How a scaling seniors' housing operator is turning regulatory complexity into a retention advantage
Eureka Group Holdings, the Brisbane-based owner and operator of seniors' rental villages, has spent the past two years transforming from a steady, low-growth ASX-listed operator into Australia's largest owner, operator and developer of seniors' rental accommodation.
The shift – powered by a $70.4 million capital raise announced within six weeks of chief executive Simon Owen's arrival in October 2024 to fund the acquisition of seven new communities – has left Eureka's people function managing a workforce that sits at the unusual intersection of property, hospitality and aged care–adjacent services.
For Rebecca Taylor, Eureka's head of people, culture and safety, turning that three-way intersection into a coherent workforce identity is now the defining feature of her role.
A workforce that doubles as the product
Taylor is blunt about what her frontline teams mean to Eureka's bottom line. "Our workforce is the product," she said. "Our village teams shape that resident experience, and what that means in a practical sense for us is that occupancy is revenue for us, and the experience that our village managers and community managers deliver is our commercial imperative."
Because those teams are "certainly not desk workers", Taylor says the levers available to her sit squarely within HR: "The mechanisms to enable them to perform through that HR lens is the rostering, the safety, the workload, autonomy, and making sure that they feel equipped to emotionally deal with the demanding work that's expected of them in supporting our residents and building communities."
That demand is compounded by the fact that many of Eureka's community managers live on-site, blurring the line between home and work. "That balance of when am I home and when am I working is really important, and we support the team on navigating that in the appropriate way and having the appropriate boundaries," Taylor said.
She also pointed to a structural tension unique to a listed operator with a social mission: "We have an absolute imperative to perform from an ASX [Australian Securities Exchange] and shareholder returns perspective, and sometimes the tension between that social mission and those ASX obligations can be challenging for people."
Her fix is deliberately simple – anchoring decisions back to Eureka's values and its resident-experience promise rather than treating culture and commercial performance as competing priorities, a philosophy that echoes HR leaders elsewhere framing retention as a genuine competitive advantage rather than a cost centre.
Hiring for attitude when the perfect candidate doesn't exist
Eureka's rapid acquisition pace – the company says it is onboarding a new community roughly every four to six weeks – means Taylor cannot recruit for a workforce identity that stays still. Her answer has been to stop searching for direct-industry experience and instead hire for traits that can't be taught.
"I will often push the team to hire against the things that are not teachable," she said. "What's that person's character? What's their attitude, what's their aptitude? And then how do we take them on the Eureka journey when they're in the business?"
She cited development managers as an example: someone who has only built high-rise towers won't necessarily suit Eureka's horizontal, modular housing model, but a residential property background paired with the right mindset will.
"You can't find the unicorns necessarily – they're far and few between," Taylor said. "We have to be prepared to deliver on that employee experience and make sure they're adequately skilled once they're in the building, on the Eureka way."
The approach mirrors a broader shift among Australian employers toward skills-first, rather than credential-first, hiring – a response, in Eureka's case, to a labour market that simply doesn't produce enough candidates who have worked across seniors housing, hospitality and property at once.
Navigating a shifting regulatory landscape
Taylor is careful to draw a line that matters for how Eureka is regulated: "We are not a care provider – we are independent living communities." That distinction places Eureka within the state-based retirement village regulatory regime rather than the federal Aged Care Act 2024, but Taylor says the compliance burden is intensifying regardless.
"It sometimes feels like the regulatory frameworks that we are constantly navigating are becoming more and more difficult for us to navigate, at a time where you're looking for support to be able to deliver on the mission you're here to achieve," she said.
That pressure is structural rather than anecdotal. Victoria's Retirement Villages Amendment Act 2025 and its accompanying regulations take effect from 1 May 2026, introducing standard-form contracts, new disclosure statements and mandatory capital maintenance plans, while South Australia's Retirement Villages (Miscellaneous) Amendment Act 2024 commenced on 2 February 2026 with its own compliance and enforcement powers.
For Eureka, which operates communities across multiple states, that means tracking materially different obligations jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Taylor said Eureka's HR information system is built to absorb some of that load, with governance and award compliance embedded directly into the platform, supplemented by external review of contracts and templates.
"From a cyclical perspective, we also have external review of all of our contracts and templates and the things that we're doing to make sure that we are constantly navigating any changing landscape," she said – a discipline that becomes more valuable as the cost of turnover continues to climb for employers across the sector and Eureka can least afford to lose the institutional knowledge that keeps it compliant.
For Taylor, the throughline across hiring, retention and compliance is the same: Eureka's growth story depends on a workforce willing to hold three identities at once, and on an HR function disciplined enough to keep them anchored to one set of values.
