A lead generation company is taking a page from Trulia and Zillow to make senior living community shopping more transparent for consumers, reports PandoDaily, by giving them a clearer idea of costs from the get-go.
SilverLiving.com seeks to provide senior care community information that hasn’t traditionally been available outside of going to a community and meeting with the sales and marketing team.
Most senior living communities don’t list their prices online—a significant omission considering cost is a huge factor for many families during a community search, says the article, especially as 95% of residents pay for their care privately.
Silver Living’s goal is to make “unbiased, transparent information” on senior living communities accessible to consumers. The company has been backed by a seed round of funding from 500 Startups, Colorado-based Oakview Group, angel investor Jim Glinn, and Bubba Murarka, the Facebook mobile product manager, PandoDaily reports.
Founder Tal Ziv says it’s in communities’ best interest to keep pricing private: Once potential residents and their families make it through all the rounds of tours and interviews and paperwork, they’re often more likely to take the offer they’re given, even if it’s above their preferred price point.
Despite this, Silver Living posts all prices encountered at specific communities. Increasingly, he told PandoDaily, communities are supporting the move toward more transparency.
So far, the company has developed partnerships with Sunrise Senior Living, Emeritus, and Holiday Retirements—three of the nation’s four largest national providers. It researches specific communities, takes photographs, interviews residents, and assigns a star rating, supplying all this information, along with cost, on a searchable and user-friendly website.
For consumers, using SilverLiving.com is free, as the company takes a commission between 50% and 100% of a community’s first month’s rent for each move-in—comparable to what other lead generators charge.
The company’s leads have higher value than some of those supplied by competitors, Ziv says, because Silver Living’s detailed reports enable buyers to figure out which communities best suit their preferences and budget before going in for tours.
Leads can be tracked when tours are booked directly through SilverLiving.com, with phone numbers called directly through the site tracked by Twilio, the article says.
“Sometimes it scares (the companies) because they don’t have any editorial control and don’t know what we’re going to write,” Ziv said to PandoDaily. “But the point of what we’re doing is increasing their conversions.”
