President of the National Investment Center for the Seniors Housing & Care Industry, a non-profit education and resources centre. Based in Annapolis, Maryland, NIC provides research as well as business and financial performance data.
What recent development will have the greatest impact on aging and the retirement residence sector over the next five years?
Longer term, it’s the whole area of brain fitness. The research there has the potential to have a huge impact on the seniors’ housing and care industry. Perhaps the boomers’ greatest fear will be dementia. They’ve seen it in their parents. Any research that offers ways to help prevent or delay it will be a huge motivator to folks moving into retirement residences.
Shorter term, for the U.S. senior housing sector, the greatest development is simply having data. It had been a total unknown. Now the U.S. sector has performance data, occupancy, revenue, supply, growth data.
That’s going to attract new sources of investment capital and will also lower the cost of capital. Data will help with the two great challenges facing our industry: capital and talent.
How is our concept of senior wellness changing?
We’ve started to think in terms of prevention and wellness rather than in terms of gradual decay. Now with the first wave of boomers in their 60s, we focus on what we can do to maximize physical and mental health. This brings a change of mindset. Aging is not an inexorable process of waiting for decay; there are lots of things I can do so I can live long and die short.
But for society at large there is still a long way to go. There is still latent ageism, still devaluing of seniors. Questions arise about what I’d call the “young old,” 65- to 80-year- olds, in the workforce. Some people may retire but we need them not to retire. We need them to transition, to stay engaged. But I don’t think society is there yet.
Care for seniors is going to be a huge growth industry. But go to universities and you’ll find very little excitement about working in that field. We have a painfully short supply of doctors coming out of medical school with training in the field of geriatrics.
What are we learning about boomer retirement plans or hopes as they age?
Boomers won’t retire; they’ll transition. They won’t be called seniors; some marketing firm will probably make a mint coming up with a name they will be comfortable being called. And they won’t move into retirement homes. They’ll move into something called self-actualizing or self-fulfilment centres. “Senior” and “retirement” won’t be part of their vocabulary.
Senior housing product offering is much more diverse today than just 10 years ago. I’d argue in 20 years we’ll see exploding diversity and choice. That’s partly because it’s what boomers have always demanded. There won’t be one size fits all.
What seniors’ housing industry direction gives you the most concern these days? What makes you the most optimistic about the future?
We need to be recruiting and incentivizing the best and the brightest right now. But for the most part, our industry is not on their radar. We’ve got to figure out how to identify, recruit and retain the talented folks we need.
The retirement community industry itself has to work at defining quality of life, quality of care. We need to demonstrate our value as compared to living at home, to document the value of living in a retirement community. Someone other than us has to provide that documentation: the university community, researchers.
Optimism? There are some great people in this industry and they are here for the right reasons. Many got into this while researching for their own parents, to provide something better.
Your advice for retirement residence executives as they plan for the next five years?
If you focus on front-line staff and making residents happy and satisfied, then your bottom line will follow from that. But if you’re not investing in staff and making sure your customer satisfaction is off the charts, then your bottom line will not be sustainable.
About Muriel Duncan
