The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety identified in 2019 that about 6,000 young people with disability were living in Australian residential aged care facilities. With many of these Australians having spouses and even children, finding appropriate housing options was considered an emergency.
Rewind to 2015, where the Australian Government was recommended to keep a database of everyone under the age of 65 who was living in aged care facilities. It was proposed the database would include information such as the diagnosis and prognosis of each person as well as the time they’d spent in aged care so that this information could be reliably passed on to the National Disability Insurance Agency and State Governments. The idea was to find suitable participants to place in more appropriate accommodation. Unfortunately, this database never came to fruition.
In 2019, the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety got the ball rolling with a strategy developed to remove young people from aged care.
The Younger People In Residential Aged Care Strategy
In response to the Royal Commission, the Younger People In Residential Aged Care (YPIRAC) Strategy 2020-25 was released on 30 September 2020 with the goal to drastically reduce the number of young people living in aged care over the following five years.
The Australian Government has set targets and timelines to have no young people living in aged care by 2025, except under exceptional circumstances. The targets are as follows:
- By 2022 — no one under the age of 65 to be entering residential aged care.
- By 2022 — no one under the age of 45 living in residential aged care.
- By 2025 — no one under the age of 65 living in residential aged care.
Of the almost 6,000 people with disability living in aged care facilities, a number of them aren’t eligible for funding and resources under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Still, an overwhelming amount of them are.
With many young people in aged care being eligible for NDIS, they’re able to access Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) to live the life they deserve with the people they love. By offering SDA, people with disability have the opportunity to live independently in their community with access to 24/7 support when they need it.
Improving the Lives of Real People With Real Families
Sarah* suffered a brain injury in a car accident and was left with paraplegia. After her stay in hospital, she was moved to an aged care facility to live indefinitely. Sarah had a husband and two young children living in a rental property at the time of the accident, which was, unfortunately, unsuitable for Sarah to come home to.
Thanks to the NDIS, Sarah moved into specialist disability accommodation as an NDIS participant with her husband and two children. Their home has all the appropriate specifications for Sarah to live independently and successfully fulfil her role as a mother.
Sarah is just one of the many people with lives they desperately want to get back to. Living in aged care facilities is degrading, traumatic and quite frankly, a waste of a perfectly good life.
The Solution — NDIS Investment Property
Sarah’s landlord was most likely someone who purchased a property investment. Sarah’s family lived in the home and paid rent so the investor could generate rental income at a rate comparable to other rentals on the market.
When Sarah and her family needed to move into SDA, the government took on most of the liability for the rental payments as part of their commitment to removing young people from aged care. Because of the undersupply of disability accommodation, the government pays a high amount of rent as an incentive to encourage more investors to build SDA as a property investment to place more young people with disability in fully accessible homes.
By building an NDIS property, you’re giving families like Sarah’s a chance at an everyday life, while earning a much higher rental income than you could on any other type of property — thanks to the government’s rental guarantees. SDA property funding improves the lives of people with disability and investors alike.
Contact us on 1300 781 680 to learn more about finance for building an SDA investment property.
*Name changed for anonymity
