You are given an address of a plot of land or an existing community, how do you evaluate if the site is a smart opportunity? The VisionLTC platform can be used to evaluate the immediate area of interest. This evaluation process explains how to determine if the property would be an appropriate fit for your company’s needs.

The first step in evaluating a single site is to run a Site Evaluation (NOTE: You can use this process with multiple sites by running a Group Evaluation). This analysis type allows you analyze a site on up to four (4) market areas. For this process, we recommend running two (2) or more market areas: one small and one medium - appropriate for the site location. For example, when running an analysis on the VLTC office in Raleigh, NC, we used market areas of 3 and 5 miles. Alternatively, we could have used drive time buffers of 10 and 15 minutes.

When trying to determine if a single site could be successful for you, use a benchmark group to compare your target site versus a group of top performers. This benchmark group can consist of your own assets, your competitor’s, or a combination of the two.

In the Reports section, compare the site to the benchmark group and evaluate how well the proposed site performs against your KPIs. Make sure to look at metrics that are most important to you for a potential investment. Some of the categories of metrics to examine include:

In the below example, you can see how the VisionLTC office address compares to an 81-property subset of the Welltower portfolio in North Carolina. If we were looking to develop in an area with strong population growth rates, this site looks favorable when compared to the NC Welltower assets.

If the site is favorable when compared against the benchmark group, the next step is to look at the direct competition. In the Competition Report or the Explorer tool, look to see how close the competition is and what their product mix is.

Other important functions that you may find useful are the Dynamic Metric Layers. By displaying the Dynamic Metric Layers of income qualified seniors ($35K+ Income Qualified 75+ CY), incidence rates (ADL Disabled Senior Rate), home value (Median Home Value CY), etc., you can visualize the market conditions of each census tract around your target site. Does your proposed site fall into a favorable area or are there better opportunities in other locations?

Below you can see that the Dynamic Metric Layer displays the median home value in the market. Based on this map, we can tell that the wealthy neighborhoods are to the immediate east and south of our site.

In the second image, you can see the number of 75+ Households with incomes over $35K. In your analysis, look for trends in the same census tracts. Are the target demographics central to one census tract or spread throughout the market area? In this example, the census tracts to the east and south of the site that represented the higher median home values also indicate more income qualified seniors.

Now that you have conducted the analysis, compared the data with other assets, and looked at the geospatial landscape, ask yourself - is this location a good opportunity? Only you can answer that.