Florida is the current epicenter for the coronavirus pandemic — but Westminster Communities of Florida has maintained an occupancy rate of around 91% despite those challenges.
The reason why, according to CEO Terry Rogers, is that the organization’s communities are safer than the cities where they’re located thanks to higher vaccination rates among the organization’s residents and staff than in the general population.
Meanwhile, the Orlando, Florida-based senior housing nonprofit is forging ahead with exploring new concepts for the post-Covid landscape, including branching out into active adult or experimenting with Bill Thomas’ Minka homes model — something Rogers also previously wanted to explore when he was CEO of Christian Living Communities and its for-profit management arm, Cappella Living Solutions.
“I’ve always believed that, as this consumer base that we respond to grows, so will the options that they will have for retirement living,” Rogers said during a recent appearance on the Senior Housing News podcast, Transform. “And I believe it’s up to organizations like ours to expand the options and the models that are out there.”
Highlights of Rogers’ podcast interview are below, edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to Transform via Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. The interview took place in early August.
On the demand Westminster Communities of Florida is seeing now:
Demand and interest, I think in the state of Florida, really seems to be strong based on what we’re seeing. We’ve seen a rebound in inquiries and lead generation, and that’s really at an all time high for our organization since we started measuring those metrics. The number of appointments and tours from those leads are up, and we’re really now back to pre-pandemic levels. So that’s exciting for us.
Recently, we’ve noticed an uptick in walk-ins, and we believe that maybe adult children are reconnecting again with their older adult family members and perhaps then seeking out a senior living community for their parents. All of that leads to sales. And we’re finally getting back to normal — or at least what we feel is normal — as occupancy continues to trend up.
On the spread of the delta coronavirus variant:
We are concerned. As a Florida resident, I can tell you that we are at the epicenter of the delta variant.
We’re doing our best to ensure safety. We feel that our campuses are safer overall than the cities where those campuses are located, mainly due to the vaccination rates we have. Nearly 100% of our residents are vaccinated, and we have nearly 70% of team members vaccinated. If you compare that to most areas in Florida that have only 50% vaccination rates, then we’re doing better.
For the most vulnerable people we care for in assisted living and in nursing care, we really haven’t changed much about what we had already implemented. Safety has always been our top priority. As cases have increased, we’re focused on ensuring that those procedures that we implemented last year are still being applied consistently across our system.
In independent living, we’re letting the resident councils be extraordinarily involved, and we’ve been transparent. We’ve been partners throughout the pandemic, but now we’re really getting their recommendations on what they expect for mask requirements for themselves in common areas and for visitors. We’re seeing some variability from campus to campus as to what those residents are comfortable with, and we’re going to honor that.
Our team members have always worn face masks since March of 2020. That continues to be the requirement. One new safety precaution we’ve started is that, as of this week, any new team members we’re hiring must be vaccinated or be willing to get vaccinated very quickly. We’re not currently mandating that existing team members get vaccinated, but since we’re at 70% and we keep increasing that number, we’re feeling good that we’re making great progress.
If the fear leads to a slowdown in tours, then occupancy is going to be impacted again, or at least the recovery of occupancy is going to be slow. We are seeing some prospects and adult children who want to make this decision now to be in a safer environment. So, they’re seeing senior living as a safer place to be than being isolated at home.
The other thing is that we have an extremely strong real estate market. For entrance-fee organizations like ours, it’s really a great time to sell your home and then move into one of our communities. So, there are some tailwinds that I hope to combat some of those headwinds that we’re seeing through delta. We’ve really been able to maintain a very stable occupancy over the last few months, and our goal is to at least maintain that and hopefully to improve that over the next few months.
We are hovering around 91% occupancy overall, so we feel that’s pretty strong. Independent living is higher than that. Where we saw the dip was in assisted living and in our health care centers over the last year, just like everyone else. But we’re happy. I think CCRCs had a great benefit in the IL numbers that we had. We’re just trying to maintain that and we’re seeing it up, month to month, so we’re pretty happy. We’re not going to let up off the pedal, though.
On the current demand for home-based services:
I’m a big proponent of in-home care. The limiting factor in that business, for growth, is workforce. And it’s a tremendous challenge. Today, we’re at maximum capacity for the team members that we have, and we’re constantly recruiting for more. It’s really not a marketing or a need problem, it’s just that we don’t have the supply. We don’t have enough team members to meet the demand. I think that will get better as we figure out this workforce thing, and we are certainly committed to it for the future. I would expect you’ll see it growing in other markets as well.
On being a nonprofit during the pandemic:
Covid has challenged all of us in many ways. Whether you’re for-profit or not-for-profit, I think we’re all in the same boat. Technology, marketing, dining, programming, activities, delivery of care — those services that we provide, we had to be creative and innovative in how we fulfilled that.
We’ve also heard from prospective independent living residents that it’s helped show the benefit of living in a senior living community. They do perceive us as being safer than living in their own home, which I think is counter to some of what we hear in the media. Nationally, providers are focused on rebuilding this trust. And in our field, to some extent, we had some very unfair media portrayals of what we actually do and what senior living is. I think we were all lumped together with the New York nursing homes, and that’s just not the business.
We are hearing that some smaller organizations had a tremendously difficult year financially. We have a very large support team that works to support our local campuses around the state. So I can’t imagine last year going it alone by yourself without the support structure that we have. I think the larger systems like ours are certainly capable of partnering with those smaller ones, and providing support to ensure that our space continues to thrive. Maybe that’s an opportunity for large systems and smaller systems to come together and be stronger together.
In my career, I’ve been part of small, mid-size, and larger not-for-profit organizations. So, I’ve seen it all. I see considerable benefits of being affiliated or being part of a larger system. It’s just a resource.
We’re definitely open to affiliations and mergers. Our desire is that always leads with culture first, and that it has to be a geographic fit and a culture fit. If it is, then we’re excited to add people to the family.
Our company, if you look through its history, has been built primarily through acquiring or affiliating with communities seeking the benefits of a large organization. It’s kind of part of our DNA, and I believe I think we’ll continue to see that around the country. There will probably be other models where organizations are working together, and maybe it’s not a true affiliation, or merger. But there are going to be some other models where providers work together to gain scale and efficiencies, purchasing power, those good things.
On current staffing headwinds:
We have definitely faced a lot of the same challenges as not only other providers in senior living and health care, but really, as in every service business.
We think the best way forward is to build a culture where people really want to work with us, that we want to be known as a great place to spend your entire career. We put a huge focus on retention as part of this ongoing culture effort we have. Over the last 12 months, we’ve done a lot of data-gathering. We did a big risk culture assessment of all of our team members, and then tried to understand the values that they want to see and the company that they work for. It’s their company, so we’re trying to make sure that we’re honoring what they want.
We just completed a total reward survey to identify those things [in] wages, compensation benefits, programs that team members expect and want. For too long, we as managers have decided what we thought they wanted, and we have really taken a deep-dive into exactly what they want and what will keep them here.
So, there will be a multi-year rollout, but we will be responding to what they said. As we think about getting beyond this challenge, I think we have to start thinking differently about why someone wants to work for us. It can’t just be a job and a paycheck. We are putting additional dollars towards frontline workers, I think all of us are having to do that.
We’re putting a big emphasis on marketing our jobs in the field, and I think if we put all that together, if you can make communities really be that, then people will be knocking at our door because they want to work for us. So we’re all-in on culture. And that’s where we’re leading from.
On the potential for new housing or payment models in senior living:
We’re really bullish on what we do today.
We have a diversified portfolio: we have life plan communities in amazing locations around the state, we have urban and suburban affordable housing communities and moderate-rate communities as rentals. And I think we probably have room to get into perhaps a different model of active adult.
But I think there’s a big opportunity for this new model of what I call age-in-place, tech-enabled small-homes, like Minka. We’re currently investigating how we might add, through a new development, a smaller Minka community, just to learn it and to understand what it is and how the public responds to it. I’ve always believed that, as this consumer base that we respond to grows, so will the options that they will have for retirement living. And I believe it’s up to organizations like ours to expand the options and the models that are out there.
During the pandemic, we saw new payment structures really grow, and they had tremendous success because people were able to access care … That’s a tremendous benefit to the older adults.
I believe the train has left the station on the new [payment] models, whether people adopt them or not. There’s no turning back. I like this new structure and I think we’ll continue to see these risk-based population health models grow. They will evolve, just like everything.
I still believe that we, as senior living providers, are in a perfect position to impact the wellbeing and health care outcomes [of residents]. And if you do that right, you can take the right amount of risk and the returns from that.
We have started a primary care company that we call Align Senior Clinic in a joint venture with AllyAlign health. Our aim is to provide chronic care management on our campuses. And we’ll use that care model then to contract at-risk with Medicare Advantage plans. It’s a win-win-win. Residents win, we win of course, and the Medicare Advantage plans win. To me, it just makes total sense.
On what comes next for Westminster and the senior living industry:
We have a lot of exciting things going on. We’re pulling out all the stops to improve recruitment and retention of the team. We’ve been implementing strategic culture plans, kind of a strategic action plan around culture improvement on all of our campuses and everyone in our business units. Team members are really excited and it’s actually fun to be part of it.
We’re also working to update our brand we’ve grown over the years. We’ve added different models of communities, so it’s just a great time to evaluate who we are, where we are and make sure that our brand reflects and supports our opportunity for growth, such as through Minka and an active adult.
We are looking at potential acquisitions. We’re always going through stuff on our desk, and we’re even looking to move outside of Florida. We’re wide open to affiliation opportunities as well.
Maybe most exciting for me are the amazing growth initiatives that we’re undertaking on current campuses across the entire system. We’re soon opening Sunrise Point, it’s an independent living building on a beautiful Tampa Bay site at our Westminster Shores campus. And we’re adding new state-of-the-art memory care communities in both Tallahassee at Westminster Oaks, in Jacksonville at Westminster Woods on Julington Creek.
We have five months left [in the year]. I think we’ll continue to adapt, and there’s probably some more pivots that we have to do between now and the end of the year. We learned a lot of lessons over the last year-and-a-half. It’s very important that we continue to put those lessons to work, not only in infection control, but in how we communicate.
My hope is that we remain stable. I think the industry is not going to see a quick turnaround. I hoped that would have been maybe a little more speedy than it seems to be. But, I predict like other people that it will be in 2022 when we’ll get back to these pre-pandemic occupancy levels.
On a personal note, my oldest son, Josh, just took his first community director job in an active adult community. I told him, I believe that there’s never been a more exciting time to enter the field of senior living, and I truly believe that 2021 may not be as good as 2018 and 2019, but we’re going to get back there.
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