NSW retirement village communities can welcome improvements to retirement village living as a result of new laws that started on 1 July 2019.
These new laws included:
- mandatory Rules of Conduct for operators designed to establish a benchmark for the conduct and behaviour of operators, with penalties for breaches coming into effect from 1 January 2020
- new emergency management requirements, designed to ensure villages are well prepared to deal with an emergency
- giving residents the opportunity to get an annual update on the costs that would be associated with them leaving the village, through a ‘contract check-up’ meeting with the operator
- giving residents scrutiny and approval rights over the appointment of the person to audit the village’s accounts.
To help inform communities about the changes, more than 1,900 people around the state have been presented to about the new laws through the Retirement Village Ambassador program.
For operators, guidelines have been developed to help them implement their new requirements:
- Village contract information meeting guidelines
- Emergency plan and evacuation exercises guidelines
- Annual auditing of accounts guidelines
For more information see changes to retirement village laws