Posts Tagged ‘ALFA’

Americans Moving to Canada in Search of More Affordable Seniors’ Housing and Health Care?

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

I read a comment about this recently. The writer was hypothesizing that as costs for seniors’ housing and health care rise in the US, Americans might move to Canada or Mexico in search of more affordable alternatives.

In both cases (i.e. Canada and Mexico) the fly in the ointment for Americans actually contemplating such a move would be health care and immigration policies, but aside from that, are costs really cheaper in Canada? My first reaction was scepticism but upon re-reading a few brochures I picked up at the recent ALFA conference in Phoenix, I thought: “well, maybe it IS cheaper in Canada, at least for some types of housing and health care”.

For example, at the Forum at Desert Harbor, the daily rate for a private room in the long term care component of the campus is $280, which is to say just over $100,000 per year. There aren’t many private pay long term care facilities in Canada that are charging $280 per day.

But at the same time, the rate at the Forum for a two bedroom 922 square foot independent living apartment is only $2,868 per month (the meal package includes breakfast and one other meal). The Forum is an upscale project with lots of amenities including a lakefront location, a pool, and a grapefruit tree, to say nothing of that desert climate.

Americans would have a tough time finding a similar value in Canada. The trick at the Forum is obviously to stay out of long term care!

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What you could do if you had 808 units

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

I toured Friendship Village in Tempe, AZ while attending the recent ALFA conference in Phoenix. It’s spread over 43 acres and has 575 independent living units (bungalows and apartments), 91 assisted living units, and 142 care beds. There’s a pool, a fully equipped fitness facility (very busy when we popped in at 10:30am), an auditorium, a library, woodworking shops, a billiards room, a 9,000 square foot recreation centre featuring rooms for dancing, weaving, ceramics, video editing, and stained glass, and three dining areas: a cafe that is open all day and looks exactly like a real cafe, a large buffet that’s likewise open all day, and a formal dining room that is open on a reservation basis at dinner time.

The first time I saw a buffet in operation at a new upscale project in Red Deer I was taken aback because of what I assumed would be the difficulty of dealing with a buffet if you had a walker or were just generally unsteady on your feet. But people at Friendship Village seemed to manage just fine – they put their food on the seat of the walker, or staff there was around to help. And it’s worth noting that at breakfast or lunch it’s the buffet or the café and that’s it – no table service is available, which is interesting in itself. Do people stay independent longer if you force them to retrieve their own breakfast and lunch from a buffet?

Aside from the array of amenities you can offer if you have 808 units, the other advantage is that there are people everywhere – in the cafe, in the buffet, in the pool, in the fitness centre. It’s lively! It’s hard to achieve the same ambience if you’ve only got 100 units or so and it’s impossible to offer the same array of amenities. But that doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to sepulchral silence and meals in the dining room at precisely 11:30 and 4:30. Au contraire – stay tuned for ideas.

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Fine Dining in Long Term Care: A Contradiction in Terms?

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Not in Phoenix! Or indeed all over the USA where fine dining in long term care is a definite trend. I toured a state-of-the-art not-for-profit skilled nursing facility in nearby Tempe AZ on Monday. I was profoundly impressed. The goal of the owner of the facility, Friendship Village, was to retain the ambience of a residential environment and avoid any feel of the institutional. Without question they achieved the goal. The hallways are gorgeous—no other word will do although it seems odd to describe a hallway as gorgeous. Unlike every other hallway I have seen in a care facility, they undulate. They are also carpeted, painted in beautiful colors, and highlighted with artwork and furniture at appropriate intervals.  Doorways are recessed. The contrast with many independent living communities I am familiar with could not be starker.

The dining rooms blew me away too— linen tablecloths and napkins! And menu choices! And open eating hours! I don’t like to overdo the exclamation marks but the facility was really unlike anything I have ever seen.

“Ah but what does all this cost?” you are no doubt thinking. Friendship Village is a life care community—residents buy in at the independent living stage and whatever care they need beyond that stage is provided at the same monthly cost. For example, a one bedroom unit may cost $160,000 (assuming no return of capital) plus monthly fees of $2,300 (meals, housekeeping, laundry etc). If someone buying in at this level were ever to require skilled nursing care, they would continue to pay the same monthly fee they paid in independent living (adjusted for inflationary increases).

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Kitchens in Independent Living Communities

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

I am in Phoenix at the ALFA conference. It takes a long time to get to Phoenix from Vancouver in spite of the fact that the two cities are in the same time zone (in the summer—Phoenix operates on standard time all year long). I spent part of the travel time reading Jim Moore’s latest book, Independent Living and CCRCs.  Chapter 11 discusses high impact design features for independent living communities. Number one on the list is full-function kitchens, even in places serving three meals per day.

Yesterday I toured three life care communities in the area and I will be posting more about these three over the next few weeks, along with highlights from the conference itself. All three had full-function kitchens in their independent living units. My tour guides were shocked when I told them that full-function kitchens in Canadian independent living communities were rare. One of the three is upgrading its units—it is 20 years old—and the new fridges are the two door type with ice and water dispensers on one of the doors. The contrast with Danby bar fridges could hardly be starker. The upgraded stoves are full size with burners that are flush with the surface.

American operators include full-function kitchens more for the impression they create than for their actual utility. Consumers associate the lack of full kitchens with nursing homes and they don’t want to go there!

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Good Market Studies for Seniors’ Housing Projects can Save you Millions of Dollars; Bad ones can Cost you Millions of Dollars

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Since one of Lumina’s business lines is market studies, it may sound self-serving for me to say that it is false economy of the worst kind to launch a real estate development project of any kind without doing a market study first. But very often, developers have great difficulty grasping the fundamental truth of this observation, partly because of personality. Lack of confidence is not a trait shared by many developers but it is easy to tip over the line from confidence to hubris. Even granting a solid understanding of a market on the part of a developer, a third party study is invaluable in terms of reducing risk and maximizing profitability. Lenders know this, which is why they are usually more likely to require a market study than a developer.

To make the matter more complicated, there are numerous ways for market studies to go off the rails, many of them not especially obvious to casual or uninformed observers, OR, it must be said, to unethical market analysts who write “market studies to order”.  Firms like this certainly exist and in most cases, knowledgeable industry participants know exactly who these companies are.

In future posts (interrupted by posts from Phoenix, where I am headed to the ALFA conference on Sunday) I will address some of the ways market studies can go off the rails and what you should watch for. This is assuming of course, that you are interested in a market study that tells you the truth.

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US Seniors’ Housing Conferences

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

I am heading off to Phoenix a week Sunday for the annual Assisted Living Federation of America (ALFA) conference. The last ALFA conference I went to was in San Diego in 2006. Since then I attended National Association of Homebuilder 55+ Housing Council conferences in Denver (2007) and New Orleans (2008). The NAHB conferences were focused exclusively on active adult housing for years but both Denver and New Orleans added a service-enriched stream. That was dropped in 2009.  The whole conference was dropped in 2010, presumably because things are so bad in the US seniors’ housing industry, at least from the perspective of the NAHB. So it’s back to ALFA.

I will be posting regularly from the conference itself. In addition I am touring three projects and will post about those as well.

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