By Steve Moran

I recently visited a senior living community that proudly displayed that they were voted best senior living community in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. Pretty impressive, except that when I visited them, it was 2023.

Unintentional Impressions

I was impressed with only one thing, and that was that in 2018, ’19, ’20, ’21, ’22 and maybe even ’23, the community was no longer considered one of the best. There could be lots of reasons for this:

  1. Maybe whoever was doing the judging stopped doing the judging after 2017.
  2. Maybe it got too expensive and they didn’t continue to participate in the program.
  3. Maybe they decided it simply meant nothing and quit doing it.
  4. Maybe in recent years COVID put the program on hold.

Except all I know is that they once were the best, and now they are not. What they have done is taken something that was once a positive and turned it into a serious negative.

It of course made me curious, so I went and looked at their consumer reviews on Google and Caring.com (a Foresight partner, but this is not sponsored), and they are in the 4 range, which is pretty good, except on one site, their most current review is more than a year old, and on the other it’s five years old.

The final place I looked was employee reviews at Glassdoor. They were not so great.

Fixing the Problem

I find myself wondering how many move-ins this community is losing each year because of these unforced errors. There are three simple fixes:

  1. Remove the “best of” messaging because it is dated. It only hurts; it cannot help.
  2. Take advantage of the “best of” by reframing it as “voted best senior living community four years in a row” or something similar.
  3. Get some updated reviews on both Google and Caring.com

The fourth fix is more complex. This community’s Glassdoor reviews suggest they have some operational challenges that need fixing.

Way too often, the key to fixing occupancy is a bunch of things that are both basic and simple.