It is not that often I get the chance to interview a resident or family member about how they made their buying decision. It is even rarer to get a chance to explore what makes a resident and family member say goodbye to a long relationship with one community and move into another.

By Steve Moran

It is not that often I get the chance to interview a resident or family member about how they made their buying decision. It is even rarer to get a chance to explore what makes a resident and family member say goodbye to a long relationship with one community and move into another.

I recently got the chance to interview Diane Holmes about why she and her mom made the decision to move 92-year-old Mom from independent living in one community to soon-to-open Avanti Senior Living at Vision Park in Shenandoah, Texas.

Important Facts

Mom and dad (who passed away several years ago), were displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Rather than moving to another home, they moved into her current independent living cottage, more than 10 years ago. While the old community also had assisted living available, she described it as old and depressing.  

The move from independent living to assisted living was precipitated by her mom’s increasing frailty. She uses a motorized scooter and had run off the sidewalk into the garden area in front of her house leaving her afraid to go out. This meant a loss of socialization except for family.

The Difference

The community she is moving into is not open yet, but should be any day (likely by the time this article is published). Because the community is not yet open, the Vision Park staff have worked extremely hard getting prospective residents together with staff and other residents who have committed to moving in. Her number one most import factor in the decision making process was how nice, caring, compassionate and passionate the staff members are.  

Home is a place where you can wear what you want to breakfast, lunch or dinner and a place where you can eat breakfast at 11 am in the morning. These were both important factors for Diane’s mom who likes to sleep in late and eat breakfast at 11. None of the other places they looked at were willing to serve breakfast that late.   

Finally, she very specifically described the apartments at the old community as being unappealing and the apartments at Vision Park as being inviting.   

Hard Lessons

Sometimes when I do interviews like this, it is the things that don’t get said that are as important as what does get said. Here are my big takeaways:

  • After more than 10 years at the old senior living community there seemed to be no sense of leaving old friends and breaking relationship bonds with either fellow residents or staff. It is a powerful truth that in the best communities team members develop genuine friendships with residents and their families.

  • It is hard to know, but I find myself wondering if the story would have been different if the old place had done more to modernize their physical plant. It is not enough to just keep things maintained.

  • Head and shoulders above anything else it was the relationships that sold the Avanti community and those relationship building skills come from ownership/management deliberately creating a culture that appeals to team members, families and residents.

  • The common areas are not nearly as important as we might think (Sorry Lori Alford). Towards the end of the interview I asked about the common areas and Diane told me they were great, but it was, at best, an afterthought. This is important because we see this common area feature creep in new communities that result in higher costs for everyone and likely have very little payoff in real life.

    I would note, though, that in this case the feel of the apartment unit itself was important.

We need to spend more time doing a critical analysis of what really motivates prospects and what is maybe not so important.