Senior Living Communities: Operations Management and Marketing for Assisted Living, Congregate, and Continuing Care Retirement Communities

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Summary: Senior Living Communities:Operations Management
Review: Pearce validates the durable truths as they apply to managing senior living communities, sparing us the babble that pollutes so much of current literature. His insights are forged from experience and it is certainly evident in each chapter. An easy to read and follow step by step process for anyone wishing to understand basic managing of senior living communities. His practical teaching tools are for business leaders today. I highly recommend it for new and experienced managers.

Rating:
Summary: Senior Living Communities:Operations Management
Review: Pearce validates the durable truths as they apply to managing senior living communities, sparing us the babble that pollutes so much of current literature. His insights are forged from experience and it is certainly evident in each chapter. An easy to read and follow step by step process for anyone wishing to understand basic managing of senior living communities. His practical teaching tools are for business leaders today. I highly recommend it for new and experienced managers.

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Summary: Detailed Best Practices in the Assisted Living Industry
Review: The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) estimates that the number of senior living communities has doubled in the past ten years and will more than double from present levels before the turn of the century. Wall Street has discovered the assisted living industry. With estimated annual revenues of $14 billion the industry is expected to grow dramatically to $30 billion by the year 2000. Two years ago there was only one publicly traded assisted living company, today there are sixteen. In 1996, assisted living companies have raised 19% of the total amount of capital raised in the entire healthcare industry, compared to 6.9% in 1995 and less than 1% in 1994. The industry showed phenomenal growth in the past year with many top operators more than doubling their bed capacity. This dramatic growth and development of the senior housing business has introduced a number of participants who have learned the complicated task of delivering quality and consistent se! ! rvices to the elderly primarily by trial and error. While many operators have successfully survived the learning curve, for others it has been an expensive and frequently disastrous attempt to capitalize on the growing demand for senior housing not withstanding the toll on seniors who bought into the dream and were later entangled in the developer's nightmare of financial difficulties. Operators, developers, lenders and community staff are flocking to conferences by the thousands, eager for practical answers to their management intensive challenges. Never before has there ever been any complete collection of best practices for managing retirement communities. The book details, operating methods, staffing ratios, departmental management, cost containment, proven sales and marketing strategies, financial analytical techniques, financing alternatives, design, budgeting, human resources, and comes complete with a 30 page operations audit which details operational standards! ! of excellence in every department! The author has summariz! ed his fifteen years of experience managing 80 communities in 23 states into this pragmatic fact filled text.

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Summary: Senior Living Communities
Review: Though this book may have been intended as a how-to for Benjamin Pearce's colleagues in the trade, it is thoroughly readable and complete. As someone who contemplates eventual entry into a Continuing Care Retirement Community, I found explanations for much that I have observed in the community where my own parents reside as well as what I have seen in the near dozen that I have toured. The intelligent consumer could not find a better way to be educated about the subject than to delve into the outline of management and practices that the author details. This will be a useful handbook for me for hopefully many years to come.

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Summary: The Standard Text for the Industry
Review: Throughout this book, Ben teaches us about the important connections between successfully managing the business and always acting as a caring professional at the same time. This unique approach educates leaders of these types of facilities to positively enhance the business itself in addition to the lives of the people that live and work in them. It combines lots of technical and behavioral applications that are proven strategies for success. This book is a pioneering work and valuable for anyone interested in this exciting industry.