Ageing in place rests on a simple assumption: that people can keep moving through their own lives, from room to garden and from building to neighbourhood, for as long as possible. Foldable electric wheelchairs, light enough for a car boot and compact enough for a small apartment, have brought that goal much closer. Yet whether a resident can actually use that freedom is rarely decided by the device. It is decided by a chain of owners, operators and funders, each of whom is responsible for only one part of the journey.
It helps to think of mobility not as a characteristic of the person or the product, but of the environment around them. A wheelchair user is mobile when the chair, the room, the lift, the front door, the path outside and the person who helps on a difficult day all work together. If one link fails, the others lose much of their value.
Germany offers an instructive example of how that chain is organised, and where it breaks. A resident of an assisted living apartment counts as living in their own home for care insurance purposes. Their personal wheelchair is generally funded by the health insurer, and adaptations to the apartment can be subsidised by the statutory long-term care insurance with up to 4,180 euros per adaptation measure. Once the same person moves into a nursing home, that subsidy no longer applies. The building becomes the responsibility of the operator and the owner, under accessibility requirements that are set at state level and differ across Germany's sixteen states. The building itself is usually owned by an investor, leased to an operator and paid for in part by residents through a monthly investment cost charge. Each arrangement makes sense on its own; together, they leave gaps, and older people with limited mobility tend to fall through them.
At IMMOTISS, our teams review nursing and senior living properties on behalf of operators, investors and developers. Since 2009, we have looked at these buildings from three angles at once: the property, its operation and the market it serves. That combination matters here, because mobility problems rarely sit neatly in just one of them. One pattern recurs in this work: the issues that limit residents' mobility are rarely purely technical in nature. More often, they are questions of responsibility. Creating a charging room for electric wheelchairs, for example, raises the question of whether this is a structural change for the owner or an operational matter for the operator. While that is being settled, the chairs are charged in the corridor. The improvement nobody owns is the one that does not happen.
The built environment is where these questions become visible. A large share of the existing care stock was planned before today's accessibility standards existed, or meets them on paper while ignoring how a building is actually used: heavy fire doors without automatic openers, furniture placed in the turning space, bathrooms that fit a wheelchair but not a wheelchair and a carer. In a multi-storey building, when one of two lifts is out of service for a week, residents on the upper floors lose access to the dining room, the garden and each other.
Electric mobility adds a newer question: where to charge. Lithium-ion batteries carry a fire risk, and escape corridors must be kept clear. Charging in the hallway is a problem fire safety officers know well and design briefs often overlook. Dedicated charging and storage areas, planned with fire protection in mind, cost little at the design stage and a great deal as a retrofit. The same applies to the thresholds between inside and outside. A resident who moves freely within the building but cannot get through the front door, across the car park or along the pavement to the nearest shop has gained a larger room, not independence.
Cost is the other side of responsibility. Under a long-term lease, accessibility upgrades are often negotiated between landlord and tenant, and where costs are passed on, they reach the resident's monthly bill. That makes affordability part of every accessibility decision. In Germany, the investment costs charged to residents are in many cases subject to approval by state authorities, so an accessibility upgrade is only sustainable if its refinancing is planned alongside the construction work. Daily practice shows that this is often the point at which upgrades either succeed or stall.
A useful reference point here is universal design. The Munich Declaration on Universal Design, published by Germany's Universal Design Forum in 2024, describes it as designing products and environments that all people can use, regardless of their differences, and as far as possible without adaptations or special solutions. Three of its principles translate directly into care settings. Design should start with people and their diversity, not with an average user who walks unaided. It should be a participatory process that involves those who will live and work in the building. And it should treat new technologies as an opportunity without underestimating their risks, which is exactly the balance electric mobility and its batteries demand. In senior living, this means that a wheelchair user, a resident with a walker and a visiting grandchild use the same entrance, the same lift and the same garden path, without anyone being routed around a special solution.
Policy will need to close some of these gaps, but owners and operators do not have to wait for it. Three steps are within reach today. The first is to assess buildings from a wheelchair user's perspective. A simple test is to ask someone who uses a wheelchair, whether a resident, a relative or an employee, to spend an ordinary day in the building without assistance. The resulting list is often more useful than a formal audit and should be shared with the mobility providers and therapists who select residents' equipment. A chair that cannot be charged safely in the resident's room, or does not fit into the lift together with a carer, will spend much of its life folded in a corner. Experience shows that an independent review combining a site visit, interviews with the operator and market data can turn such observations into a prioritised plan for owners and operators. The second is to make responsibility explicit: leases and operating agreements can state clearly who maintains lifts, who funds accessibility upgrades and who provides charging infrastructure. The third is to treat accessibility as part of the long-term value of the property. As residents arrive older and frailer, with more equipment, a building that cannot adapt becomes harder to operate and to re-let.
Staffing completes the picture. A resident who needs help to transfer, to charge a chair or to open a door is mobile only as long as someone has time. Every barrier removed from the building returns time to care.
The wheelchair is the last link in a long chain of decisions, most of them made years before anyone sits in it. If we want older people to move through their lives on their own terms, the question is not only which device to provide, but whether the building, and the system behind it, has been designed to let them use it.
For owners, operators and investors in Germany, and for international partners, including mobility providers, who want to understand how this market works, our entrepreneurial experience points in one clear direction: those who approach accessibility wisely bring property, operations and market together, and ask at every stage who is responsible for the next link in the chain. This is where we can help.
Michael Schlenke is Senior Advisor Investor Relations at IMMOTISS Group, a Frankfurt-based consultancy specialising in nursing, senior living and healthcare properties. The group advises operators, investors, developers and fund companies across Germany and draws on its proprietary care market database, Trasenix®. Contact: msch@immotiss.de · www.immotiss.de
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