Working With an Advisor

A senior placement advisor is a guide, not a salesperson, and the difference shows up in the first ten minutes of a call.

Our job is to learn what your family needs, tell you which communities can actually meet it, and then walk beside you through touring, comparing, and moving. We are paid a referral fee by a community when a family moves in, which is why the service is free to you. That model can create pressure to steer people, so these guides show you how to check that it has not. Ask any advisor how many communities they work with, whether they will show you options that pay them nothing, and whether they have set foot in the building recently.

The guides in this set cover what to expect from the process and what to ask along the way. You will find a walk through of a first call, a list of the documents that speed everything up, an honest look at how referral fees work, and a comparison of working with an advisor against calling communities yourself. Both paths work. One takes about twenty hours of your time and the other takes about two.

We also write about the parts of this work that are hard to advertise. Advisors who have run communities read a building differently. We notice the staffing pattern on a Tuesday afternoon, whether the same faces are still there after a year, what the state inspection history says, and how the nurse answers a question about a resident who is declining. That is the kind of read that keeps a family from moving twice.

If you are comparing agencies, use these guides as a checklist. Any advisor worth your time will answer every question in them without flinching.

To see how our process runs from the first call to the week after move in, read how it works.