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Lowering the Average Age of Entry into Supportive Housing (Reprise)

Posted by kmancer on April 29th, 2010

If I start getting boring on this subject please let me know! I had lunch with my 85 year old mystery shopper, Edna, today. Edna is well-suited to mystery shopping—she worked on the Enigma project in London during the Second World War. In an interesting twist, so did her father but because of the enormous secrecy shrouding the Enigma project, neither one of them knew about the other’s work until years later.

Edna lives independently and is in great health, although she had a scare a few months ago. Often we in the industry like to say that a scare is just the thing to drive people into the arms of the supportive housing industry, but not Edna! She’s got a pacemaker now and feels better than she has in years.

I asked her if she would consider moving into a project like the one we were touring if she had buckets of money but she said no. She said she was not interested in giving up anything she has now to move to “God’s waiting room”. By the way Edna highly recommends a British TV show of the same name.

That’s the problem in a nutshell—people don’t think of retirement housing as a wonderful carefree way to spend their golden years; they think of it as the last stop before death.

Can we change this view, even a little? Here’s Edna’s suggestion for an appealing tag line: “Have the freedom to do whatever you like. Join us for an endless series of adventures.” That sounds good doesn’t it?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Future, Marketing, Senior Housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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