Wellness real estate was a US$134bn industry in 2017, growing by 6.4 per cent annually since 2015, and making up about 1.5 per cent of the total annual global construction market. It represents a shift that explicitly puts people’s wellness at the centre of the conception, design, creation and redevelopment of our homes and neighbourhoods. Wellness lifestyle real estate is a nascent industry that recognises – and has the potential to meet – today’s immense health challenges. This includes moving from not just preventing “sick buildings”, but building homes that enhance health and wellbeing shifting from passive to active wellness complementing bricks and mortar with policies, management and programming that build social connections and nurture healthy behaviours and creating awareness that our individual health and wellbeing is intrinsically linked to our broader environment and the people around us – a shift from “me” to “we”. The power of wellness lifestyle real estate lies in its potential to foster wellness communities, but the connection between the two is not automatic, and requires a shift. Wellness lifestyle real estate includes homes that are proactively designed and built to support the holistic health of their residents, while a wellness community is a group of people living in close proximity who share common goals, interests and experiences in proactively pursuing wellness. All aspects of a person – mind, body and spirit – need to work in harmony for that person to be truly well.
Wellness is not just about physical health it is multi-dimensional, encompassing the physical, social, mental, emotional, spiritual and other dimensions of our selves. We cannot address the global crisis of rising chronic disease and unsustainable health costs without committing to a dramatic transformation in where and how we live. Even as we live longer, more of us are living lonely, unhealthy and unhappy lives. Our built environment favours driving over biking, sitting over walking, riding in elevators over using the stairs, texting over face-to-face conversations, and screen time over outdoor recreation. Our modern environment has created new health risks – sedentary lifestyles, lack of physical activity, poor diet, stress, social isolation and environmental degradation. The way our homes have been built in the last century is reinforcing lifestyles that make us sick, stressed, alienated and unhappy. Our homes, communities and surrounding environment directly affect our daily behaviours and lifestyles, which together determine between 80 and 90 per cent of our health outcomes, so it’s only logical that consumers should increasingly want to invest in health and wellbeing there. The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) sees residential real estate as the next frontier to transform the wellness movement. Wellness is a US$3.7tn industry, growing faster than the global economy. ReGen Village in The Netherlands is one of more than 740 wellness communities being built Credit: PHOTO: Effekt Architects
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