A senior living veteran has sold a longtime business as part of a pivot to building a tool to bring to the industry more transparency in pricing.
The veteran is Michael Baldwin, who worked as president of OHC Advisors for seven years until July of this year. Baldwin sold his venture to found SeniorComps, a crowdsourced database that brings together pricing comps for senior living providers. In founding SeniorComps, he saw a need for property-specific comps from the marketplace and additional transparency.
The idea is that senior living professionals can use SeniorComps to share information on community pricing and in turn get access to comps shared by others, essentially creating an open-sourced database for the industry. Companies can track resident rental rate comps by pricing and occupancies, followed by sales comps and expense comps. Once an organization or property owner joins SeniorComps, they can receive access to the database that is specifically designed for senior living properties.
Baldwin told Senior Housing News he envisions building a data ecosystem that grows into a centralized online hub for all things related to senior living comps.
“I’ve been an appraiser for about the last 20 years, and we found a big pain point around data,” Baldwin told Senior Housing News. “By giving the industry a crowdsourced database, we’re becoming a single-source of truth for that data.”
Baldwin noted that as the senior living industry grapples with multiple pressures, it’s important to arm operators with as many tools as possible to make new transactions happen.
“There’s a big need to stabilize assets,” Baldwin said. “Many of the transactions that are happening are distressed and so transparency becomes important.”
At the same time, senior living deal brokers need to know realistic pricing expectations that a seller may have, and without transparency it gets tougher to pencil out a deal. With a database of crowdsourced comps, senior living operators and financiers can receive additional data points to make decisions, Baldwin added.
“What they can do in SeniorComps is look at a map of all the properties nationwide, click on a property and start adding that data that they’ve come across,” Baldwin said.
Users can also share comps to earn “credits” that allow access to additional data within the database.
“If you make it available to be viewed by others then you will be able to access whatever other data that you want with those credits,” Baldwin said. “There are a handful of data providers but everyone is giving just the one viewpoint that they have on that data and the reality is that sometimes there are different perspectives on it.”
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