Assisted living finance in the South East

With more than 9.6 million residents, the South East is the most populous of England's nine regions and contains both the South Downs and New Forest national parks. We arrange the full range of assisted living finance across the South East, from the acquisition finance and commercial mortgages that buy and hold a trading care home or a lease-backed supported living asset, to the bridging, development, mezzanine and equity behind a build, a conversion or a repositioning. Care and supported-housing market data is published nationally by Knight Frank, CBRE and the ONS, so the figures above are presented as clearly-labelled benchmarks, while the housing-transaction figure is genuinely local Land Registry data for the towns we track.

The South East and East are the heartland of private-pay care and retirement living. High home equity among older owners supports self-funded care fees well above the national average, which underpins both care home trading and the extra care and later-living schemes expanding across the region. Average UK care home occupancy ran at 88.7 percent in 2025 on the Knight Frank review, and southern private-pay homes typically trade ahead of that. Lender appetite for stabilised care and lease-backed supported housing here sits at the top of the market.

On capital values, a modern, well-occupied purpose-built care home trades at an indicative £100,000 to £150,000 per bed on a going-concern basis (Knight Frank / care market commentary, 2025), with older and converted stock materially lower, while supported living is valued off the lease to the registered provider at yields around around 5 to 6% (Knight Frank UK Living Sectors Yield Guide / market commentary, 2025). Around around £12bn of UK healthcare property is forecast to transact in 2025 (Knight Frank, UK Healthcare, 2025 forecast), with investment into the wider UK Living sector reaching £3.2bn in a single quarter (CBRE UK Living, Q3 2025).

Benchmark figures from Knight Frank UK Care Homes Trading Performance Review 2025; Knight Frank UK Living Sectors Yield Guide, September 2025. Regional commentary draws on Knight Frank (UK Care Homes Trading Performance Review, 2025).