045 - How property adaptations can lead to long term tenants with Carole Smyth

In this episode Carole Smyth shares her experience as an occupational therapist, she explains how occupational therapists are important to supported living schemes, discusses adaptations to property and why she believes older people are an important group of tenants that landlords can often overlook.  Carole has spent most of her working life as a community Occupational Therapist in London, in a local authority setting, alongside social care practitioners and surveyors. Her role was to work with people with long term and complex disabilities, finding ways to help them to remain independent or cared for at home. She really enjoyed combining my medical knowledge with problem solving skills and very quickly began to specialise in equipment provision and major adaptions. In 1996 she become an independent Occupational Therapist and started her own company, Calido Occupational Therapy services, primarily helping local councils and housing associations to reduce their waiting lists for assessments and service provision. This gave her an opportunity to develop my interest in housing for disabled people and twice found myself working within housing departments special needs teams. More recently, in 2018, having moved to Exeter she was able to develop a long held idea to help older and less able people reach their future potential by either moving to a suitable home or adapting their current home to suit their long-term needs. As a result, she set up Moving Together Devon CIC, to help people with all aspects of the moving process whether they want to move to a care home,  retirement scheme or live independently, either through buying or renting. https://www.movingtogetherdevon.co.uk Carole Smyth Director/Occupational Therapist Moving Together Devon CIC 01392 273067 07931892431 https://www.rcot.co.uk/about-occupational-therapy/find-occupational-therapist https://www.disabledliving.co.uk https://www.foundations.uk.com https://www.nrla.org.uk/campaigns/adaptations Lisa Brown became a property developer after her nursing career. She then discovered the need for supported living property and has been exploring the challenges and solutions, to create more homes for those with support needs, ever since. Lisa has some limited availability for consultancy calls. If you would like to talk through anything discussed in the podcast, to explore how to work with supported living providers in your property business or if you are a supported living provider looking to understand property then please email [email protected] Join the conversation about supported living by joining Lisa’s free Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/supportedlivingproperty/ If you wish to find our more about Lisa and how to connect with her on social media please go to: https://linktr.ee/Lisa_Brown To find the video versions of these episodes please go to: https://www.youtube.com/c/LisaBrownProperty Thank you for listening, please do leave a review and subscribe to keep up to date with future episodes.