The company that is now known as Churchill Retirement Living was established in 1994 working out of a garage as its office. Back then the company was known as Emlor Homes, after Emma and Laura McCarthy, the daughters of one of the founders.
“My brother and I were co-founders, building stone and thatch cottages in Wiltshire and Dorset,” says Spencer J McCarthy, who is now Chairman and CEO of Churchill Retirement Living.
The big breakthrough for the company would come towards the end of the 90s, when Emlor purchased a site in Romsey for 40 retirement apartments. The apartments sold well, and Emlor made a similar investment in Southbourne, Dorset in 2001. It was clear there was potential in the market.
“At that stage we decided to focus purely on the retirement housing market, selling one-and two-bedroom private apartments,” McCarthy recalls. “We changed our name from Emlor Homes and ran a competition to come up with a new name.”
The winning entry came from one of the firm’s site managers, and Churchill Retirement Living was born in 2003. This year it celebrates its 21st birthday, and the company now employs over 700 people throughout the country, with five regional offices from its head office at Ringwood in Hampshire, to Byfleet in Surrey, up to Warrington in the North.
Churchill Retirement Living offers one-and-two-bedroom retirement living units. Typically, its customers are asset-rich, but potentially cash-poor people an average of 80 years of age.
“It is a lifestyle people often buy into positively seeking friendship and a low maintenance lifestyle, or it can be after an event such as a partner passing away, when they are feeling vulnerable or can no longer maintain a property, and want to be closer to family,” McCarthy says. “Our developments perfectly suit the needs of the lifestyle they are now living, and offer safety, security, and a community of like-minded people. I refer to it as halls of residence for life’s post-graduates.”
Evolving from its role as a construction company into a construction and property management company, Churchill not only builds but runs and maintains its developments for their residents, with an on-site lodge manager at each location to look after the building and foster a sense of community among the apartment owners. In fact, the management division of the company is overseen by Emma McCarthy, one of the daughters who inspired Churchill’s original name.
“We are very much a family-owned business, with a trusted reputation and a lot of experience in the retirement market,” McCarthy says. “What we do, we do very well. We focus purely on a single product, which is our one-and-two-bedroom independent retirement units. We are there for the long term. We develop the site, we build up a database of customers, we sell the units, and our management company manages the developments for us and the customer. We also provide an in-house emergency careline service which gives peace of mind, and when it comes to selling the apartment, we have an in-house estate agency service called Churchill Sales & Lettings which can help achieve the best value for our owners and their families.”
A Home for Success Stories
The nature of Churchill’s work depends on reliability. Customers need to be sure that the property they move into, and the service they receive there, will be of a consistently high standard. Ultimately, in construction and management, that comes down to the people doing the work, and this is McCarthy’s priority.
“Recruitment and retention of our colleagues is of paramount importance,” McCarthy insists. “When I first started out, I soon learned any successful business is only as good as its team and needs a happy workforce.”
Churchill Retirement Living boasts an attrition rate of less than 20%, extremely low compared to the industry. Many people have joined the company and gone on to attain five, ten, 15 or 20 years of service.
“At Christmas, we had three female colleagues with 20 years of service,” McCarthy says. “One of them joined us as a 17-year-old, and she has now been with us for 20 years and is Group Head of Marketing.”
Employees are rewarded with a Rolex for 20 years of service – an expense McCarthy views as a bargain compared to the amount the company has saved in hiring costs for that time. The company also provides staff with free health checks every three years, and a free employee assistance programme which offers independent health and wellbeing support for staff and their families.
“I’m a very hands-on CEO, and every year I get everyone together and we have a Q&A session where they can ask me any question,” McCarthy says. “It is a chance for them to have their say and hear me respond. It is also a chance for me to hear first-hand about the issues that are important to people.”
Investing in Housing
In the last 21 years, Churchill Retirement Living has seen its fair share of ups and downs. There has been a global recession, Brexit, a global pandemic, and the economic impact of the War in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis.
“It has affected our building costs, which have risen by more than 20% without any house price inflation,” McCarthy says. “We have had to evaluate the business and be smarter in what we do. Sometimes it is good to have these challenges come along which means we have to take a step back and realign the business.”
But however volatile the economy has been, on a local or even global scale, two immovable facts remain. First, our population is ageing, and secondly, there is an urgent need for more housing.
“The Government has put in place an older people’s housing taskforce that is looking at how to bring forward more suitable housing for our ageing population,” McCarthy says. “Just recently, we carried out some research which shows that living in a supported retirement development leads to people being released from hospital much earlier because they have suitable accommodation to go to, which frees up beds and saves the NHS money.”
Currently, Churchill Retirement Living’s goal is to achieve 1,000-unit sales in a single year. It has the stock and the team to reach that goal over the coming years, it is just waiting for the market to pick up.
“The current government has not been overly favourable to housebuilding,” says McCarthy. “With a new government potentially coming in this year hopefully that will change. The Labour Party are saying the right things, and Rachel Reeve has a lot of support from businesses. So, I think there are plenty of reasons to be positive about the future and some great opportunities ahead. My father always said under a labour government he built more houses!”
