SAN DIEGO — As the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care seeks to expand its Actual Rates Initiative to cover 10 metro areas this year, a challenge continues to be incorporating data from a high percentage of any given market, President and CEO Brian Jurutka said Wednesday at NIC’s Spring Conference.
Markets can be “incredibly fragmented,” and “mom and pop” operators often don’t use the larger software platforms of NIC’s certified software partners, he said.
The initiative, a board priority for approximately three years now, the CEO explained, goes beyond collecting the market rates being offered to senior living residents to collect the dollar amounts being paid by residents on an ongoing basis, including base rent and care fees.
Actual rates now are available for three markets: Atlanta, Phoenix and Philadelphia.
“That’s important, because while national trends can give you some insights, at the end of the day, it’s a local business, and the more local you can get that information, the more actionable it becomes,” Jurutka said.
For Atlanta, however, less than half of operators are represented in the data, NIC executives said. “Penetration is not where we’d like it to be,” the CEO admitted. NIC is “moving as aggressively as we can” to have data from all of the major metropolitan areas that NIC covers, Jurutka added.
“Just like in the seniors housing space, you can’t necessarily do it all by yourself; you need partners that may come in to an organization to help you with the healthcare piece. NIC obviously can’t do this by itself as well. We need operators that are willing to participate and understand the value associated with transparency,” Jurutka said. “Transparency associated with actual rates allows the seniors housing and care industry to have transparency that’s comparable or similar to that of other real estate classes. It also allows operators and investors to identify those opportunities and risk in a way that has additional granularity compared to historical data.”
On Wednesday, Medtelligent was announced as the initiative’s newest certified software partner. Assisted living, memory care and behavioral health communities that are clients of the Chicago company now will be able to submit their data through its ALIS software.
“Now they can use their high-quality data to contribute to the senior living ecosystem facilitated by the NIC actual rates program,” Medtelligent founder and CEO John Shafaee said. “Our clients are just as excited as I am for this opportunity. We share the belief that more data, and more diverse data, will give us all a clearer picture of the health and trends of our industry.”
For more news from the NIC meeting, see McKnight’s Senior Living and McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
