Lifestyle Communities Increases Underlying Profit by 69%.

30 August 2022

Lifestyle Communities settled 401 new homes in FY22 increasing its homes under management to 3,193 and lifting underlying profit by 69%. The company now has over 4,500 homeowners living in its 19 operating communities spread across Melbourne’s growth corridors, the Mornington and Bellarine Peninsula, and to Shepparton in the North.

Managing Director, Mr James Kelly said “To say this year was an unusual one for the business is an understatement. Lockdowns for the first four months of the year were followed by a large upswing in demand through the Christmas/New Year period as pent-up demand and a “life is short” sentiment coming out of lockdown saw strong sales and increasing desire to free up equity through downsizing.

More recently we have seen inflationary pressures through supply chain challenges and rising interest rates. As a business, we took decisions to build latency into our delivery timeframes, ensuring that we had sufficient stock to meet pre-sales commitments as we emerged from the pandemic shutdowns. To deliver 401 new home settlements in this environment was a really pleasing result.”

Mr Kelly said “In addition to the Phillip Island site which we announced in August 2021, we acquired three more sites during the year, which gives us a future pipeline of over 2,150 homes. This will underpin our continued growth for the next 3 to 5 years. We continue to see new land acquisition opportunities come to market and are well funded to continue to purchase high quality sites that meet our investment criteria. FY22 saw the completion of construction at Mount Du need and Kaduna Park as well as the opening of the clubhouse at St Leonards. Wollert, Deanside and St Leonards are all selling well and we were very pleased to welcome our first homeowners at Lifestyle Meridian.”

In FY22 the company invested $1.6m to upgrade its IT systems. The digital transformation included:

  • Launch of new website,
  • Implementation of SAP as our finance system
  • Introduction of Salesforce including a homeowner portal

The upgraded systems provide a 360-degree view of our customer from their first engagement through to their move-out day, a journey which can be more than 10 years. These systems enable automation and scalability as the business grows and are a key platform to better facilitate customer interactions.

Mr Kelly said “These systems are a key platform to deliver the next evolution of our customer experience and enable us to maintain the personal touch with our customers as we continue to grow. We are particularly excited to launch our homeowner portal which will provide our homeowners with a simple to use platform to stay in touch, engage with content, access benefits, book their facilities, and communicate directly with Lifestyle in real time from any device”.

The company plans to launch 7 new sites for development and sale during FY23 increasing the total projects in various stages of development to 11 by FY25. With land already in the pipeline, the company is planning to deliver 1,400 to 1,700 new home settlements between FY23 and FY25. An uplift of circa 30% compared to the previous 3-year settlement range.

Looking forward to FY23 Mr Kelly said “Supply chain challenges are expected to persist in the near term but our construction program is progressing well at this stage. FY23 settlements are expected to be consistent with FY22 but the launch of the 7 new projects during the year will see a step up in settlements in FY24 and FY25 as new projects come online at Woodlea, Phillip Island, St Leonards, Clyde, Bellarine, Pakenham, Merrifield and Ocean Grove. Resale settlements attracting a DMF are anticipated to be in the range of 550 to 750 over the next 3 years. We have the capacity to secure three new sites per year and we continue to investigate further land acquisition opportunities in
Melbourne’s key growth corridors.”

In closing, Mr Kelly Said “I’d like to thank our amazing team for their initiative during an extraordinary FY22. I’m very proud of the results that we’ve delivered and our team’s continued dedication to our homeowners. We are excited to launch Lifestyle Bellarine for sale in September 2022. This project will commence the next evolution of our homeowner experience strategy which will seek to offer benefits and experiences to Lifestyle Homeowners beyond the boundaries of their direct community.”

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