Arvida chief executive Jeremy Nicoll confirmed the arrangement when he was in town recently for the opening of Queenstown Country Club’s (QCC) care suites and apartments at Ladies Mile.
Arvida already owned QCC when the then-Southern District Health Board (SDHB) invited them to run the Lake Wakatipu Care Centre, which was in a wing adjoining Frankton’s Lakes District Hospital.
This was after former care centre operator Bupa gave notice to SDHB they were exiting — "they were loss-making on that site", Nicoll says.
"We said to SDHB, ‘look, it’s important for the local community that there is somewhere for [the care centre residents] to go.
"‘So, we’ll step in and run it on the basis that when we finish building the new care centre at QCC, we’ll move all the residents across and we’ll move all the team across’."
"Once this building was open, we took the people from Lake Wakatipu Care Centre, moved them across and we grandfathered their financial arrangements from Lake Wakatipu to here, so we didn’t force anyone to come in here and buy a care centre or pay anything more."
Nicoll confirms those then-35 residents who moved to the new facility are paying "a much lesser rate".
"Lucky them, they get to pay the same amount and just move to something that’s much nicer.
"When that resident passes away or moves out, we’ll then sell that unit as a care centre."
