Business View Oceania

28 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA VOLUME 4, ISSUE 12 year from the 22nd to the 25th of August. Online webinars and regional forums are also held intermittently throughout the year. “We will be at the Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre over four days for our biggest event of the year, co-hosted with the New Zealand Aged Care Association. We have around 700 delegates and 250 exhibitors, we’ve sold nearly 150 trade stands, and there’s a waiting list for more. We will hold a variety of topical forums, social functions, and have some great guest speakers attending. For the first time, we will also be holding the RVA Sustainability Awards. “We have acknowledged that sustainability is becoming increasingly important, not only for operators, but also residents and their wider communities as a whole,” Mr. Collyns explains. “We have launched three awards for sustainability. They are the APL Operator- led Sustainability Award, the EBOS Resident- led Sustainability Award, and the Spaceworks Resident-led Gardening and Landscaping Award. There are 28 nominees, so we’re pretty pleased with that, and we’re just about to start the judging process. The awards will be presented in collaboration with the Aged Care Association. We also have a Sustainability Committee which is designed to give members best practice ideas about how you might do things like waste audits, sustainable building, electric transport, and more.” The future of RVA and its members looks bright. Mr. Collyns concludes, “Over the last decade or so, the market share of the over-75 industry demographic has steadily increased year on year. In the year ending in 2020, we saw 14.3% of over-75s choosing to live in a retirement village, which equals 50,000 people. When I first started, retirement villages were a boutique, little understood housing option. Today, they’re part of the mainstream housing option for older people. They are accepted by the community at large, and we expect that the growth we have enjoyed now for some time will continue to expand and grow. It gives us peace of mind to give them peace of mind. And that, at the end of the day, is really what it’s all about.”