The third edition of the Living Sectors Summit returns this November and will open up the real conversation we should be having about the future of some of our key residential assets.
It’s a $12 trillion giant that’s simply too big to ignore. Australia’s residential asset class demands the collective attention of developers, investors, policy planners and facility managers. Its wide scope includes key living sectors across build-to-rent (BTR), purpose built student accommodation (PBSA), co-living, retirement living, land lease communities, and social and affordable housing.
BTR will see its cumulative operating apartments increase from just over 9000 in 2024 to more than 46,000 by 2029, according to BDO Australia’s ‘A changing of the guard’ report. A CBRE report, ‘Accommodating the growth in students’, meanwhile has found that Australia has potential excess demand of approximately 185,000 student accommodation rooms, based on the gap between student renters and available stock. PBSA penetration sits at seven percent, or around one student accommodation bed for every 15 university students.
Urbis Research indicates that the co-living sector is underpinned by more than 2.2 million single, couple and group renter households, key markets that co-living typically encompasses.
The aged care sector includes 220,000 beds; retirement villages have around 210,000 independent living units; and land lease communities have around 51,000 units, collectively totalling approximately 480,000 units. CBRE estimates the asset value of senior living exceeds $150 billion, according to its ‘Senior living’ report.
Meanwhile, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s ‘Housing Assistance in Australia 2026’ report indicates that the country had approximately 452,000 social housing dwellings in June 2025, while 206,000 households remained on consolidated waiting lists.
While each of these sectors is, and should be, assessed independently for its unique growth strategy, challenges and opportunities, there are common threads that run across them. “Ultimately, each sub-sector has its own economics, customer needs and regulatory settings. Across all of them, however, many of the core questions are increasingly shared: how to attract long-term capital, get projects through planning, make delivery viable, and build operating models that can perform as portfolios grow,” explains the portfolio director for the Real Estate Asset Class Division at FuturePlace, Fergus Cunningham.
“We are increasingly seeing investors and operators in particular looking across the sector to compare models. From a sector-agnostic perspective, synergies exist in assessing platform capability, operating data, resident experience, procurement, asset management and the long-term resilience of income.”
FuturePlace, an Australian B2B media, events and advisory platform, has a particular strength in identifying and amplifying synergies between the different living sectors. It is the organiser of the annual Living Sectors Summit, the third edition of which will be held on 11-12 November at ICC, Sydney.
The evolution of the summit
Back in 2023, FuturePlace organised a BTR Summit at the Dockside, Cockle Bay Wharf in Sydney. That room attracted a powerhouse crowd that really drives the agenda across the national living sectors. By the following year, the event had transformed into a fully-fledged and expanded Living Sectors Summit. Among those attending FuturePlace’s events over the years is Adrian Harrington, NSW Chair, Housing All Australians.
“What makes the Living Sectors Summit particularly valuable is that it brings together people who are often having different parts of the same conversation – investors, developers, government, planners, operators and housing providers,” Harrington says.
“Australia’s housing challenge is no longer simply about how many homes we build. It is about how we fund, plan, deliver, operate and maintain housing at scale. The Summit deliberately brings those issues together across build-to-rent, retirement living, land lease, student accommodation, co-living, and social and affordable housing.”
This year, Harrington will chair the first day of the Summit, which will focus on how Australia funds, delivers and operates housing at scale. Building on its involvement in previous iterations of the conference, Housing All Australians is also the Summit’s Knowledge Partner.
As Harrington notes, this year is particularly relevant because the industry is moving from talking about the need for more housing to confronting the practical question of how we actually deliver it at scale. “For me, the real value is the cross-sector dialogue. We won’t solve Australia’s housing challenge in silos. We need capital, government, developers and operators around the same table, and we need to move from conversation to practical collaboration,” says Harrington.
That’s precisely what Cunningham and his team are preparing the Summit to deliver. The main goal, he says, is to gather the people funding, developing and operating Australia’s emerging living sectors into the same room.
In the inaugural 2024 edition, many of the conversations were centred on living sector foundations: could emerging models attract institutional capital? What policy, tax and planning settings needed to change? How could affordable housing be funded at a greater scale? And how could projects remain viable while construction costs and supply constraints were rising?
Cunningham explains that those issues are still central to the Summit. However, the 2026 agenda has evolved to reflect the changing nature of the sector, with more focus on execution and scale.
The core thematics in this year’s edition will unpack how capital can be deployed with confidence; how planning, delivery capacity and financing can align; and how organisations can create operating platforms that deliver consistent performance once assets are open.
This year’s edition is expected to welcome more than 700 attendees. The speakers and attendees will include a cross-section of institutional investors and super funds, developers and operating platforms, as well as government, community housing providers, lenders and advisers.
“Bringing those groups together matters because the decisions around capital, policy, delivery and operations are increasingly interconnected. Ultimately the Summit provides a forum for senior leaders to work through how more housing can be funded, delivered and operated successfully over the long term,” says Cunningham.
The opportunity for facility management
The long-term outlook for the living sectors is what is driving these conversations. In the case of social and affordable housing, for example, Harrington argues that higher initial funding alone will not solve the issue of its maintenance over the long term. What will tip the scales is taking a longer-term view of the sector and planning spending across the asset’s life cycle.
“The real mistake is thinking the project finishes when the building is handed over. That is when the real life of the asset begins. We need to design social and affordable housing with its operational life in mind from day one – understanding who will manage the property, who will occupy it, how intensively it will be used and what it will cost to maintain over 20, 30 or 50 years,” says Harrington.
“Materials and fixtures need to be durable, readily replaceable and appropriate to the level of use. Building services need to be accessible for maintenance. Landscaping, waste management, security, lifts, fire systems, air-conditioning and common areas all carry ongoing operating costs that need to be understood before construction starts.
“Ultimately, we should be asking three questions: what does it cost to build, what does it cost to operate, and what does it cost to replace? That is the real cost of housing.”
This thought process that applies to social and affordable housing assets can just as much be applied to other living sectors including BTR, PBSA and retirement living. A cheaper product at construction can become an expensive product to maintain over 20 years. Therefore, Harrington argues, spending a little more upfront on durability, energy efficiency or maintainability can substantially reduce operating costs.
Tony Massaro, partner for Real Estate KordaMentha, who serves on the advisory board for the Living Sectors Summit along with Harrington, agrees that attention needs to be paid to assets post handover. “A lot of attention should be focused on the assets once complete. While the development is obviously super important to get right, these are, after all, operating businesses, and the level of attention to detail focused on operations separates excellent businesses from others,” says Massaro.
What to expect
FM Media is the official Media Partner for the Summit, which is expected to have over 75 speakers, including two international keynote speakers – Dan Batterton, head of Housing at Legal & General in the UK, and Johnny Caddick, managing director at Moda Living in the UK.
While Batterton and Caddick will lead day one with keynote speeches on ‘Scaling housing as an institutional investment platform’ and ‘Building a scalable BTR platform’ respectively, the day will progress with a number of panel discussions and breakout tracks discussing topics such as benchmarking, planning reforms and technology integration.
Day two tackles topics such as social and affordable housing, retirement living and land lease communities, as well as PBSA and co-living, followed by fireside chats and roundtables on different aspects of each of them for those who want to explore those topics a little further.
“I believe the greatest opportunity lies within the retirement and land lease sectors, given the weight of folks in the age demographic that these assets support and the lack of supply needed to maintain the current penetration levels, let alone any increase in the amount of folks who opt to live in these types of assets,” Massaro says.
At last year’s Summit, more than 40 percent of those who attended were a mix of owners, operators and developers. FuturePLace says that the Summit is the only event in Australia designed to connect the capital, policy, planning, development and operational decisions – and the roll-call of its dozens of speakers backs up its claims. It includes C-suite executives from the likes of Greystar, CBRE, Lendlease, Morgan Stanley, Stockland, QIC, AustralianSuper and Cushman & Wakefield, among others.
Cunningham says that some of the biggest demand at the upcoming Summit was for conversations to unpack how risk is allocated, how early design and delivery decisions affect operating performance, how organisations use data effectively and how they build scale without losing sight of the resident experience.
“This is an outstanding forum to both learn and network across multiple living sectors. That is where I see the value proposition sitting, and I will continue to attend this conference in years to come on account of it,” adds Massaro.
Going by what has transpired at previous events and the feedback from some of its participants, don’t expect monotonous monologues on the living sectors. Instead, expect spirited debates that challenge herd mentality and go against the grain.
“I am keen to see open and honest discussions about what a genuinely scalable and investable living-sector platform looks like in Australia,” says Cunningham.
“I think a successful summit can always be marked when we have provided a forum that allows each of the key industry stakeholders to challenge each other openly and honestly – that is where the most useful discussions tend to happen.”
To learn more about the Summit and register for it, visit livingsectorssummit.com.
This article first appeared in the November 2026 edition of FM magazine. To download the entire edition for free, click here.
All photos: Supplied by FuturePlace
Read more: FM Media partners with FuturePlace on upcoming Living Sectors Summit
