Intro To Senior Living Development Management
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This section of the website discusses development issues specific to senior living projects. Senior living is a unique animal. It is one of the most complex, multi-faceted and interesting of all the real estate asset classes. Some developers describe it as a mix between multi-family, healthcare, and hospitality. This complexity also makes it one of the most difficult to develop. If you, as the development manager, can gain the knowledge and experience on how to effectively manage the development of senior living facility, you can bring huge value to the successful delivery of the project.
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The Boom is Almost Upon Us
I, along with many others, believe the need for senior living is set to explode. The median age for a senior living community resident is 82. The first of the Baby Boomers turn 82 in the year 2026. As recent history shows us, the marketplace has many times been ill prepared to handle the incredible demand of goods and services from Baby Booms as they move through their life cycle. As of 2024, there was 76 million Baby Boomers in the United States. The generation before them, The Silent Generation (people born from 1928 to 1945), only numbered 23 million as of 2019. The current stock of senior living housing units are built largely to accommodate the Silent Generation. But there is an incredibly large glut of Baby Boomers that are three times the size of the Silent Generation that will cause the demand for senior housing to triple.
The Baby Boomer generation also has a huge amount of wealth and spending power. They were the beneficiaries of several strong economies during their lifetimes, which gave them the ability to build this wealth, and carry it into their retirement years. Many Baby Boomers have more money then they do life left. And when they near the end of their lives, they will spend large amounts of that accumulated wealth to extend and have a better quality of life. Senior housing is where many of those Baby Boomers will spend their final years.
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Development Manager's Roll in Helping to Fulfil The Demand
There is and will continue to be a strong need for senior housing for our elderly citizens. In order to provide that housing at an affordable cost and a high quality, the industry needs development managers that know what they are doing. If you can save time and/or money on your senior living development project, all the better for you and your company, but also all the better for the elderly residents that will move into your community. If you are able to bring in a project at a cheaper cost, maybe you can undercut the competition with cheaper rents and still meet investor IRR requirements. If you can deliver the facility quicker, the faster our seniors will have a place to live, and the faster the developer can start collecting rent. Senior housing is important for the health of our senior citizens and society at large. Those reasons alone make senior living development worthwhile and fulfilling.
If you enjoy solving complex problems and working with a wide and diverse cast of team members, managing a senior living development won't disappoint. I get to come to work every day and help to solve complex puzzles with a team. That’s fun. After you start developing senior living communities, I hope you grow to share my enthusiasm for this asset class. Dig into the rest of the table of contents in this section to learn how interesting and complex these projects can get.
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Next Section: Finding a Site and Assessing Demand​