Posts Tagged ‘Supportive housing’
Friday, August 5th, 2011
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
Friday, March 11th, 2011
I have been having a dialogue with one of our clients about capture rates, sometimes called saturation rates, sometimes called penetration rates. They are calculated as the number of units of private pay service-enriched housing (supportive housing and assisted living) in a market area compared to the population over the age of 75. Years ago when CMHC first started publishing its Seniors Housing Reports (it’s hard to believe but we have them going back to 1999), I used to think about the capture rates they published as less than illuminating. I used to think: “well what if the number of seniors housing units in a market area is entirely sub-optimal?”
Back then that question made some sense. Does it still make sense?
Yes and no. We often use a saturation rate of 5% to indicate a more or less healthy market and usually that works pretty well. But there are communities that can absorb higher numbers of units without creating excessive vacancies. Kelowna for example, with a saturation rate approaching 10%. The rate in Kamloops on the other hand is a shade under 5%. Both those markets appear to be in reasonable shape.
But sadly, one of the key ingredients in this equation is the health of local markets and that is a very very hard thing to be sure about. We recently did some work in Nanaimo for example and almost every single operator reported an occupancy level of 85%. Is that just a wild coincidence?
The saturation rate in Nanaimo by the way varies from 11% if you consider the total number of units to 9% if you consider the number of occupied units. And of course that is exactly what you should be considering, if you could find out what that number is of course. I am guessing an overall occupancy level of 80%.
So Nanaimo’s saturation rate is high but Nanaimo is one of those communities that is appealing to seniors. Although the population of Nanaimo and Kamloops is almost identical, the 75+ group accounts for 8.6% of the population in Nanaimo compared to 6.4% in Kamloops.
Tags: Assisted Living, CMHC, Housing Market, Seniors, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing
Posted in Housing Market, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011
Insights and Innovation: The State of Seniors Housing analyzes data from the 92 projects submitted to the Design for Aging Review (DFAR) in 2010. The report is a collaboration between the American Institute of Architects and Perkins Eastman Architects.
One of the insights of the report is that the traditional distinction between independent living and assisted living is becoming increasingly blurred “as a greater number of communities offer independent living plus services” as opposed to independent living as well as assisted living. For example, one of the winners was Sun City Palace Tsukaguchi in Osaka, a 760 unit CCRC that offers independent living with services as well as a skilled nursing facility, but no assisted living component. The continuum at this community is provided through increasingly supportive in-home care, rather than through transition to a designated assisted living environment. Another winner was the Villa at San Luis Rey, which has licensed all its units as assisted living but markets them as independent living with services. Blurry indeed!
The report explores many other fascinating issues and is available on-line at www.aia.org.
Tags: Aging, Aging in place, Assisted Living, Independent Living, Retirement, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing
Posted in Future, Housing Market, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Monday, July 26th, 2010
I have posted a couple of times about my forthcoming book currently titled The Future of Seniors Housing: Planning, Building, and Operating Successful Seniors Housing Projects. The original goal was to publish mid-year but now it’s looking more like fall. However great progress has been made over the last few months and I am feeling much less anxious than I have for a long time. There are now seven chapters in the book plus the introduction.
I have said many times that the book has practically killed me and that if I had known yada yada yada. I don’t know if that is entirely true though. I might have written it even if I had fully realized how much work it would be. Because, as all of you who read this blog know, seniors housing is an endlessly fascinating field. It is such a cliché to describe things as labours of love, but that’s how things get to be clichés in the first place—because they are true!
So, coming soon!
Tags: Aging, Housing Development, Housing Market, Retirement, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing
Posted in News, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
Conventional wisdom suggests that for supportive seniors’ housing projects (meals, housekeeping, laundry etc), walking-distance proximity to stores and services is, if not essential, then at the very least extremely important. But without sitting down and doing the math, I would say that a minority of supportive seniors’ housing projects in BC are located close enough to stores and services so that people could easily walk to them. Some are in locations that are downright pastoral. Of course walking isn’t necessary for all people—many have scooters that enlarge their geographic boundaries. Scooters though are used by a small minority of seniors, meaning that walking distance is more important than scooter distance.
As well, many seniors’ housing projects have their own buses to take people around to shopping and doctors’ appointments, many have small tuck shops that sell various items, and in any case, most meals are provided on site. So why do people need to walk anywhere? I firmly believe that the answer to that question is this: even if people don’t have to walk anywhere, the fact that they could if they wanted to is an important psychological benefit. And for those people who actually do walk to the store or the bank, it’s more than just a psychological benefit—it’s a physical benefit as well.
Proximity to green space seems to be less important than proximity to stores and services. It’s always nice to have a park to walk through but half the time the weather may preclude the walk. But proximity to schools and other places where children play is almost always considered a decided advantage because it gives people something highly enjoyable to watch. Proximity to seniors’ centres is hugely advantageous, not just because it allows residents to participate in outside events and activities, but because it facilitates two-way interaction. It’s easy to invite people living in the community and using the seniors’ centre to come for meals and events at the housing project, which is one of the very best ways of keeping buildings full. Easy access to public transportation falls into the “it goes without saying” category, whether or not people living in supportive housing projects ever actually take a city bus. Visitors might though and staff almost certainly will.
Of course finding sites that are close to stores, services, schools, public transit, and seniors’ centres is much easier said than done. When “affordably priced” is added to the list, finding a suitable site begins to verge on the miraculous, especially in centres where land is expensive.
Tags: Aging, Aging in place, Assisted Living, Developers, Housing Development, Housing Market, Housing Options, Independent Living, Mobility, Retirement, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing
Posted in Seniors' Housing | Comments Off
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
Understanding disability rates and how they affect housing market behavior, in particular moves to supportive housing or assisted living, is a very difficult thing to do. Statistics Canada tells us that 43% of the 65+ population in Canada have some degree of disability, primarily mobility, agility, pain, or hearing. Of those with disabilities, 60% are mildly or moderately disabled, while 40% have severe or very severe disabilities. What “mild”, “moderate”, and “severe” mean is not easy to define. Statistics Canada uses a complicated rating system to categorize disabilities. At any rate, the question is how these disability rates affect housing market behavior.
To establish a context for his discussion, it’s useful to reflect on the fact that the huge majority of houses in Canada are neither “visitable” nor “accessible”, meaning they do not accommodate aging in place. So does this mean that when people become disabled in some way will they move to supportive housing? Maybe not all people, or even a majority of people, but some quantifiable proportion? Alas, no. We know that entrance into service-enriched housing such as supportive housing or assisted living is primarily need-driven, which means that people move into these types of environments not because they want to but because they have to. However that does not necessarily imply the presence of a disability—people may move because their spouse died and they are afraid to stay alone, or because they are isolated, or not eating properly, or because they have lost their driver’s license. And couples with disabilities are much less likely to move to supportive housing than individuals because they are able to help each other. If there were some way to quantify demand based on disability status we would have to adjust for the number of couples in a market area, which would further complicate an already suspect analysis.
As a result of all these confounding variables, in my view it is not possible to arrive at any conclusions at all about the demand for service-enriched housing in a community by applying national disability rates to the seniors’ population and assuming that some arbitrary proportion of that group will choose to move to service-enriched housing. Some market analysts do this I am sad to report. Be careful if you are working with one.
Tags: Aging, Aging in place, Assisted Living, Disability, Housing Market, Housing Options, Mobility, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing, Universal design
Posted in Market Studies, Seniors' Housing | 1 Comment »
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
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
If I start getting boring on this subject please let me know! I had lunch with my 85 year old mystery shopper, Edna, today. Edna is well-suited to mystery shopping—she worked on the Enigma project in London during the Second World War. In an interesting twist, so did her father but because of the enormous secrecy shrouding the Enigma project, neither one of them knew about the other’s work until years later.
Edna lives independently and is in great health, although she had a scare a few months ago. Often we in the industry like to say that a scare is just the thing to drive people into the arms of the supportive housing industry, but not Edna! She’s got a pacemaker now and feels better than she has in years.
I asked her if she would consider moving into a project like the one we were touring if she had buckets of money but she said no. She said she was not interested in giving up anything she has now to move to “God’s waiting room”. By the way Edna highly recommends a British TV show of the same name.
That’s the problem in a nutshell—people don’t think of retirement housing as a wonderful carefree way to spend their golden years; they think of it as the last stop before death.
Can we change this view, even a little? Here’s Edna’s suggestion for an appealing tag line: “Have the freedom to do whatever you like. Join us for an endless series of adventures.” That sounds good doesn’t it?
Tags: Age of entry, Aging, Assisted Living, Housing Development, Housing Options, Retirement, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing
Posted in Future, Marketing, Senior Housing | Comments Off
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