Three siblings.
One decision.
No shared set of facts.
Ryman’s promise is that it is all taken care of. For the resident, largely it is. For the three adult children in a group chat across two time zones, almost none of it is — and the part that is hardest is not the village. It is each other.
This is a concept for the family’s side: the answers they cannot find, and the disagreement no brochure has ever tried to help with.
An independent concept. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or commissioned by Ryman Healthcare. Every Ryman fact on this page is published by Ryman or on a public register, and cited. The family is invented.
“I’m the one doing this. I’ve seen the stairs. It has to be soon and it has to be near me.”
“Nobody has shown me what it actually costs over ten years. What comes back? I’m not signing something I can’t model.”
“I find out on Sunday what was decided on Thursday. I’m not against it. I’m just never in the room.”
Watch a lounge being read.
The same reader the family uses below, on a real lounge — every piece found, sized roughly, and set against the villa’s 6.0 × 5.4 m room. A photo is a starting point for a tape measure, held for a person.
One guidance figure, once: a wheelchair turning circle is 1.5 m (NZS 4121). Everything else here is observation from the photo — never care advice. For her real lounge, the multi-photo upload below does the full read.
the 42-page answer, read for them · while they wait · a person signs the reply
The answers are already published.
In a document no family has ever opened.
Every New Zealand retirement village files a statutory disclosure statement on the Companies Office Retirement Villages Register. It is long, it is a PDF, and it contains the exact answers families spend months failing to get. Nothing here needs inventing — it needs reading.
The Act’s own prescribed wording says it is common for misunderstandings to arise “by residents and their families” about the legal interest, the exit, the fees for entering and moving and leaving, and the ongoing fees. The regulator has already written this brief.
7. Fees payable while you occupy the unit
7.1 The Weekly Fee is payable from the Commencement Date and continues until the date you permanently vacate the unit…
7.2 The Weekly Fee will increase annually on 1 July each year. The annual increase will be the same as the percentage increase in the after-tax New Zealand Superannuation Rate, based on the percentage increase for the previous 12-month period, 1 April to 31 March, and will be advised to you before 1 June each year…
8. Deferred management fee
8.1 The Deferred Management Fee accrues from the Commencement Date at the rate set out in the table below and is deducted from the Entry Payment on termination…
8.2 For the avoidance of doubt, the Deferred Management Fee is calculated on the Entry Payment and not on any capital gain…
“Just tell me what it costs.”
The wait itself · running on this page
Nobody chooses a village in one sitting.
They wait, between every step.
The waiting is where the family is most alone and most anxious — and it is the only stretch of this decision where you have their whole attention. Right now it holds a brochure request and a callback promise. Press the phone and watch what could go there instead. It stops once to ask one real question, then tells you what that answer changed.
Illustrative concept screen. Not a Ryman product, no real resident or family data, and nothing is sent, booked or signed without a named person approving it.
It counts minutes of reading the family no longer has to do — not progress through your funnel. There are no points and no scratch card anywhere on this page. You do not gamify a family deciding about their mother, and a family can tell instantly when someone has tried.
One specialist at a time, each saying what it is reading and where that came from. When the honest answer is that Ryman has not published something — the accrual period for a fee it does not yet have the answer to, for instance — the screen says exactly that instead of producing a plausible number.
Fee mechanics: Ryman’s own published pages. Accrual period: not published anywhere.It stops and waits. A question you can scroll past is not a question. Answer it and the screen says what it learned; decline and the pack still gets drafted. This is the only part of a customer journey that sends something back the other way — and in this sector what comes back is the thing no brochure can capture: what this family actually needs.
The one decision aid ever trialled for this exact decision cut a carer’s own decisional conflict by 11.96 points. Its authors reported that disagreements between family members were often left unresolved even so. Clarity for one person is not agreement between three. That is the gap, and it is still open.
DECIDE — Lord, Livingston & Cooper, BJPsych Open 2017 (PMID 28243460), n=41 feasibility RCT, −11.96 points, 95% CI −20.10 to −3.83, p=0.005.Same page.
The one decision aid ever trialled for this exact decision reduced a carer’s own decisional conflict significantly — and its authors reported that disagreements between family members were often left unresolved. Each person got clearer. The family still did not agree.
So this does the one thing that helps: it separates the arguments more information can settle from the arguments it never will. Fill it in as three people. It takes a minute.
These are facts. Someone is simply wrong.
And the answer to every one of them is published. Nobody has to win an argument.
These are values. Nobody is wrong.
More data will not move these, and treating them as factual disputes is what turns a decision into a rift. They need saying out loud, not solving.
The fact-versus-values split is Ottawa’s, from the Ottawa Personal Decision Guide for Two (Stacey, Lewis & O’Connor, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute & University of Ottawa) — “if you disagree on facts, get more information; if you disagree on what matters most, consider the other person’s views.” Their guide is free to use on condition it is cited and not altered, so this cites it and works alongside it rather than adapting it. What is added here: more than two people, a decision-specific question set, and the synthesis done for you instead of left in two columns of a PDF.
The villa, in metres
Will her dining table fit? Nobody in this category answers that.
One villa, authored from a floorplan as walls and slabs rather than drawn as a picture. The living room is lit and it measures 6.0 by 5.4 metres. That number is the question every family asks on the second visit and gets an eyebrow in response. Drag the plan around.
A two-seater and a three-seater, her sideboard, and turning room for a walker beside the chair. Villages publish floorplans as PDFs and let families guess. A measurable model answers it in one line, and the answer belongs in the information pack.
Where this geometry came from. 7 walls and the floor plates were authored in the Pascal Editor’s own schemas and measured in metres, not sketched. Pascal is MIT-licensed and open source. The same pipeline reads a real IFC file exported from Revit or ArchiCAD, which is what makes this a working method rather than an illustration.
Will Mum have to leave her things behind?
Show us her living room, and we’ll tell you what fits.
This is the question no floorplan answers: will her sofa, her chair and the sideboard she has had for forty years fit the new room? Upload a photo or two of her living room as it is now. An agent reads the furniture and measures it against the villa’s 6.0 × 5.4 m room above. It is a starting point for a tape measure, held for a person — nothing is sent.
What this must never do.
This is a family deciding where their mother will live, sometimes in a week when she has just had a fall. The boundary is written before the feature, and the sales team does not get to move it.
It always
- Cites the document and the clause behind every number
- Says “this is not published” when it is not published, and offers a person
- Asks which agreement a resident is on before quoting any fee
- Works with no contact details, no account and no lead captured
- Lets a family read everything and leave without hearing from anyone
- Holds anything reaching a family for a named person at Ryman
It never
- Creates urgency — no countdowns, no “two villas left”, no scarcity of any kind
- Books a tour, takes a deposit, or moves anyone toward a signature
- Uses the words of a fall, a diagnosis or a bereavement to prompt a next step
- Touches a care record, a clinical note or anything myRyman holds
- Gives financial or legal advice, or substitutes for the independent lawyer the Act requires
- Takes a side between siblings, or scores one family member against another
The Retirement Villages Act amendment package (announced 4 December 2025) mandates capital repayment within 12 months of vacating, interest accruing from month 6, weekly fees stopping immediately, and plain-language ORAs.
The journey timestamps every stage from vacate to repayment. The family sees the clock; the operator proves compliance with it — the same trace serves both.
From the day a resident vacates: weekly fees stop immediately · interest accrues to the resident from month 6 · capital repaid by month 12.
The family sees this clock; the operator proves compliance with it. Announced policy (4 December 2025, per MinterEllison’s summary) — not yet law; introduction imminent. Nothing here is legal advice.
simulated journey · illustrative concept · the numbers above are the pilot’s to earn, not ours to claim
What a pilot actually asks of you.
Most of it is your time rather than your money, and none of it touches care.
The approver — most likely in customer or resident experience. Every draft stops with them and nothing reaches a family until they say so. About two hours a week, reading drafts.
Six weeks on the family’s side of a single village: the guides moment through to the first fortnight after a move. Not the group, and nothing to do with care.
Your published guides and the disclosure statements that are already public. No resident data, no care records, no myRyman, nothing that writes. There is no integration in the pilot at all.
What an adviser may and may not say, and which cohort question comes first. Every rule on this page is a placeholder standing in for yours.
Scored on: answers a family got without waiting for a callback, drafts an adviser sent without rewriting, and whether a family said they felt less alone. Fail any line and we change the design or stop.
Agreed before any work starts, and it does not move. No figure is published here because it depends on the scope you pick.
Run the pilot.
Say yes to the six weeks above and add anything you would change first. Most pilots move a line or two before they start.
Opens your mail app to assembl@assembl.co.nz with your notes in it. Nothing is collected by this page.
- Six weeks, one village, the family’s side only
- Published documents — no resident or care data at all
- A named approver — nothing reaches a family without them
- A fixed fee, agreed in writing before anything starts
- Stop any time. You keep what was drafted