strange aspect is, a lot many charitable homes have low occupancy levels. The homeless people living on the streets do not like to live in a free senior living facility, reason is loss of income from begging.
In a nutshell, senior living in India has tremendous opportunity to be tapped, however one needs to be careful while planning. The complexities of the industry need to be researched and understood properly.
Pankaj Mehrotra