Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
The most recent edition of Assisted Living Executive includes a chart illustrating AL occupancy levels over the period from the fourth quarter of 2005 to the third quarter of 2010. Occupancy levels fluctuated in a very narrow band between 90 and 91% from 2005 to 2007. Then the recession started to bite and occupancy levels fell to a low of 87.6% by the first quarter of 2010. They recovered somewhat to 88.7% in the third quarter of 2010.
Well you might say 88.7 to 91% is only 2.3 percentage points and that is true. But in view of the fact that there are more than 1,000,000 Americans living in assisted living units (estimate from ALFA) 2.3 percentage points means about 23,000 more vacant units in 2010 than there were in 2005.
While I was searching for that 1,000,000 number (it’s not actually units, it’s number of AL residents but I made the assumption that they are all living in individual units), I found another number on the ALFA website—86.2%. That’s the number of AL residents who pay privately for their accommodation and care. We always consider the US AL industry to be primarily private-pay so that was no surprise. But it got me thinking about AL in Canada. We have absolutely no idea how many assisted living units there are in Canada but there probably aren’t anywhere near 100,000 (using the old 10 to 1 ratio). In BC, the only province that regulates assisted living, the Office of the Assisted Living Registrar has registered over 6,700 units, 45% of them private pay. That does not mean that 6,700 people are actually receiving assisted living services because many operators register units in advance of providing services. Furthermore, no other province has provided subsidies for assisted living on the scale that BC has through the Independent Living BC program.
It seems fair to assume that BC probably has many more AL units per person over the age of 80 than any other province. If we remove the ILBC units and make an adjustment for registered units not actually providing AL services, perhaps there are 2,000 private pay AL units in BC, which has 14% of the 80+ population in Canada. Does this suggest a grand total of 14,000 AL units in Canada? When we might expect 100,000 based on US experience? Food for thought.
And for those wonderful blog readers who would like to listen to this as a pod cast please click the following link:
US AL occupancy slowly improving and other thoughts on assisted living
Tags: Assisted Living, Housing Options, ILBC, Occupancy Rates, Seniors' Housing
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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
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