As I had previously mentioned in my blog, I have had a keen interest in the setting up of active lifestyle retirement communities in Asia. I see it as a growing market as my generation ages. We are different from our parents and tend to have a more western concept of leading an active lifestyle after retirement with like-minded people as we are more aware of the importance of maintaining a healthy way of life and hence living longer. This is also partially due to medical advances.
This retirement concept is not new for countries like the USA, Holland, Australia, and Japan. My country is only just beginning to realize the growing demand for this service while we have absolutely zero supply at the moment. I tried to get a business going last year after talking about it for a few years but the deal fell through as I could not get my 2 principal partners to agree on the concept and to work together. We did our numbers and estimated that the conservative demand was for at least 6,000 of such units here. The project would be like a condominium of around 300 units on a lease basis and the IRR can be in the mid-teens.
Chiang Mai is one of the cities that had come up on my radar recently. It has attracted a lot of older Aussies and Europeans for its low cost of living and nice environment. I decided to pay the place a visit this week to check things out, given that I had time on my hands. There were a number of retirement resorts there and I arranged for a visit to 2 of them.
The last time I was there, I was on a backpacking trip with my uni mates in the late eighties. That was almost 30 years ago, where we were young and gung-ho with a tight budget. How things have changed there as I had discovered.
Booked my flights on the budget airlines and the hotel was also relatively cheap ay $50 per night, located near the night bazaar area. I flew in this week on Tuesday and stayed until Friday morning. On day 2, I hired a car with a driver for half a day and made my way to the 2 retirement resorts which I had made appointments with via emails.
The first visit was to Care Resort. The head nurse Tanya greeted me and proceeded to give me a tour of the grounds. It was a former hotel resort which the current British owner turned into a retirement concept. Currently, they are full and there are 22 long stay retirees mainly from America and only 2 were from Asia. Technically, one was a Thai-Amercian lady who had spent many years in America. The place looks a bit small and oldish. Most of the people seem to have a bit of dementia. The resort is looking to double its capacity by expanding and opening a new wing by Sep. http://www.careresortchiangmai.com/
The next place I visited was Vivo Bene and Khun Aoy was there to show me around. The place was pretty impressive and modern looking, resembling a Swiss/Japanese setup. They have 6 large villas that each have 12 individual rooms with common living and kitchen areas and are able to accommodate about 90 people. I was told that it is owned by Swiss operators with Thai partnership. Given that it was opened in 2014 at a cost of THB 250 million, I was surprised that they currently only have 8 retirees after opening for almost 3 years. 1 patient has quite severe dementia while I see 2 other elderly men exercising in the gardens. I suspect that this could be the pricing, as they are relatively high, targeting Swiss nationals who have more pension funds. I guess the original aim to attract mainly Swiss demand did not really work out. http://www.vivobene.co.th/
Overall, the retirement villages here seems to cater more to the older folks (at least 70 years old) who require some form of assistance. For those that seek active retirement lifestyles, they can still do it on their own as the city offers cheap private accommodations ($350 to 1k per month) and there is already a big network of expat associations where one can reach out to.
Spent the rest of my time doing a Mae Ping river cruise and a rickshaw city tour. Massages were really cheap, only $8 for an hour of foot reflexology. So I did a 1 to 3 hours of massage every day. The night bazaar street comes alive at night but it was raining most nights except for my last night. Went to watch live bands and have an ice cold beer with nice Thai seafood meals most of the time.
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