Inspired Villages expands planning team to deliver ambitious growth plan

Award-winning retirement villages operator Inspired Villages has enhanced its planning team with the hire of Nathaniel Raimi as Planner and the promotion of Ellen Pearce to Planning Manager. The moves will support Inspired Villages’ ambitions to grow its portfolio to at least 34 villages with a £500m investment from Legal & General and NatWest Group Pension Fund.  

Nathaniel has over three years’ experience as a planner, having worked for local authorities, a housing association, and most recently at the multidisciplinary design firm HTA Design.

Ellen joined Inspired Villages from property consultancy Savills in 2020 as a planner and has supported numerous planning applications for sites across the country.

Established in 2017, Inspired Villages has six operational villages, four in construction, and 13 future sites secured. The company helps address a critical need in the UK for more age-appropriate housing for older people. There are now more than 12m over 65s in the UK with this figure expected to increase by 41% to nearly 18m by 2040[1]; however, there are currently only circa 80,000 later living homes in this country and between now and 2025 only around 8,000 new units are forecast to be delivered each year[2]. 

The planning team, which is led by Land & Planning Director Stuart Garnett, exchanged contracts on five sites in 2021 alone, adding nearly 800 homes to Inspired’s development pipeline, and secured planning permissions for four sites, totalling almost 500 homes. 2022 promises to be a bumper year for the team with contracts already exchanged on a site in South Cambridgeshire and many more planned. With sustainability a key priority for Inspired Villages, the pipeline includes net-zero carbon regulated energy retirement villages.

Stuart Garnett, Land & Planning Director at Inspired Villages, commented:

“Inspired Villages aspires to be a world-leading operator of retirement villages, and we know that hiring and nurturing the best talent is key to achieving that goal. I’m therefore delighted to promote Ellen to Planning Manager, it is a well-deserved promotion that is a testament to her skills and dedicated work ethic. I’m also pleased to welcome Nathaniel to the team, he brings a lot of relevant experience to the company. Our enhanced planning team will allow Inspired Villages to grow its pipeline of sites even further and help address the critical need for more age-appropriate housing in the UK for our rapidly ageing population.”