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Happy Holidays to our Faithful Readers
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
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 »
And you thought the US housing market couldn’t get worse: reverse mortgages in default
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
If you did think that that US housing market couldn’t get any worse, think again.
Apparently a significant number of seniors who entered into reverse mortgage arrangements to provide an additional income stream are facing the possibility of foreclosure and could lose their homes. The problem is that reverse mortgage holders must pay property taxes and must maintain house insurance or they are considered to be in default. Nobody knows for sure how many people are in this situation but the industry estimates that there are 30,000 or so now and that that number is bound to rise. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which insures all reverse mortgages, is looking for ways to help homeowners in distress because it is “loath to foreclose on senior citizens”. I would think so. The Vice-President of the National Council on Aging said: “Nobody really wants to see situations where older homeowners end up on the street.” That too seems like a masterpiece of understatement. The President of the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association reported that the Association was making dramatic (my word not theirs) efforts to help their clients—sometimes helping them get food stamps for example. How’s that for heart-warming?
Tags: Housing and Urban Development, Housing Market, National Council on Aging, Reverse Mortgage, Seniors' Housing, US Housing Market
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CKNW Interview
Monday, June 27th, 2011
For all you non-Vancouverites following our blog, CKNW is the # 1 rated talk radio show in the region. I just did an interview with Jill Bennett, one of the hosts on the station. Before the interview started I was thinking about interesting ways to talk about the numbers—how our population is aging and what that really means. For example, the Vancouver metropolitan area is expected to grow by 1 million people between now and 2035. That’s a pretty interesting number in itself (where are they all going to live you might reasonably ask) but what is more interesting is that fully 40% of those 1 million people will be over the age of 65.
What does that really mean though? The fact is that there are lots of communities that already have much higher proportions of their population over the age of 65 than Vancouver will have in 2035 (22%). For example, Parksville-Qualicum at 33%, or Penticton at 24%. If you visit Penticton you do not get the sense that it is overrun with seniors. Parksville-Qualicum is a little different, partly because it is quite a lot smaller than Penticton. I know people who decided to retire in Nanaimo rather than Parksville-Qualicum because they got frustrated in grocery stores by slower-moving shoppers. Just imagine though what life would be like in Sun City Arizona, where 80% of the population is over the age of 65.
Tags: Aging, Aging population, Baby Boomers, British Columbia, demographics, Migration, Population, Seniors, Seniors' Housing
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State of the US Housing Market
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
The Joint Centre for Housing Studies at Harvard University (JCHS) just released its 2011 State of the Nation’s Housing report. These reports are a gold mine of information on the US housing market. The 2011 edition makes for very sobering reading thanks to the ongoing impact of the Great Recession.
Single family completions in 2010 sank to lows last seen in the middle of World War II. Note this refers to absolute numbers of completions, not population adjusted numbers. Total housing starts in 2010 were just 587,000. If we apply the usual “10% in Canada” rule, that would suggest fewer than 60,000 starts in Canada in 2010 if housing markets were in similar shape in the two countries. In fact there were 189,930, triple the US number on a population-adjusted basis. Over the last 30 years, the lowest level of housing starts on record in Canada occurred in 1995, when just over 110,000 housing units were started. I remember that event well—it seemed calamitous at the time. And it was, but it still reflected a healthier housing market than what the US is experiencing today. It’s no wonder senior housing providers continue to face occupancy challenges.
Among many other topics, the report addresses the impact of the baby boomers on the US housing market. The demand for smaller homes is forecast to increase significantly in view of research indicating that 58% of 65-74 households who move downsize. As explored in my book The Future of Seniors Housing: Planning, Building and Operating Successful Seniors Housing Projects research on this topic in Canada is somewhat inconclusive. A 2005 Statistics Canada survey found that 43% of movers over the age of 65 downsized, which means that a majority either upsized or moved to a new house that was the same size as the old house.
Tags: Baby Boomers, Housing Market, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Future, Housing Market, News, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Sleepless in Seattle because your mortgage is underwater
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
Because Seattle is so close to Vancouver (Canada), we pay a lot of attention to what goes on there. A recent article in the Vancouver Sun about negative equity in the state of Washington as well as other US cities was truly startling. In metro Seattle at the end of 2010, 34% of all houses with mortgages were worth less than the mortgages, up from 23% at the end of 2009. It has taken Seattle longer to feel the impact of the recession than in Las Vegas (where an astonishing 82% of houses are underwater) or Phoenix (70%).
Some people are a bit worried about the metro Vancouver market too, although I am not one of them. That is to say, I do not lie awake at night worrying about the market. However, that being said, I would not be a bit surprised in prices bumping along (with the odd case of price wars in special circumstances) for several years. People forget that the last half of the 1990s was a period of general stagnancy in house prices.
Tags: British Columbia, Housing Market, Mortgages, Seattle Housing
Posted in Housing Market, News | Comments Off
Integration or segregation of assisted living services in independent living communities
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
I have posted about this before and there is also a section on the subject in my book The Future of Seniors Housing: Planning, Building and Operating Successful Seniors Housing Projects (now available on our website and soon to be available on Amazon etc).
The thing is, I think I have changed my mind since the book was published (that would be last month). Aha you may think, she is already cleverly planning the second edition. That’s not true although I do think about another book from time to time. What has changed my mind is talking to many people in the industry in recent weeks about the provision of assisted living services in retirement communities. The Lumina Group is working with a new entrant to the industry and it is up to us to advise him about the right strategy—he has no preconceived notions and no established model he is unwilling to deviate from. Should he plan to deliver personal care services to his residents who need them wherever in the building they may live, or should he develop a separate wing for his assisted living customers?
The book comes down on the side of the segregationist model although when you think about it, the term “segregation” has so many negative connotations that its use should immediately raise red flags. But the support for the segregationist model reflects quite specific circumstances in which the assisted living residents are really very frail and receiving significant levels of personal care—hours per day, not minutes per day. In those situations, more independent residents may feel very uncomfortable living cheek by jowl with their much frailer neighbours and as Victor Regnier has pointed out, the feelings may well be mutual. (See my book for further information, or any of Victor Regnier’s of course).
But when daily hours of care are not so extreme, most industry people we have polled strongly support integration. I will go into more detail about why in later posts. In the meantime, I am working on the second edition of The Future of Seniors Housing.
Tags: Assisted Living, Housing Development, Marketing, Retirement, Seniors, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Future, Housing Market, Marketing, News, Seniors' Housing | 3 Comments »
December 13 2010
Monday, December 13th, 2010
The Future of Seniors Housing has arrived!
For all of you out there anxiously awaiting the availability of my book (and none more anxious than I), I am more than happy to announce that the printed copies have been delivered to Vancouver from the estimable Hignells Printing in Winnipeg and will be in our hands tomorrow.
We hope to have copies out before Christmas to those of you who have already bought them, either at the BCSLA conference in Victoria or at other venues. Our web store will soon be open for business as well.
That’s the good news. The bad news, for those who follow our blog, is that I won’t be posting till after the festive season unless something really momentous happens.
Happy Holidays, one and all!
Tags: BCSLA, Kate Mancer, Seniors, Seniors' Housing, The Future of Seniors Housing
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The Highest Return on Investment in Seniors’ Housing
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
According to a recent report from NIC (the National Investment Center for the Seniors Housing and Care Industry) overall occupancy in US seniors housing projects is about 88%, with no signs on the horizon of any significant improvement any time soon. The housing market is still very weak and interest rates on popular savings vehicles like Certificates of Deposit are very low, meaning seniors are not feeling remotely rosy about their financial prospects.
On the bright side, 33% of stabilized properties were at 95% occupancy or higher. What is it about these properties that makes the difference in occupancy levels? One thing for sure is the importance they place on trained and effective sales staff. NIC statistics show that an astonishing 85% of people in sales positions are not sales professionals. To quote NIC:
“They are not purposely selected, trained, compensated or managed as such. Professional selling is both science and art. An average property (location, pricing, etc.), with the right sales professionals can and should be at or above 95% occupancy today. But many owners are not willing to invest in or don’t understand what professional selling is and thus are under 88% occupancy today. Investing in sales professionals produces the highest return on investment under any capital budgeting analysis. Thus, if an owner has capital, there is no more productive use.”
That’s interesting isn’t it? Compelling even.
Tags: Housing Market, Market Study, Seniors' Housing
Posted in Market Studies, News, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off