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Senior Housing Blog
Welcome to the Lumina Services Senior Housing and Health Care Blog. Our hope for the blog is that it provides a forum for discussion about the very wide range of topics we are interested in.
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Happy Holidays to our Faithful Readers
We have been letting our faithful readers down recently and I apologize for the scarcity of posts over the last few weeks. We will do better in the new year. A few topics lined up for comment include the future of Canada’s housing market based on some interesting data from the Conference Board; anti-anxiety medication (I hope I have piqued your interest with that one); seniors living in poverty (a bit of a rant coming up); geographic mobility of Canadian seniors, a subject in which I have an unhealthy interest; and more on the boomers, a subject that will never die until all of them do.
So stay tuned and in the meantime, have a peaceful and happy holiday season.
Tags: Seniors' Housing
Posted in News | No Comments »
90 is the new 80
In case you haven’t been keeping up, 90 is the new 80 or more precisely, 90 is the new 85. A recent report from the US Census Bureau (I know what you are thinking—why doesn’t she ever reference Canadian data in her posts? Because there isn’t any is the short answer to that question.) points out that among the seniors population as a whole, the 90+ group has been growing the most rapidly. When all of the baby boomers reach the age of 85 (in 2050), 2% of the US population will be 90+ which is pretty amazing if you stop to think about it. That is a lot of 90 year olds.
What are today’s 90 year olds like?
• Women outnumber men 3 to 1
• 6% of the women are married; 43% of the men (which is one of the big reasons that the vast majority of the residents of seniors housing communities are women—not only do they live longer, they are much more likely to be alone.)
• The likelihood of living in a nursing home rises from 20% between 90 and 94 to 31% between 95 and 99 to 38% for those over 100. These ratios are probably lower than what many people would expect. I usually quote a ratio of 35% of the population over the age of 85 living in nursing homes in Canada but either my estimate is wrong or there is a much higher incidence of institutionalization in Canada. We will try and check this out.
• Not surprisingly, people living in nursing homes have more disabilities than people living in the community although overall, the differences aren’t huge—98% of nursing home residents have disabilities (I don’t know why it isn’t 100%) compared to 81% of people living in the community. But there are major differences in a couple of categories—trouble remembering (73% versus 30%) and needing help with activities of daily living such as bathing and dressing (85% versus 35%).
Tags: Aging, Baby Boomers, long term care, nursing homes, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Future, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
US Market Improving (slowly)
I know I do go on about the US market, but I find it endlessly fascinating. Of course that’s partly because there is so much data on the US market. We have so little data in Canada that it is usually quite difficult to figure out what’s going on.
The chart below, courtesy of NIC, shows a steady improvement in occupancy levels in independent living (IL) and assisted living (AL) communities in the US since the seniors markets bottomed out in the first quarter of 2010. It’s interesting though, or maybe depressing is the better word, to think about how long and how deep the slide has been, really since the latter part of 2006. Not only that, over the same period of time the 75+ population in the US increased by over 800,000 people. To put that number in perspective, in Canada there are a total of just over two million people over the age of 75.
So while things are getting better, they are still a long way from good, thanks largely to the still extremely sluggish US housing market.
Tags: Aging, Housing Market, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Housing Market, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Construction activity down but prices at high end up
The National Real Estate Investor just reported that 14,942 units of private pay service-enriched and skilled nursing facility beds are under construction in the US. That’s up modestly year-over-year although well below pre-recession levels. But it’s way below the peak of 1998, when an astonishing 57,800 similar units were under construction. Of course a lot of those projects eventually went broke thanks to over-supply in many markets. I wonder what the Canadian situation is? Sadly, no one has any idea.
But prices for high end US projects have been climbing steadily since the recession. Reports from NIC and Real Capital Analytics indicate that in the first quarter of 2008, the top 25 percent of project prices was about $169,000 per unit. That number fell to about $101,000 a unit by the fourth quarter of 2009. Prices for the properties in the top quartile have increased since then to $170,141 per unit. That’s a big jump.
One of the transactions highlighted in the report is in Raleigh North Carolina. Prudential Real Estate Investors sold the project in 2004 for $29 million and just bought it back for $53 million from the same company they sold it to. Some improvements were made in the meantime (eg 14 cottages added) but it sounds on the surface like a very good deal for the interim owner.
Tags: Housing Development, Housing Market, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Housing Market, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Numbers: Canada vs. US Nursing Homes
A recent study published by Brown University (July 2011 edition of Health Affairs) shows that between 1999 and 2008 the nursing home population in the US shrank by just over 6% while at the same time the population over the age of 70 increased by just over 8%. The shift is attributed largely to the growth of alternatives such as assisted living.
Here’s another interesting thing to note—in Canada, there were 250,000 nursing home residents in 2008/2009. In the US in the same year there were 1.2 million. Using the standard 10 to 1 ratio suggests that there are twice as many people in Canada in nursing homes as there are in the US on a per capita basis. That is undoubtedly due in large part to the lack of Canadian alternatives, assisted living in particular. Assisted living in the US is almost entirely a private pay phenomenon and when it comes to care, no matter how light, Canadians do not like to pay for it. As a result, the private pay assisted living market in Canada is a very thin one.
On the surface, the impact of twice as many nursing home residents and very few assisted living residents would seem to result in much higher public expenditures in Canada for the elderly compared to the US, particularly in light of recent dramatic cuts to US Medicare and Medicaid budgets (11% reductions). And maybe that is as it should be, although it seems inevitable that Canadian public expenditures on the elderly are going to be spread much more thinly in the future than they are now.
Tags: Aging, American Health Care, Assisted Living, Canadian Health Care System, long term care, Medicaid, Medicare, nursing homes, Seniors, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Future, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
The 80/20 Rule as It Applies to Seniors Housing
I have always wanted to improve my time management skills—who doesn’t? So I bought a couple of books, The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch being one of them. The 80/20 Principle basically says that 80% of your outputs result from 20% of your inputs. The principle works in all kinds of ways, even in the criminal word. Apparently 80% of the crimes are committed by 20% of the criminals.
(In the US the 80/20 rule also refers to the Federal Fair Housing Act as it applies to communities that are designated for seniors—at least 80% of the units must be occupied by someone over the mandated age, 55 or 62 or whatever.)
So all this got me thinking about the world of service-enriched seniors’ housing and how the rule could be applied there. Here are some possibilities:
• 80% of resident satisfaction is attributable to 20% of operational efforts.
• 80% of food satisfaction is due to 20% of menu items.
• 80% of profits is due to 20% of effort.
• 80% of positive word-of-mouth marketing comes from 20% of residents.
• 80% of complaints come from 20% of residents.
• 80% of internal productivity advances are suggested by 20% of employees.
• 80% of new residents come from 20% of marketing efforts.
Operators who are able to figure out the 80/20 distribution in their communities are in a position to make a huge contribution to resident satisfaction as well as to the bottom line. After all, if the principle works in the world of crime, it must certainly work in the world of seniors’ housing.
Tags: Assisted Living, Retirement, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing
Posted in Marketing, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off

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