In 2019, Vi President Randy Richardson revealed that the company was planning on returning to the rental senior living market — and now, those plans have started to come to fruition in Arizona.
Vi is currently under contract on a piece of property in Scottsdale, Arizona, on which to develop a 320-unit luxury rental senior living community. The communities would mostly look and feel like Vi’s 10 life plan communities spread around the country, but with a twist: they would only serve the rental market — predominantly for independent living residents — and offer slightly scaled down amenities and services.
“I just think that the independent living rental market has been overlooked for a long time,” Richardson said during a recent appearance on SHN+ TALKS. “[Some residents] just don’t want to give you a big entry fee, but they will pay you rent, and they want a nice place to live with all features and benefits that we offer.”
Outside of its plans in Arizona, Vi is evaluating other sites, with plans to roll its new concept out over 10 years. One aspect of the plan that has not yet been made is its brand name — but to that end, Richardson said there is an announcement on the way.
We are pleased to share the recording and this transcript of the SHN+ TALKS conversation with SHN+ members. Read on to learn about:
— Richardson’s philosophy on the ongoing senior living recovery
— What Vi has in store for its new rental senior living product
— Why economic conditions are still good for life plan communities amid a challenging pandemic
— How long Richardson thinks staffing pressures might last, and what the industry can do about them
The following has been edited for clarity.
[00:01:30] Tim Regan: Where is Vi right now with regard to its operations and occupancy recovery efforts in 2022?
[00:02:02] Randy Richardson: Actually, 2021 was a very strong year for us, as it ended up. It didn’t start that way. We had planned for the first two quarters to be sideways, with improvement to come in the third and fourth quarter. The reality was improvement started in the first quarter and it was really strong in the third and fourth quarter, in particular. We had one of our biggest sales months in December ever. This is a pre-pandemic measurement.
Now all of those people that we got deposits from, so contracts won’t be moving in until this first quarter of 2022. Nonetheless, we ended up with about 91% occupancy in our independent living units, about 84% in assisted living, and about 75% in skilled nursing. Keep in mind in our care environments, those are built almost in every community, specifically to manage the life plan residents that are in the community.
We do take people from the outside, but typically, we’re full, so we don’t have that on a regular run rate. We don’t have that much outside business, depending on the market. We did take a hit there, no question about it, just like the rest of the industry did in those care environments when we couldn’t take people in from the outside, so we’re recovering in those areas still.
[00:03:51] Tim: You said you had a great year, and December was one of your best sales months ever. What’s really working right now to make that happen?
[00:04:07] Randy: There are a couple of factors that are coming together here that are important. First of all, it may be serendipity, but we made a significant investment in our website in 2019 that came to be very, very useful during the pandemic, because it allowed us to expand our virtual marketing efforts and keep in contact with those people that had shown an interest in our communities and, at the same time, continue to market virtually because remember when everything closed down, our typical selling method is group sales, community-related activities where we invite prospects and so forth and certainly, dining.
When all of those common areas were shut down, we didn’t have the ability to market that way, so we had to pivot it to do whatever we could, virtually, but that turned out to be very, very useful for us. David Egeland and our marketing team, they’ve done a great job over the period in developing more and more virtual program-related activities where we could keep in touch with our prospects and continue to market through the pandemic.
When things did improve, we had relationships that were still there and we were able to communicate to people, “Hey, we’re opening up. Come and visit. Come and dine with us, have a meal with us,” or something like that.
Then, the other thing that’s really been helpful to us is that the housing market was just red hot. As you know, in life plan communities, many people want to sell their home or will sell their home and use the equity in their home to finance the entry fee into a community.
We’re finding that in literally every market, people are able to sell their home much quicker at a much higher price than they thought. If they were on the fence with respect to a decision to move in with us, that’s one objective that is taken off the table now. I think that’s helped tremendously. We’re seeing the results of a really strong housing market that is lifting us this time.
[00:06:45] Tim: I’ve heard some operators tell me that some of the seasonal trends that they’ve seen in occupancy, leads, inquiries were a lot different before the pandemic than they are now.
I’ve heard a lot of chatter at the beginning of this year about whether 2022 might be the year that some seasonality comes back into some of these trends. Have you seen a disruption of the normal seasonality of your occupancy trends, and do you expect maybe a return to some of that this year as, hopefully, case counts continue to dwindle?
[00:07:31] Randy: That’s a good question. I think we still see the seasonal trends. Just to pick one that is obvious in our southern communities, in Arizona and Florida, for example, it’s not unusual to see 40% of the population go back north in the summertime to be with families or maybe even continue to have a home in those areas and get out of the heat.
We still saw that this year. The order of magnitude was not as great, so there was still some seasonality there. What I was surprised about was, during those seasonal periods — especially if you’re looking at Florida and Arizona — your sales activity goes dark there for a couple of months where there is just not that much going on because people aren’t around, or they’re waiting to make a decision at a point when they return to the market and so forth.
We actually had some pretty good sales months in periods that normally we would see very quiet. That was a little unusual to me, and I can only– I’m not sure we’ve concluded what it is other than just more people, I think, hung around and didn’t travel as much and those types of things because of the pandemic.
[00:09:15] Tim: Where are you feeling the most pressure in your operations? Where are things that you think still need improvement or that you’re working on?
[00:09:37] Randy: It’s funny, I feel the things I used to worry about I don’t think about anymore. We’ve gotten, I think, a bit of a tough skin as a result of Covid. And in some cases, maybe we’re overly confident that we can deal with anything now. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but we’re emboldened because we’ve made it through all of this and in fine shape, and we’re recovering.
The things that trouble me right now, the biggest concern is the workforce. I think any operator would tell you that’s probably number one on their list of things to worry about. I continue to be concerned about that. It’s not a short-term issue, it’s a longer-term challenge for the industry. That continues to be in the gun sights, if you will: strategically thinking about, okay, how do we work it against that?
We have four new recruiters over the last year that we’ve hired to support our recruiting activities in our communities, as an example. Recruiting is one of the highest priorities right now. Again, I think this will be a longer-term issue we’ll have to deal with. I’m also concerned about inflation. I still have a view that what we’re dealing with or seeing right now is somewhat transitory, but we’ll see how it plays out.
It comes at such a bad time, on the heels of two years of additional operating expenses related to managing Covid, with respect to equipment, testing, vaccination, all of the additional work that people in the communities had to do to take care of residents in an abnormal kind of fashion. It costs money to do that. We had some of the largest operating expense increases for 2022 than we’ve ever had, that our residents are really paying for.
By the way, there was not a lot of squawking about it because I think they understood and saw what happened and what we had to do. I’m concerned about that getting baked in longer-term and what that means for the cost of the operation. Those are probably the two big things that I think about. I worry somewhat about the economy. It seems like we’ve got some very strong underlying economics that are good and that we can build upon.
[00:13:13] Tim: You said there were some things that you’re not as worried about anymore. I’m assuming occupancy growth might be one of those, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. What’s on that list?
[00:13:26] Randy: Certainly, in the last two years, it’s been a day-to-day battle to figure out how you get through a critical situation — a life safety situation, with respect to the pandemic — with no gamebook. All of us have had to play this out as it happened.
Pre-pandemic, 2019 was a terrific year for us. It capped a series of really strong performances since 2012 and 2013. We felt really good about the operation at that point. The things that you might have been concerned about with respect to occupancy, simply, they just weren’t there. We were satisfied with the business and so forth, always concerned. I think employment issues in general and workforce issues, in general, were as much of a concern in 2019, as they are today.
[00:15:00] Tim: I think there’s a lot of data out there that shows that life plan communities and CCRCs have withstood some of these Covid pressures. Do you think there’s something about the model that helps guard against some of these pressures?
[00:16:09] Randy: Yes. I serve on the advisory board for Ziegler. As you know, they do a lot of not-for-profit bond financing, and frankly own the not-for-profit financing world with respect to life plan communities. They have deep experience there. They’re also big-time trying to get into the for-profit sector and service that side of the business as well.
I’ve been working with them on those issues, but one of the things that they reported on in our last meeting was that the higher-quality life plan communities in the not-for-profit world are doing much better than the rest of the pack. There is a difference in their mind between quality operators versus not so much. I completely agree with this point because I think our business is somewhat reputational.
If you did a good job of managing through a very difficult situation — so you and your reputation is out there that you took care of people and you took care of your employees — I think you’re going to get a second look or a third look as a result. The other thing is, inherently, the business is predominantly independent living. Yes, there’s a big care component there, but it’s predominantly independent living and usually larger populations, versus a 120-unit assisted living building when you can’t take anybody in from the outside over a period of time, your occupancy drops to 75% or lower and you’re struggling.
That’s a real challenge for that operation. The larger numbers help us be able to weather the storm better financially. For us in particular, we don’t have any debt, we were able to do what we needed to do to manage through the pandemic, and that’s a bit of a blessing, but I think at the end of the day, there is a view that we’re just a little bit of the safe harbor relative to some other options that people might have.
Then when they ask around and talk to their friends, “How did things go? How did they handle things? Were you treated right?” I think we got an A+ in that area. And that, reputationally, has helped us a great deal.
The biggest vulnerability that life plan communities have is the housing market. There are a lot of other things that we can manage, but the market can get pretty tough if people can’t sell their home to move into your community. Fortunately, we don’t have that issue to deal with here right now.
[00:19:36] Tim: As you look into 2020 and beyond, I guess, are you optimistic that the housing marke is going to continue to be strong? Can you compare this period to another real estate cycle?
[00:20:32] Randy: If you go back to the Great Recession, the housing market really picked up in 2007. I can remember then saying to myself, “Jeez, it seems a little frothy,” and it was, it simply was. Now, the conditions then were much different than now, way different. You had an incredible cycle of development taking place, constructing new homes at a record pace.
That all stopped with the recession. Nobody was buying anything, but the new development stopped. Frankly, a lot of contractors and a lot of developers just went out of business, they evaporated. Things started recovering by our records in about 2013. We’ve become experts in the housing market because, as I mentioned, it’s one of the single-most important external factors that can influence our business.
We measure every market quarter by quarter, and we can see what’s happening in terms of volume and pricing. If I were to show you the graphical representation of that, you’d see the “tale of the tape,” so to speak, illustrating the recovery, from 2013 to present, really. The difference here is that all of a sudden you have a lot of people spending a whole more time at home because they’re not going into work and so forth, or they’re saying, “To hell with this, it’s time, I’m checking out, let’s go to Florida.”
Between 2012 and 2018, 70,000 people left Illinois to move to Florida. I’m not even including the last three years. 70,000. An equal number left New York, New Jersey, the New England area to move to Florida, an equal number left California to move to Arizona. There’s a really interesting kind of graphic that shows the relocation of people over the last decade, but that’s really been supercharged by Covid.
Now, people are saying, “I’m not going to wait anymore. If we’re going to spend a bunch of time at home, I want to be in a place that I can really enjoy or a more fun place to be,” and so on and so forth. You’ve heard all the stories, people buying motorhomes and taking a two-year tour of the states and these types of things. The conditions are a lot different. The Great Recession was a multi-circular recession that included housing.
Housing was at the center of it, it was the meltdown, the crucible, and that’s just not the case here. It’s fascinating to me when you look at the dynamics and how they can play out so much differently in different economic conditions. Thank God for the housing market, for us, that’s all I have to say because it’s really helped tremendously.
[00:24:36] Tim: We have a question from our audience. The question is, do you have any ideas on how you can use technology to bolster your efforts to deliver a personalized resident experience? Maybe tell us more about some of the ways that you’re doing that at Vi.
[00:25:00] Randy: Technology, that’s a perplexing topic for our industry because now that some of the conferences have opened back up. I think you’ll find them well-populated by prospective tech providers, I’ll put it that way.
There are some really cool things. I’m only telling you this story as background, and I’ll get to answer your point more directly. Five years ago, we were engaged in a series of meetings with Mayo Clinic to work on a predictive fall mechanism. There’s probably nobody that’s done any more research on falls than Mayo Clinic. They have a whole laboratory, that’s all they do. It’s fascinating.
Anyway, the conclusion was, at that time, most of the stuff that they were trying to do already existed in the tech world in one form or another. It was clear to me that at some point, the Apple Watch was going to be it, and it is. Now the Apple Watch even has a feature that if you fall, it will alert somebody, and you can actually talk to somebody. Is it perfect? No, but it’s going to get there.
My point about technology is that there are a lot of really cool new shiny pennies out there, but it’s really hard to sort through it and figure out what will actually work in your operation. Then, more importantly, can you afford it? I just told you how well we were doing, and we’re thankful for that. We’re blessed, but a lot of my colleagues are not doing as well.
This is going to be a reasonably long recovery. Their bottom lines are pressured. They’ve got wage expenses, they’ve got all of the other Covid-related expenses that they’ve had to deal with. They don’t have a lot of extra money in the till to spend on a new tech project. Really, the technology that can be most beneficial is those applications that can legitimately show that if you buy this, you’re going to save this.
You’ve got to be able to show a return on the investment that’s positive. The other thing is that we’ve learned when you install a new tech feature, you have to take care of it. It’s not free. Not only do you buy it and then spend money to install it and get it running right, but then you’re going to spend money every month to maintain it. It’s not a one-time plug-and-play kind of thing.
At least the ones that we’ve been working with that we could see some real value have a cost associated with them to keep them running right and interfacing with all of the other things that you have. That said, we’ve really spent a lot of time on the website, and it’s paid off. The technology there is improving every day. It’s something that you can see in real-time a return on that investment.
The quality of life applications, yes, there are a few that we’re migrating to technology. For example, in the skilled and assisted living areas where it makes it easier to monitor activity if an individual gets up out of bed in the middle of the night; in weight management, these types of things; all great ideas. There’s plenty of options out there. It’s the new cutting-edge stuff.
For me, I’ve had a hard time rationalizing, “Okay, this is cool, but is it going to really save this money, or are we going to be able to improve a quality outcome for a resident in our environment. Those are the questions that have to be asked. It gets tough as we’ve gotten into it to understand all of those different options that you might have and how they might actually work and benefit you. I’m more of an opinion of being selective.
I would challenge the tech providers to really do their homework, because there’s a lot of stuff that we have looked at. It becomes very clear to us as we’ve gotten into our conversations with the provider that’s interested in trying to figure out how to do something, they don’t know our business well enough. I’m speaking generally so I don’t want to pick on anybody, in particular, but I think it’s important that they do their homework to really understand the operation and then they’ll find ways to make the application of technology work for a client.
[00:31:06] Tim: Well, if there are any tech vendors watching, I hope they’re taking notes right now. [laughs].
[00:31:12] Randy: We have a very robust lifestyle program. It’s called Living Well. It encompasses all of the activities that you would normally think about in a senior living community, and a lot more. It’s meant to be multi-dimensional in terms of not only offering different options for people to participate in but if they want to focus on physical activity, mental wellbeing, or whatever it might be. There’s a pretty robust list of activities that people can become involved with.
Most of those were delivered, or a lot of them were delivered in person so we had to pivot and figure out how to deliver them virtually. Fortunately, we had the technology in all of our communities where we could do that, and actually go into people’s homes. They can participate in a yoga class, we had people who were playing bridge virtually. We pulled that off and that worked very well. Fortunately, we have the fundamental technology in order to do that, which is very helpful.
[00:32:43] Tim: I guess technology is a line item on the budget and each year you probably have to spend, not only to explore new things but just to maintain what you have.
[00:32:59] Randy: We spend a lot of money on security. It’s really behind the scenes, but it’s very important, especially when you’re dealing with privileged information, resident information and care plans, those kinds of things.. We’ve spent a lot of money just bolstering our security.
[00:33:29] Tim: Randy, you had mentioned cost inflation earlier. I wanted to actually ask you a follow-up about that. Where in your operations are you seeing the most cost inflation? Obviously, labor is one area that I hear over and over again with contract labor and overtime, but where else?
[00:33:47] Randy: Labor is a big line item, but also food costs. Protein is up across the board. It’s not just pork or beef or chicken, it’s everything, 7% and more. Just pick another category in the food chain and you’ll find a similar inflation rate. A combination of things that are driving that, but a big part of it is supply chain. These are the supply chain things I think will sort themselves out, ultimately, and so I think we might get some relief. There’s so much disruption then in the system to get back to a normal cycle. It’s going to take a while to do that.
This year we had a really great experience in terms of insurance renewal, for not only casualty but GL/PL which was welcome after last year, where we had almost a 20% increase.
[00:35:47] Tim: In staffing, what are you having the most challenge with? Where are you seeing that pressure specifically?
[00:36:23] Randy: Well, I think at the heart of it is labor supply and the competition for labor, and at different price points. Across the board, supply is one issue and it’s different by market. In Denver, a new Gaylord Hotel opened up 18 months ago. Of course, they had their own challenges with the pandemic, but they sucked the labor supply out of the market when they came in because they had over 2,000 employees. You have to deal with things like that.
When we break it down, the things that we focus most on our onboarding. When we find somebody or make an offer and they actually come to work for us, let’s make sure they stay with us. The highest turnover rate typically for us — and I think it’s probably similar in other companies — is within the first 12 months.
Culture is very important to us. That’s something we spend a lot of time on but we found that by reducing the turnover in that first year, you significantly impact your future turnover. That’s something that we’ve really focused on. I mentioned amping up on the recruiting side of it.
Then there are some uncontrollable things that you have to deal with. In some states, the background check and all of the other screening that needs to be done just to hire somebody into a care environment can take a couple months. When people want to work, they want to come to work now. They don’t want to come to work two months from now. It’s a real challenge to work through those types of things.
We’ve been working on ways that we could, let’s say, conditionally hire somebody pending the completion of all the background checks, and all that kind of stuff that normally would need to be done, but have some temporary window allowing us to get them into the workforce and start working with them to show them what a good choice they made, and we’ll clean up the paperwork later. You’d have those kinds of issues as well that work against us in the industry. It’s really not a fair playing field.
When somebody goes down the street and works for a restaurant and with the same pay, and maybe makes tips, it’s not necessarily the same playing field. You have to get creative to do some different things. We’ve also created career ladders in certain positions. We took one position and opened it up, made it three with graduated increases in responsibility and pay so that people can actually say, “If I’m here nine months from now, I can move to this next position and I get paid more.” So, it’s something for them to work for and improves our retention over time.
[00:40:10] Tim: We had a follow-up on some of what you were talking about here, Randy. You were talking a little bit about employees and keeping them. The question is, do you provide certain incentives and benefits within that first year to support employees and mitigate attrition and if so through what ways?
[00:40:43] Randy: In the care environments, in order to play, you almost have to have a sign-on bonus and that’s been effective for us in getting people at least into our system. The most important thing is that when somebody makes a job change, it’s not just for the money because there’s a lot of different options people have today. It’s really an employee market in many respects. We believe that one of the things that they’re looking for is a good home and culture is very important.
We throw a lot into that in the first six months or so of somebody’s employment with us, the tangible things that they have and you have to pay right. You have to have a decent benefit package for people. Work plan flexibility is becoming more and more important, so we’ve been experimenting with different models, different ideas rather along those lines to give people more flexibility with respect to their work life. That, I think, will become more and more valuable to people. Those are the major things.
We offer education reimbursement, tuition reimbursement, those types of things that a lot of people take advantage of. All of those things put together help make you sticky at the end of the day. Those are some of the things that I think we found most effective.
[00:42:53] Tim: Great, thank you for sharing. We have another question I want to get to here from the audience and this has some acronyms in it that I’m going to try to parse. Do you know if ICER — which I’m assuming is the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review — has started to apply QALYs — which I think are Quality Adjusted Life Years — to programming? Then in turn, is that being studied and applied towards marketing?
[00:43:56] Randy: No, is the answer. I think I’m aware of what’s being asked. As a company we have not looked at that. There are so many, in my opinion, more fundamental issue to work on and it’s a cool idea if you can prove to somebody that living in one of our communities and if you’re being cared for the right way can actually extend your life or your quality of life which we believe by the way and think we can demonstrate it in a lot of other ways. But, we haven’t adopted any program like that, at least not yet.
[00:44:49] Tim: During this period of Covid where there’s been unpredictability among some of these third-party service providers, there’s been a real effort to try to save money by doing some of this yourself. Have you ever thought about starting an in-house service line for staffing or something else?
[00:45:44] Randy: Well, we’re not that big a company, although we do have 3000 employees. Yes, we’ve talked about this, but we haven’t done it. It’s a lot of work and I think it could be valuable in the right setting, for example, having your own agency. It can allow some flexibility in terms of your workforce and where they go to work and where you need them and so on. We haven’t done that. We’ve just not found the efficiency on a scale, at least in our system.
The other problem, Tim, is, if you have three or four communities in one market, it’s a lot different than having one in each of several different markets. We don’t have any multi-community markets other than Scottsdale, for example. In those kinds of situations, in those communities, we’ve ganged up resources to help with recruiting. If there are some shared staff opportunities, then we’ve been able to look at those kinds of things.
But no, we haven’t taken that step and gone that far. We’ve focused more on the things that we have been doing that have been working, really focusing more on the recruiting side of the business and minimizing the need for any outside agency support, whether it be in the care environments or otherwise. It’s a premium and sometimes you need it and you can’t get around it, but it costs a lot of money.
The other thing is, we’re intrigued by different staffing models and universal work or models through the pandemic. There are a lot of individuals working in a community that found themselves doing something very different than they were hired to do as a result of just the necessity of getting things done. I still think that there’s some value in looking at some work models like that. It doesn’t work in every position or every department, but there are some values there I think that you can engineer out.
[00:48:23] Tim: We have a follow-up question on something that you had mentioned earlier. The question is, does this tuition reimbursement program cover both degree-seeking and non-credit professional development programs?
[00:48:37] Randy: Our program will reimburse for any education that is relative to the individual’s job.
If they want to go get a master’s degree, we’ll help them get it, but if you’re working in resident care and you want to get a master’s in engineering, no, that won’t work. It’s meant to support an individual’s desire to get educated. We’ve had people that have got their master’s degree from us and they’ve gone to work for other companies, just because at the moment, we didn’t have an opportunity that would fit their desire or their ability.
We firmly believe in the program, we think it’s a great program. We’ve had an individual who’s been working with us over 30 years. He’s put four kids through college with this program. We’re very proud of that.
[00:50:21] Tim: As you look ahead to this year, how do you think that this recovery is going to play out over the next 12 months and what are you preparing for?
[00:50:41] Randy: I’d like to reference an article that was published by NIC. In that article, [NIC Chief Economist] Beth Mace attempted to do a presentation of how long recovery might actually take, and looked at not only supply, but demand, absorption and so forth.
I’ve encouraged everybody, seek it out and look at it because at the very least, it’s thought-provoking. You can plug in your own kinds of assumptions, and maybe drop your own conclusion. Before I saw that report, I’m thinking to myself, “Maybe in 2024 we could get back to 2019 levels.” Her analysis, at least in one illustration that she makes, suggests that it’s going to be a two- to three-year recovery. If it were a slow, methodical build, it could be 10 years. I don’t think it’s going to be 10 years, I’m not saying that. But her point was to illustrate how you might think about the recovery actually rolling out.
I think it’s reasonable to expect at least two to three years, and then you’re still going to have some challenges. Some communities will never recover from this, they just won’t. They’ll be reconstituted in some fashion or form.
There a term in economics, a Latin term, and I can’t recall it now from my college days, but it basically means “all things held equal.” When you make a projection, all things held equal, this is what you might expect. But, we know things don’t get held equal. It just doesn’t work that way.
God forbid we have any worldwide issues that pop up that cause even more distraction than we’ve got right now. We’ve got to get our supply chain back in order. I think the fundamental economics are probably pretty good, I love to see people getting back to work.
[00:55:04] Tim: You and I had talked about Vi possibly returning to the rental market. Do you still have plans to do any of that?
[00:55:46] Randy: As a matter of fact, they have materialized and we are under a contract and a piece of property in Scottsdale, Arizona for a 320-unit luxury, independent living rental program. It will include assisted living and memory care in a separate environment. It will look and feel from an amenity point of view and a service point of view a lot like our high-end CCRCs, only not as opulent and not as deep in those service areas. But will have the amenity packages that people want to see.
It’s our view that that will set us apart from the competition in and of itself, let alone the service we would provide. We have one site active and other sites that we’re evaluating. This is a program that we intend to roll out over the next 10 years.
I just think that the independent living rental market has been overlooked for a long time. It’s been easier, quicker to develop assisted living and memory care. Developers are like water. They take the path of least resistance and that’s what got built. I think it’s been overlooked and it’s a product that I think is needed.
Some people have all the money. It’s not a financial issue. They just don’t want to give you a big entry fee, but they will pay you rent, and they want a nice place to live with all features and benefits that we offer. It’s more of a targeted market. We have to be careful where we go, but we’re very excited about it. We actually have developed a separate brand for it.
[00:58:03] Tim: Is there a brand name for this concept?
[00:58:04] Randy: I’m not going to tell you what it is right now because my marketing team they’ve got a reveal coming up and everything, so I want to let them do their job, but, we’ve done to the work of creating a separate brand in anticipation of rolling this program out in the future.
[00:58:22] Tim: What are you most worried about right now and what are you most excited about right now in 2022?
[00:58:56] Randy: Well, the worrisome stuff is really the workforce. Although I will tell you, in 2020 we had 17% turnover. In 2021, it’s more like 28%, but that includes turnover related to the vaccine mandate. We lost several hundred people as a result of mandating vaccines. I think we’re still holding the road there on turnover. Although we have to work, we still have a lot of work to do, but workforce is a big issue for the industry. It is for us. It will be something that we have to continue to address.
That said, I’m very bullish on the industry as a whole. I’m incredibly bullish on CCRCs. The demand wave is marching on. There’s just no way we will have enough product to service the population unless we get into some very serious development. That’s where we’re focused right now.
Companies featured in this article:
