Carterwood Co-Founder, Amanda Nurse, reflects on insights from MIPIM 2026.
Last week, Amanda and Carterwood’s Managing Director, Tom Hartley, joined sector leaders from across Europe at MIPIM in Cannes.
Carterwood was proud to sponsor the Healthcare Workshop – Senior Living and Care: Balancing Demographic Demand and Investment Risk. The panel, chaired by Tom, sparked a wide-ranging discussion on the trends shaping elderly care and senior living across Europe, with conversations continuing in country-specific roundtables.
Amanda led the UK table discussion, alongside Sarah Skuse, exploring how investors and operators are approaching growth, risk and opportunity in the current market.
Read Amanda’s blog below to discover the key themes that emerged.
How to Spend €500 Million in 35 Minutes
Sarah Skuse, Partner at Bevan Brittan and I led the roundtable discussion at the Care and Retirement Living session at MIPIM last week.
It was a fascinating and collaborative discussion that uncovered golden insight from leaders across Europe.
We were joined by representatives from design, the London School of Economics, and an operator fund, which created a rich and diverse discussion.
What one roundtable debate revealed about the future of healthcare real estate investment
At MIPIM 2026, one of the most revealing moments in Carterwood’s European healthcare real estate session came not from the main panel, but from the breakout discussions that followed.
The brief sounded simple enough. If you had €100 million to invest, where would you put it?
Within minutes, the answer from the UK table was clear. €100 million would not be enough.
By the end of the discussion, the group had mentally expanded the budget to €500 million and built a compelling investment thesis around what the next phase of healthcare real estate growth could look like. It was ambitious, practical, and highly revealing about where the market is heading.
The conversation quickly moved beyond the traditional question of whether investors should back care homes, senior living, or medical assets. Instead, it landed on a more sophisticated conclusion. The strongest opportunities are likely to sit within platforms, operating capability, technology, community integration, and selective development.
Start with a platform, not a patchwork portfolio
The first conclusion was that scale matters, but quality matters more.
Rather than assembling a broad portfolio of mixed assets, the discussion centred on acquiring an existing, high-quality elderly care platform. The emphasis was on modern assets, ideally no more than five years old, providing investors with a strong operational base from which to grow.
This reflects a wider shift across European healthcare real estate. Investors are becoming more cautious about buying scale for the sake of scale. Large portfolios can contain weak assets, inconsistent operating performance, and hidden complexity.
The smarter route is increasingly to start with a controllable platform and expand from a position of strength. However, where investors do acquire more complex portfolios, success often depends on having an operating partner with the specific expertise required to deliver operational turnaround and unlock value.
That idea echoed comments from the panel, particularly around the importance of avoiding regret. It is far better to build on a strong foundation than inherit problems that take years to unwind.
Development still matters, but only when it is disciplined
The breakout group did not reject development. Far from it.
What emerged instead was a more disciplined view of how development should fit within an investment strategy. The preference was to combine an operating platform with a pipeline of new sites, rather than pursue speculative greenfield development in isolation.
That is significant. Across Europe, rising construction costs and higher financing costs have slowed development activity. However, the long-term need for new care home infrastructure has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more urgent.
The discussion showed that investors still want exposure to development, but they want it paired with operational certainty, market insight, and a clear understanding of where demand is strongest. In practice, this means targeting locations with strong private pay demand, favourable demographics, and a clear route through planning and delivery.
Technology is no longer a side conversation
Perhaps the most interesting twist in the debate was the group’s instinct to allocate capital to technology as well as real estate.
This was not technology for technology’s sake. It was a response to one of the clearest themes of the wider session – that future operational performance in care will increasingly be driven by technology, process, and data.
From digital monitoring and more efficient care documentation to smarter staffing models and improved resident experience, the discussion recognised that better buildings alone will not be enough. The best performing healthcare platforms will be those that combine physical real estate with operating intelligence.
That is a powerful insight for investors. Healthcare real estate is not becoming less operationally complex. It is becoming more so. The winners are likely to be the groups that can embed innovation into care delivery, not just into asset design.
Community is not a soft issue. It is an investment issue
Another theme from the roundtable was the importance of community.
The group discussed the value of creating schemes that are not isolated buildings, but places embedded in local life. This includes thinking about how residents interact with one another, how families engage with a scheme, and how local communities can become part of the broader ecosystem around a care setting.
This is also seen as an important part of the ESG agenda, and it is not dropping down the priority list for investors in this sector.
The future of later living and care is not simply about accommodating need. It is about creating environments where people want to live. That distinction came through strongly in discussions about senior living, where several contributors noted that residents are drawn not only by support but also by companionship, activity, and a sense of belonging.
For investors, this has direct implications for design, service model, branding, and lease-up. Community should not be treated as a nice extra. It is a core part of the value proposition.
The real lesson: capital is chasing operational excellence
What did the exercise ultimately reveal?
It showed that investors are no longer thinking about healthcare real estate as a narrow property play. They are thinking in terms of ecosystems.
The most attractive strategies combine:
- strong operating platforms
- selective development
- modern, future-proof buildings
- embedded technology
- community-led design
- management teams capable of scaling responsibly
In other words, the challenge is no longer just where to invest. It is how to build a model that can continue performing over the long term.
If a room full of experienced delegates can turn €100 million into €500 million in half an hour, that says something important. Appetite for the sector is not the issue. The real question is where capital can be deployed most intelligently.
