Specialist property support for care home operators and investors from Fraser Bond's experienced team.
A care home is a trading business that happens to occupy a building. It is valued on earnings rather than floor area, and the thing most likely to delay your completion is not the survey — it is CQC registration, which does not transfer with the property. Here is the stock, and what decides whether a home works as a deal.
Maintainable earnings, occupancy over time, fee mix and agency spend. Price per bed is a sense-check, not a valuation.
Current rating and report date, any conditions or enforcement action, and whether the registered manager is staying. You should not learn this from a public register after you have offered.
Because a new provider cannot simply take over on completion, we structure the deal around registration rather than discovering it three weeks before exchange.
Our fee comes from the vendor or the landlord. No introduction fee and no retainer, whether you are buying the freehold or taking a lease.
Beds, region, nursing or residential, lease or freehold — and crucially whether you are already a registered provider, because that changes which homes are realistic for you.
CQC rating and history, occupancy, fee mix, staffing and lease terms up front. If a home has a problem we know about, you hear it before you view.
Share purchase or new registration, interim arrangements where they are needed, and the vendor or landlord managed through a timetable that reflects how long this actually takes.
Care homes are valued on maintainable earnings — typically an EBITDARM multiple — not on floor area or a price per square foot. Price per bed is useful as a cross-check and misleading as a valuation, because two 40-bed homes with identical footprints can differ by several million pounds on the strength of occupancy, fee mix and staffing costs alone.
So read the trading position before the building. Occupancy across 24 months rather than a snapshot, the split between local authority and self-funded residents, and agency spend as a proportion of payroll. That last figure is the most honest single number in the accounts: a home running heavy agency usually has an earnings problem being described as a staffing problem.
This is the point that reshapes care home transactions and the one buyers most often discover late. Registration under the Health and Social Care Act regime is provider-specific. It attaches to the registered provider, not to the property and not to the business as an asset. A buyer cannot complete on Friday and carry on the regulated activity on Monday unless they are already registered to do so.
That drives the structure of the deal. A share purchase leaves registration with the corporate entity, which is why so many care transactions are structured that way despite the additional diligence. An asset purchase requires the incoming provider to register in their own right before they can operate, and that takes weeks at best and commonly a good deal longer.
From April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for those aged 21 and over, with £10.85 for 18 to 20 year olds and £8.00 for under-18s and apprentices. In a sector where payroll is typically the majority of operating cost, an uplift of this kind flows almost directly to the bottom line unless fee rates move with it, and local authority fee uplifts have a long record of lagging cost inflation.
Recruitment has also tightened materially. Dependants have not been permitted for new care worker applicants since March 2024, the English language requirement rose to B2 in April 2025, and sponsor licence enforcement has intensified — workers affected by a revocation typically get 60 days to find a new sponsor. Immigration rules for the route have changed repeatedly, so check the current position at the point of a transaction rather than relying on what was true last year.
A home at 90 per cent local authority funded and a home at 50 per cent self-funded are different businesses with the same CQC registration. Self-funded fees can be repriced; local authority rates are negotiated annually and generally trail wage inflation. Neither mix is wrong, but they carry different risk and they should not be valued on the same multiple.
Room mix is the constraint that most often caps a home’s value. Single ensuite rooms let and shared rooms increasingly do not, so a home with a high proportion of shared accommodation has a lower effective bed count than its registration suggests. Beyond that: wet room provision, lift access, the fire strategy and sprinkler position, and whether the building can physically accommodate the staffing model you intend to run.
Scale matters too. A 12-bed home has a very thin base over which to spread a registered manager, compliance and management overhead. It can work, particularly in a specialist or supported living model, but the margin arithmetic is unforgiving and worth doing before you view rather than after.
No. Registration is provider-specific and does not pass with the property or the business. If you are not already registered to carry on the regulated activity, you cannot operate the home on completion. This is the single most common reason care home transactions slip, and it is entirely foreseeable — which is why we build it into the timetable from the outset.
On maintainable earnings, usually as a multiple of EBITDARM, sense-checked against price per bed and against the vacant possession value of the building. Occupancy, fee mix and agency spend do more to move the figure than the property itself. If a vendor is quoting a price purely on beds or floor area, ask what earnings it implies.
They are not independent. A rating below Good restricts admissions in practice and often formally, so occupancy tends to follow the rating down. Read the report rather than the headline: a Requires Improvement driven by paperwork is a different proposition from one driven by safeguarding, and the price should reflect which one you are looking at.
No. Our fee is paid by the vendor or the landlord, whether you are acquiring a freehold or taking a lease. What that buys you is someone reading the trading position and the CQC history properly, and telling you when a home is priced on earnings it is not going to sustain.
