Support at Home, one year on: what buyers of home care businesses now look for
Here is a simple way to think about a home care business, circa 2024. You count the clients. Each client came with a Home Care Package, each package came with a government-funded budget, and the provider took a fee for managing that budget whether or not much of it got spent. More clients, more packages, more fees. A buyer could look at the client list, do some arithmetic and go to lunch.¹
On 1 November 2025 that stopped working. Support at Home, which began the same day as the Aged Care Act 2024, pays providers for services actually delivered out of each client's quarterly budget, and funds care management from a pooled share of those budgets. The package management fee is gone. A client with a generous budget who uses very little of it is now, from the provider's point of view, a generous budget the provider mostly does not get.
So a year in, buyers have changed their first question. They used to ask how many clients you have. Now they ask how much of those clients' budgets you actually turn into services, and how long the clients and the staff will stay. A smaller business that uses its clients' budgets well will often draw more interest than a bigger one sitting on unspent budgets, which is a sentence that would have sounded odd three years ago.
What buyers price now
Utilisation and tenure come first: how fully clients use their services, how long they stay, and how many are likely to move into residential care in the next two years. This is not a small adjustment. StewartBrown's March 2026 financial performance survey reported average utilisation falling from 85.2% in the six months to December 2025 to 62.2% in the March 2026 quarter. A business can keep every client it had last year and still find a lot less of their money reaching it. Monthly data on each measure tells a buyer more than any headline client count.
Workforce comes next. Revenue now depends on delivered hours, and delivered hours depend on people turning up. So a buyer will want turnover, the share of shifts covered by agency staff, and how care management is resourced now that it is paid for out of each client's budget rather than a separate fee. If your care managers are the main reason clients stay, and your care managers are thinking of leaving, that is something the buyer will want to know sooner than you would like to tell them.
Geography and compliance complete the picture. Clients concentrated in one region cost less to serve than clients spread across a state, and buyers know this even when the accounts do not show it. Registration history, audit findings and complaints are read early, well before anyone talks about price.
Buyers also price the move itself. A business whose client agreements, rosters and systems can move across without disruption carries less risk than one whose owner holds all the key relationships. That risk shapes the terms of an offer as well as the price, which is the polite way of saying that more of the price tends to be deferred.
Why everyone is merging
Meanwhile the economics got tighter. StewartBrown reported an average operating loss for home care providers in the March 2026 quarter, the lowest result it has recorded for in-home care since it began benchmarking the programs in 2016. The loss was small, about 46 cents per client per day, but it was an average, and it had the wrong sign.
When a program rewards scale and your margin is negative, one natural response is to go and become part of someone else's scale. That is what has been happening. In July 2026 Anglicare Sydney agreed to sell its community home care business, with about 3,200 clients, to HammondCare. In August Five Good Friends acquired Living Choice's home care business, with more than 300 clients across 13 villages, and Regis Healthcare agreed to acquire Royal Freemasons' Victorian home care business of about 480 clients.
Look at who the buyers are: a not-for-profit consolidator, a listed residential operator and a technology-led operator. Three different kinds of buyer, three different reasons to want a home care business, and so three different answers to what one is worth. If you are thinking about selling, that is probably the most useful fact in this note.²
Structure is now a timetable
The choice between selling shares and selling assets has always mattered. Under the new Act it also decides how long the sale takes.
In a share sale, registration stays with the entity. The provider must notify the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission within 14 days of becoming aware of a notifiable change, such as a change in the people responsible for the business or a significant change in its governance or scale. The sale is not itself the trigger; the changes that come with it are.
In an asset sale, the buyer must already be a registered provider. Clients move across through a transfer of the service delivery branch, which requires at least 90 days' notice to the Department, written notice to clients and new service agreements. That step now sits between signing and completion. Ninety days is a long time to be half-sold, and it gets longer if nobody planned for it.
What to prepare
The owners in the strongest position over the next year will be the ones who can answer a buyer's questions with data already in hand: monthly utilisation, client tenure, staff turnover and agency use, care management resourcing, and a clean audit record with the evidence on file. It also helps to have stepped back from day-to-day client relationships, so the business is seen to run without its owner, and to know how clients and staff would move across to someone new.
None of this requires a decision to sell. It is the same information that tells an owner whether a sale makes sense, when, and to whom. Mostly, the owners who get a good result are the ones who had the numbers before someone asked for them.
¹ Not literally. Nobody serious valued a home care business on client count alone. But the client count was the first number on the page, and it did a lot of work.
² It is also the argument for running a process rather than taking the first offer that turns up. We would say that. It is still true.
Northlight Strategies works with owners and acquirers of Australian healthcare and care businesses, from preparation through sale to integration. This article is general information only and is not financial, legal or tax advice.
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