Legal Brief with Alan Tate of Harris Tate www.harristate.co.nz

The retirement commissioner has recently published some research into retirement villages and it makes interesting reading.

About five per cent of New Zealanders aged 65 plus live in retirement villages. In Tauranga, the figure is much higher; where 14 per cent of the older population live in retirement villages.

It is forecast there will need to be 800 to 1200 new retirement village dwellings built each year to meet rising demand as New Zealanders age.

Part of the research was directed at finding out how well retirement village residents understood the relatively complicated contractual arrangements around Rights to Occupy and the other conditions associated with buying into a village. Most people who participated in the research were happy with their decision to move into a retirement village, but many did not have a good understanding of their rights and obligations.

Many also had concerns their future in the village may not be as certain or secured as they had been led to believe and there was a level of dissatisfaction with the reality of life in a village not being what they had been led to expect.

From a lawyer's point of view, I have concerns about the amount and content of the paper work people intending to shift into a retirement village are expected to understand.

There is a Disclosure Statement which sets out details of the particular village, a Code of Resident's Rights which apply to all villages and an Occupation Rights Agreement which sets out the resident's rights and obligations on shifting into the village. These documents often total about 50 pages and deal with every aspect in detail. It is simply not possible to expect anyone to take all of that information on board.

The result is people tend to rely on the information contained in the brochures and other marketing information prepared by the villages, which may or may not be totally consistent with the fine print in the documentation.

There has got to be a better way of providing people with the correct essential information they need before shifting into a village. Hopefully the retirement commissioner's report is a first step in that direction.