Estate Living Magazine Retirement Living - Issue 40 April 2019 | Page 22

P R O P E R T Y
&
I N V E S T M E N T
EVERGREEN
LIFE RIGHT RETIREMENT LIFESTYLE
Evergreen Lifestyle Village Broadacres
Drawing on its existing position as industry leader in the life right retirement community landscape, and
leveraging the new financial muscle it developed in its transaction with PSG, Evergreen is rapidly expanding
its retirement village footprint and setting new benchmarks for every aspect of retirement living.
‘Just because it “ain’t broke” is no reason not to make something
better,’ says Evergreen’s Brand Marketing Director, Arthur Case.
New structure, new companies
With expansion comes corporate restructure and in January 2019,
Evergreen divided into two separate but complementary business
services – the property development and asset holding company,
Evergreen Property Investments (Pty) Ltd (EPI), under the
management of new MD Cobus Bedeker, and Evergreen Lifestyle
Villages (ELV), the operating company that runs the estates. ELV’s
new MD, Garry Reed, who was previously with Tsogo Sun, has
extensive hospitality experience, which will be put to good use in
perfecting Evergreen’s lifestyle products.
Both ELV and EPI fall under the holding company Evergreen
Retirement Holdings. Evergreen’s pre-restructure CEO, Arthur
Case, has stepped down, and now concentrates on marketing the
Evergreen brand.
Bigger and better
Since PSG bought into Evergreen in 2017, the company has been
able to expand its property holdings, and also to accelerate its build.
As Case says, ‘we realised we need to build scale. Scale allows you to
offer a lower purchase price because you are building in economies
of scale – and it allows you to keep levies lower.’
So new properties in the pipeline include Evergreen uMhlanga
Ridge, which will have 640 units, Evergreen Zimbali Lakes with
750 units, Evergreen Hilton with 500 and, in Port Elizabeth, a
planned 800-unit village. And they are expanding existing estates. A
hundred and four new homes are nearing completion at Evergreen
Noordhoek, which will bring the total to 270 units. Phase One is sold
out, and 47 homes are already occupied.
They’ve also bought additional land at the existing estates, and have
already added 43 new homes at Muizenberg and 13 at Bergvliet,