By will be over 60 years of age (For Samuel Green’s excellent four part series on this subject, go here, here, here, and here). Any businessman who looks at this number will tell you that it represents a huge market opportunity. Of course, there is a catch. You have to know when it’s time to enter the market.
Right now, is definitely NOT that time. But, there likely IS a right time.
Currently, the Chinese government is over-incentivising the real estate market in order to produce jobs. SOEs, flush with cash and blessed with leaders who have limited term limits and so care little for the long term consequences of expensive real estate purchases, are pushing the price of real estate ever higher through bid wars at record setting real estate auctions. This means that non-SOE players, of real estate purchases. If you are a foreign investor wishing to enter the Long Term Care market by building a private retirement home or something similar, you can’t do it by purchasing a plot of land and building something on top, unless you want to set up shop in the middle of some abandoned country side (in which case, you can’t ever really hope to build a high end facility). It’s just too expensive.
(If you don’t believe that there is a real estate bubble, (highlighted by ) and see if you come away unconvinced.)
So what does this mean? It means that the time to invest in long term care is right after the bubble bursts and real estate prices collapse. With a little luck (relative to the long term care facility tycoon’s position) the bubble will collapse close to 2020, when China’s elderly population starts to peak.
At that point two things might happen. 1) The government will be glad to offer assistance to those wishing to relieve some of the burden from retirement homes already running at over capacity (today, there is), and 2) Couples of working age will be able to buy previously unbuyable apartments, and decide they have money left over to send their parents to a really nice retirement home.
If those two factors don’t make an ideal investment period for long term care facility entrepreneurs then I don’t know what will.
About the Author
Makes me wish I had enough money to start a private nursing home business. Guess I've got 10 years to save before it happens, the potential for eldercare profiteering in EVERY country is going to be phenomenal. Start investing in accessibility, palliative healthcare and Saga holidays folks!
Trust me, no moment in time is full of only lost opportunities.
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[...] Pounds basically argues that concerns over a China-led space race would become a sustained political issue. I disagree. I could fathom it being a story for a few weeks leading up to the launch maybe, but I doubt attention spans in 2020, focused as they are on more pressing concerns (like the, by that point, out of control health spending) will be long enough to put up with a story that's any longer than that. It's more believable that the landing would mark a cultural shift: it could become a way that China definitively brands itself as the country of the moment. The Olympics didn't quite do that; they were more a lead in chapter. The article gets into this a little bit with pictures from a future mission trumping anything that Apollo brought back, but doesn't go far enough. (disclaimer: this is all assuming that the mission is not pre-empted by a giant real estate bubble burst in China). [...]