The trading update from McCarthy & Stone should not have contained too many surprises, only two months after its flotation and the issue of a prospectus. The company came to the market and raised £90 million, allowing investors such as Goldman Sachs and private equity firms to exit.
It plans to invest £2.5 billion over the next four years in the UK retirement home market, of which it has about 70 per cent, to be funded out of free cashflow. The demographic advantages of this market are obvious enough and the company quotes a recent YouGov poll that suggested one in three homeowners aged 55 or more was considering moving and downsizing.
McCarthy & Stone was quoted until a decade ago, when it was taken