EngAGE Stories

If you’ve considered using a placement service to help find a senior residence, it’s important to understand how they work. The following article, which focuses on Florida, offers some cautionary advice that applies to these types of services no matter where they’re located.

“Looking for a retirement community, assisted living or nursing home for yourself or a loved one? You’ll find a flock of businesses eager to guide you through the elder housing maze, claiming their local experts can find the perfect place at no charge. But elder advocates say seniors and their families need to be aware of what they’re getting when they say yes to free senior placement services. These businesses, springing up around South Florida as entrepreneurs get in on the latest elder-care trend, are unregulated and require no special licensing or training. They can be opened by anyone with enough cash to put up a website, and the quality varies widely. . . . Eric Carlson, a long-term care expert and directing attorney at the National Senior Citizens Law Center, said that while clients like not having to pay, commissions can make it unclear if an adviser is working for the senior or the facilities paying them.” Read more here.

Coincidentally, not long after reading the article above, the EngAGE Blog received an e-mail from reader Tal Ziv, CEO and Co-Founder of Silver Living:

We’re somewhat new to the online caregiving space and so I wanted to introduce myself and Silver Living. We’ve built a research site presenting expert reviews showing the good the bad and the ugly on a community by community basis. Our research analyzes dozens of inputs like mystery shoppers, state inspection reports, interviews with current residents,  complaint reports, family reviews, and financial information on the operator. We even take our own photos of each community so that there’s no question about the accuracy of the photos.

We contacted Tal and asked for his comments about the type of service his company performs and the issue of transparency for senior housing placement providers. His response:

Transparency is an inevitability for all industries, and its time has come for the senior living industry.

I was thrown into the senior care world after searching for an appropriate community for my grandmother. I was accustomed to finding comprehensive research and reviews on whatever service or product I wanted — from houses to cars, to selecting pediatricians, dentists and hospitals. It baffled me to discover that even though senior care is likely the most expensive and emotional decision you’ll make, there’s no Consumer Reports or Zagat. 

The online world is littered with slick lead-generation focused online directories that promise detailed information and advice, but come up very short. Most of these national “advisors” even outsource their call-centers and staff them with high-pressure sales staff, not Certified Senior Advisors.

Even though price is one of the top three critical items, not a single directory or “advisor” has detailed pricing information. Some provide the minimum price for the room only, which does not include the other essentials of senior care: care level pricing, medication management. The minimum price is typically less than half of what the total bill is — quite misleading for a family in a rush to find the best community. The community operators are coming around to publishing detailed pricing, but most are not quite there yet.

Our model is to provide expert reviews on these communities. Unlike an advisor from a call-center who is reading the community’s marketing blurb, all our research passes through our editor-in-chief who reviews hundreds of communities. In addition to factual inspection reports we receive via Freedom of Information requests, we interview actual residents at each community to get a first-hand view on the operations. Including our mystery shoppers, dozens of inputs are used in our reviews. The reviews are topped off with hundreds of photos and high-definition videos of each community that are not marketing photos. Our own photographers take each photo — so the family knows that what they see is what they get (the good and the bad).

As you can see, we are quite passionate about providing the best information on these communities . . . 

EngAGE has no connection with Silver Living and we don’t endorse specific companies, but we appreciate the valuable insights and information that Tal Ziv provided. And, as always, we encourage you to do your own thorough research before making any important life decisions.

If you’re looking for an assisted living home, here’s a recent post from the Changing Aging blog to help with that research: Ten Things You Need to Know About Assisted Living. It was written by Martin Bayne, who is a journalist, Buddhist monk, MIT graduate, and well-known advocate for the aging. In the nineties, at the peak of his professional career and personal eldercare advocacy, Bayne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. For the past ten years he has lived in an assisted living facility.