Archive for June, 2010
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
As we have often commented in this blog, the US is light years away from Canada in terms of the quantity and quality of available research on the seniors’ housing and health care industry. The mission of the wonderful National Investment Center (NIC) is: “To advance the quality of seniors housing and care by facilitating informed investment decisions through best-in-class data, research, networking events and professional education” and they do a great job of that.
One of the many useful things they do is track occupancy data by quarter for five categories of housing and health care—freestanding IL, combined IL, freestanding AL, combined AL, and CCRC. (Remember that AL in the US is almost exclusively private pay).
A recent NIC Newsflash points out that occupancy rates for all five categories have declined more or less continuously since the first quarter of 2007, when they reached a cyclical peak of 92.3% (on average). First quarter 2010 data indicates an average occupancy rate of 88.0%.
Assisted living performed best over the period (decline of 2.7%) and freestanding IL the worst (decline of 6.2%). CCRCs ended up in the middle with a decline of 4.1%.
This is not remotely surprising. The US housing market has been hammered over the last few years. People more able to postpone a move into service-enriched housing (i.e. potential IL residents) have done exactly that.
Tags: Aging, Aging in place, Assisted Living, Housing Market, Housing Options, Independent Living, Occupancy Rates, Retirement, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing, snow birds, Supportive housing
Posted in Future, News, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Monday, June 21st, 2010
Many people (myself included) share the view that disability rates among the seniors’ population have been declining. For example, here’s a headline from a National Association of Aging document dated May, 2001: Dramatic Decline in Disability Continues for Older Americans. And what’s the evidence? Between 1994 and 1999, the percentage of Americans over the age of 65 with disabilities declined by 2.6% per year.
In answer to the obvious question: “why”?, the article suggests several possible reasons—improvements in maternal health early in the 20th Century; better control of infectious childhood diseases; behavioural changes such as declines in the incidence of smoking; better management of diseases such as hypertension; better drugs; and even increases in education levels.
But a recent article in Public Policy and Aging Report suggests that declines in disability rates are due not to medical science, but to “disability-friendly” environmental changes including curb cuts, disabled access ramps and elevators, and transportation services. Improvements in assistive devices (walkers, wheelchairs, scooters) have also enabled people with mobility impairments to get around better on their own.
The Public Policy and Aging Report article is focused mostly on physical impairments that impede a person’s ability to interact with the built and social environment but it also refers briefly to the positive impact of higher education levels on rates of cognitive impairment.
It is interesting to think about this. Disability is not defined as an impairment per se, but as a “social construct insofar as it reflects the ease or difficulty that individuals with physical impairments experience interacting with the built and social environment.”
Tags: Aging, Aging in place, Disability, Mobility, Seniors, Universal design
Posted in Future, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
This week I am working in Stony Plain, a community of about 12,000 people 20 minutes west of the West Edmonton Mall, as these things are always described in the Edmonton area. It’s not where you are relative to downtown Edmonton, it’s where you are relative to the West Edmonton Mall.
On my way here I stopped off in Devon, a town of about 6,000 people midway between Stony Plain and the Edmonton International Airport. There are only 275 people over the age of 75 in Devon and yet there is a 61 unit supportive senior’s housing project (Discovery Place, The Heights) that has only one vacant unit. It is situations like this that keep market analysts humble.
But getting back to the topic of this blog, the current issue of the Edmonton Condo Guide includes a handy chart comparing year-to-date statistics for the four year period between April 2006 and April 2010. In terms of the sales-to-listing ratio, the trough over that period was in 2008, when the ratio was 37% compared to an astonishing 91% in 2006. Things have improved since 2008, but in the first four months of 2010 there were 12,365 listings on the Edmonton MLS compared to 5,645 sales. That’s a long way from the heady days of 2006—7,779 listings; 7,100 sales.
You can see the evidence of the hangover everywhere in Stony Plain. “Immediately available condos”, “condo units for rent”, “move in now”—signs like this are common. It’s nothing like Phoenix, but it is a bit unsettling all the same.
Tags: Advertsising, Age of entry, Aging, Alberta, Developers, Housing Options, Independent Living, Retirement, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Marketing, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
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