Understanding the market conditions around your portfolio sites is critical to long-term success. This article aims to show you a few ways to use VisionLTC to better understand your market and stay ahead of the competition.
We’ll utilize Analyses, Explorer, Labor, Construction, and News (Pipeline Insight) to take a deep dive in our portfolio. For information about sales strategies, see the Scenario: Sales & Marketing article.
To get started, make sure your current portfolio is set-up as a Group in your portal. Not sure how? Read this. Once that's ready, then run a Group Evaluation using your portfolio sites as the subject AND the benchmark. This will allow us to compare the market conditions of each individual site against the average of the entire portfolio.
We recommend using three (3) or more market areas during this process, including a small, medium and large market area. For our example, we used a 3-mile radius, 5-mile PMA Overlap (what’s PMA Overlap?), 5-mile radius, and a 20-minute drive time. Once you’ve run your analysis, go to the reports section and open up the details screen of your first site.
Once the analysis is done processing, open up the reports section and dig in.
Compare the target site against your benchmark group against your KPIs. If you’ve run this analysis in the past, compare the old report against the current report to see how things have changed, if at all.
Some categories and metrics that you’ll definitely want to review include:
Supply & Supply Growth (i.e. Supply Growth – Past 5 Years)
In-Migration & Living Alone Rates
Disability/Incidence Rates (i.e. Cognitive Impairment Rate)
Income and Income Growth Rates
Home Value (i.e. Average Home Value by Age)
Net Worth (i.e. Median Net Worth by Age)
Assess your site on each of your KPIs for all of the selected market areas, making sure to take note of positive and negative changes in your KPIs as your market area changes. Some questions that you may want to consider:
How close is the competition located to my property? Find the answer by clicking on the Supply tab and reviewing the Distance from Site column.
Are my Income, Home Value and Net Worth KPIs strongest in my smallest market area, or are these KPIs dependent on geographies farther away, and thus part of my larger market area?
Is my market area growing, and is it expected to continue to grow?
How are wage rates for key positions (RN, LPNs, etc.) changing in my market? Use the Labor module and the Labor Data tab to uncover information about the labor market your site is located in.
How expensive is it to build in this market area relative to the national average? Is this market attractive to outside investment? Open the Construction Cost tab to review local building cost estimates. Look at the National Construction Cost Index, what’s its value? Positive values mean that it’s more expensive to build in this market than the national average. Negative values mean that it’s relatively cheaper to build in this market that the national average.
What new projects are being discussed in the news? Go to the Site News tab to see articles about senior housing development projects located in your site’s general market area. This tab presents data for the MSA that your site is located in.
Once you’ve reviewed the reports for all of your site’s market areas, it’s time to move to Explorer and assess the nuances of your market area.
Explorer allows you to visualize data points through Dynamic Metric Layers and Marker Layers – including disability rate by age by market and the location of competitors. You can efficiently desk shop any market without leaving your seat.
Click on Explorer on your sidebar, then open the Analysis dropdown on the right side of your screen and select your analysis from the list. Now it’s time to start. Each dot on the map represents one of your communities, if you select it, then the map will re-adjust to show the market area for this site.
To really understand the nuances of this site’s market area, start by adjusting the current display metric on the map by clicking a metric in the Measure dropdown box. This allows you to view one aggregate metric for your selected site and market area. You can also turn on the Dynamic Metric Layer to view the metric values (per census tract) that underlie the market area.
In the image below, you can see the IADL Disabled Rate by census tract for the Raleigh market.
By enabling the Competition Data marker layer, you can see where all of the local competitors are relative to your community and to your target demographic.
In the example below, the 75+ Cognitively Impaired Rate to the south and to the east of the site - exactly where the competition is located. In this instance, competition is likely very intense for "frailty" qualified seniors.
Now that you know how to utilize these tools, it's time to put this method to practice.