McCarthy Stone

We buy land to build communities

McCarthy Stone is the UK’s leading developer and manager of retirement communities for the over 60s. In order to build our high quality retirement apartments and bungalows, we’ve acquired 200 sites in the last four years and invested £111m in buying land in 2022.

About McCarthy Stone

We enrich the lives of our customers by offering them an independent lifestyle with the peace of mind of help on hand if needed. 83% of our customers say their homes allow them to be independent for longer – potentially saving around £30,000 for every year of delayed residential care.

Quality and service are integral to everything we do. We’ve won multiple awards and are the only developer to achieve five star customer satisfaction ratings from the Home Builders Federation (HBF) each year since the award began.

Local benefits of retirement housing

As well as meeting the needs of older people and their families, McCarthy Stone developments provide tangible benefits to the local community too.

The local benefits:

• 97% of sites we acquire are brownfield (previously developed land)
• Average £10.92m overall boost to economy during construction per development (labour, fixtures, fittings, materials etc)*
• Up to £261,000 total expenditure in the local economy per development over and above a general needs housing scheme*
• £670K per year total economy expenditure in the local economy by customers per development*.

A smooth and simple acquisition  

With decades of expertise and experience in buying sites and obtaining planning permission, you can rely on us for a smooth, straightforward and quick acquisition process. We pay competitive rewards for all successful introductions too.

What kind of land do we buy?

We consider every type of land deal, whether unconditional purchase, conditional contract, or option agreement. And we’re not shy of a challenge – we’ll always consider ‘difficult sites’. Although we do have preferences.

We prefer to buy land that: 

• Is within half a mile/easy walk to shops and amenities 
• Has good public transport links 
• Is typically brownfield land 
• Covers 0.6 to 6 acres (0.2 to 2 hectares) 
• Offers scope for a three-storey (or higher) development 

Examples of good potential sites: 

• Local authority surplus car parks or buildings 
• Police and fire stations 
• Garages 
• Car dealerships
• Care homes
• Office buildings
• Sports grounds 
• Garden centres
• Depots 
• Hotels
• Areas of larger sites owned by house builders. 

Our stand on sustainability

Respect for the environment and biodiversity is important to us and our ambition is to divert 99% of our waste from landfill across all sites and be 100% Considerate Constructors. We use more environmentally Modern Methods of Construction in many of our builds and have a clear sustainability policy.

Get in touch if you know of land for sale

We want to hear from you if you own, or know of, land that might be suitable for our retirement developments. If you have information on land for sale, contact us at: [email protected].

* These statistics were sourced from the Local Area Economic Impact Assessment prepared by the Institute of Public Care at Oxford Brookes University using a sample of homeowners in March 2014, researched by Professor Michael Ball at the University of Reading in 2011 and the ‘A Better Life Report’ by Roger Tym & Partners in 2004