✨✨General Discussions

It would be helpful if posts to this blog would include the name and location of your CCRC. Different States have very different regulations for CCRCs. Thank you!

Wow! A 10% increase is a lot. Try to find out if residents get their entrance fee back if they have to leave.

Our independent living CCRC has just been informed that a 10% increase in monthly fees will be imposed for the coming fiscal year. We have been told that about 4% of this increase is due to insurance costs going up.

Is anyone else experiencing increases due to insurance costs?

Thanks!

To answer your question, our owners would follow the contract.... if it was a refund contract, they'd get either the 50% (if that's what they chose) or the 90%. All other contracts amortize to zero after 4 years. I don't think any "exceptions" to the contract would happen.

Sorry ... I just re-read what I posted. The original outsourcing of management by the hospital to the CCRC folks in the next county was 2017, not 2019. Hence, the 5 years of management before they bought us.

We are in North Carolina. We were built and owned by the county's non-profit hospital system, opening in 2003. In addition to the CCRC (45 cottages; 110 IL apartments; 12 AL rooms; 12 Memory rooms; 24 SNF beds for the CCRC's continuum of care), the CCRC's Health Care unit was attached to a 81-bed SNF open to the public with both Medicare and Medicaid beds. All this was built on the scraped hospital grounds --- a new hospital (our owner) was built across town. In 2013 that local hospital district merged with a larger non-profit hospital/clinic system in the next county. In 2017 management was outsourced, with our becoming run by a larger non-profit CCRC located in that adjacent county. Its own CCRC was traditional Life Care and about twice our size. In 2019 our hospital owner decided to divest itself of the public SNF on our campus by selling off the licenses (North Carolina is a Certificate of Need state, so the asset was the 81 licenses, not the bricks and mortar and furnishings. They managed to sell 54 of the 81 licenses. The remaining 27 beds are dual certified -- Medicare and Medicaid. So we currently have a large empty building on campus.) With that decision to sell and empty the public SNF, our staff had to find new places for its 65 patients DURING COVID, if you can imagine the challenge of that. In 2022 our CCRC was sold by the hospital district to the CCRC group that had managed us for 5 years. THEN our new owner discovered things (again, they had managed us for 5 years so I don't really understand why action wasn't taken sooner and the corrective action more "spread out"). They discovered the "variety" of contracts within what was routinely offered. What is routinely offered? Someone moving in could choose either fee-for-service or equalized pricing Life Care. There were two Life Care refund contract options (50% and 90%) in addition to the option of a non-refund LC contracts that amortized to zero refund after 4 years. Fee-for-Service never had refund contracts, just the 4-year amortization. Our new owner "discovered" upon owning in 2022 that the refund contracts had been underpriced and stopped offering them. Why they didn't pick up on that sort of thing sooner, while managing us, I'll never know. Then they "discovered" inequities of what residents were paying for occupying the exact same units. Oldtimers had to "catch up" with what newcomers were paying. Hence the substantial adjustments being communicated now for 2025 --- that they justify as being "the fair thing to do."

Some residents now fear they will run out of money. I had asked our "new" management back in 2017 where the Resident Assistance Fund balance (benevolence for when people can't fully pay anymore) was located in the financials of the annual Disclosure Statement that North Carolina requires -- it took 5 requests with two Executive Directors to FINALLY get the answer in 2019. When I saw it, I said "that's not enough" and I'm no financial genius. And on the books it was combined with the Holiday Fund for employees. In response, the very young Exec Dir said, "Yeah, I know. We'll be working on some philanthropy strategies soon." Never happened, and in 2025 this fund will run dry and the 2015 budget shows the shortfall as a line item in the 2015 operating budget, affecting everyone's monthly fees. The "normal increase" just announced for 2025, for those who moved in recently, is 5.5%. Old-timers are getting that 5.5% folded into, say, the 22% increase for 2025 (each "adjustment" was individual and communicated individually). Also communicated at the same time was the resident's next big adjustment step for 2026 -- it's 13.3% for those who got the 22% this year for 2015. On top of that will be whatever the "normal" increase is --- say it's 5% for 2026, so the total increase would be then be 18.3% for 2026.

Apologies for all the detail above. I couldn't stop myself.

Jennifer,

From having researched a lot of CCRCs, I don’t think it’s unusual for all residents, new and existing, to be charged the same monthly fee for the same type of apartment (depending on size, floor, view, etc.).

But what seems very unusual, and really abusive, is switching out of the “vintage” system (higher fees for new residents) by raising the fees of existing residents to the level for new residents.  If residents faced with a 22% increase, as you report, have to leave the CCRC, are they going to get their entrance fee back?

Our monthly charges adjust annually, on the anniversary of the Residence Agreement. The amount of the adjustment is "3.5% or in proportion to the change in the Consumer Price Index of the United States Department of Labor, whichever is greater." The specific index is the BLS All Items Index, All Urban Consumers, U.S. City Index. When I signed my contract I was told that the increase had always been around 3.5%. Well, who would have anticipated COVID.

The CPI spiked after COVID and it adjusted every month. The result was that, depending on in which month someone moved in, their increase could have been 8% or more. This varied over the next couple of years with some residents experiencing higher percentage increases than others, but for all, that increase of course raised a new monthly fee from which future years' increases would be calculated. Needless to say many were upset and some worried about the impact on their budget. We gave thanks for a substantial Benevolent Fund safety net!

Management comment was that in some years people in one month may have a larger increase than others, and another year those in a different month would have a larger increase, and "it all evens out." We are not so sure about that but there is no transparency with regard to the impact of variable increases over the population as a whole, other than the published "this month's increase percentage."

We are a single-site 501(c)3.

That sound egregious! What state do you live in?

In our community, the monthly fees are based on the floorplan and are the same for all residents with that plan. The way that they have handled incentives in the past is to waive the monthly fee for new residents for some number of months. During COVID, when a large number of units were available, they offered up to a year's worth of waived monthly fees.

The entry deposit is also based on the floor plan and another incentive they have offered is to discount the entry deposit for certain apartments that may be in a less desirable location. That allows Sales to publish standard pricing sheets and avoid resident confusion.

Wow! I was not aware of this practice! No, the fees at Applewood (Massachusetts) are the same for everyone - new or old - though the percentage may differ slightly by size of apartment. Loomis Communities (non-profit, 3 communities including Applewood) has followed the practice of imposing a 3% +/- increase every year. So if there is a year when there would be little need for an increase that large, they do it anyway. The purpose is to have a pretty even and predictable fee increase for residents. We did have one year recently when inflation was really bad and the fees increased by 5+% but we're back to about a 3% increase for 2025.

Nancy Eddy

nbeddy@gmail.com

I'm wondering if it's a common practice for a CCRC to have the current on-campus residents "keep up with and pay" the same monthly rate as newcomers are paying for the same unit. In other words, if someone moved into the "Lago" floorplan unit 12 years ago, their monthly rate, by experiencing the common 5%, 6%, 5.5% over the years that all residents experience, hasn't kept up with what Marketing has to ask nowadays for the "Lago." Now they're telling lots of residents that everyone needs to become equal to newcomers moving into units of equal size. Many long term residents arrived during the recession that began in 2008 and got "deals." Now, our new owners are tell several residents that they have to catch-up, with some experiencing 22% increases in their monthly fees for 2025. Some of our residents are in shock. If I learn from you all that "yes, that's the way we do it at our community," maybe I'd feel better about all this.

Hi Kay, we’re in Towson, Maryland at Blakehurst, an LCS owned property.

Ziegler is an investment bank specializing in the senior living, healthcare, education, and municipal sectors.

Hi Garland,

Where are you located? Are you living at Ziegler? Is it a CCRC?

Kay Roberts

Medford Leas (a CCRC)

Medford, New Jersey 08055

Bill, I'm checking in to see what's happening fee wise for 2025. Here we endured an 8.5% increase in 2023 and a 4.9% increase for 2024. We're in discussions now with managment for a 4.5 or 4.75 percent increase. (This becomes a negotiation annually due to the Fair Share concept being employed here.) I note more locally they're at a 4.5% average increase, while Ziegler's CFO annual forecast reports a 4% average to date. Our managment believes this is skewed down due to rurual reporting, which operate with reduced labor and building costs. Thanks in advance for your reply, GM

Charlestown, Catonsville, Md, is 4.5 % for 2023.

Ann MacKay

We live in Bethany Village, a not for profit CCRC in Asbury Communities in southern Pennsylvania. Our montly rate increase was 3.5% for 2024.

I live in a not-for-profit CCRC in Northern Virginia. Our 2024 onthlybfee increase is 3.95%.

The 2024 annual fee increase for Ingleside at King Farm in Rockville, Maryland is 4%. Last year's increase was 9%. We are a nonprofit.

Bill Samuel