Designing and Funding Your Senior Living Facility

After your building master plan, focus on market drivers.

In our recent blog post, Taking Your Senior Living Facility from Concept to Completion, we discussed the facility planning steps to take when launching a new building project. After evaluating your market, site, and program offerings, it’s time to develop design concepts and elements that will improve your marketability and meet the needs of your residents and staff. Once those are in place, you will be able to create your financing plan, bringing you into the most exciting stretch of facility planning: implementing your project.

Making your facility attractive to staff, residents

It’s no secret that competition among senior living facilities is high. Families not only search for the best care for their loved ones, they also search for a facility that brings vitality to seniors’ lives. As a result of these market demands, increasingly, designs for new and remodeled senior living facilities showcase:

• Separation of skilled and long-term care areas from independent and assisted living areas
• Decentralized nursing areas
• High-quality interior design elements, like residential finishes and natural lighting
• Private units with private baths and European-style curbless showers
• Expansive public gathering areas
• Restaurant dining experiences
• Beautiful and secure outdoor courtyards and walkways

These days, when individuals transition to life beyond their own house, they want to live in a place that reflects a sense of home. Our senior living architects stay atop these trends to deliver design concepts that fit your market and meet the needs of your program and service offerings. And, we don’t stop at one design concept. We create multiple concepts to fit your site and budget while ensuring your facility exceeds expectations of current and future residents and staff.

Budgeting for your senior living facility 

Budgeting for your project should go beyond building costs to include:

• Acquisition and site development costs
• Infrastructure costs, like site utilities and municipal requirements
• Furnishings, fixtures and technology
• Financing and project development costs

Once this budget is complete, we encourage you to develop five-year financial projections to ensure long-term sustainability. This financial model should take the following into consideration:

• Occupancy projections
• Census and payer mix assumptions
• Other revenue sources
• Operational cost projections
• Debt service projections

The budget, financial model and building design concepts are integral to securing financing. In addition, your lender likely will request information on facility ownership and your senior leadership team.

We also encourage you to consider forms of financing outside of traditional bank loans. To get your senior living facility project off the ground, you may also want to develop investor partnerships or seek funds from national venture capital companies.

If you have questions about senior living facility design or financing, we are here to help. Contact us via email, or call 920-969-9344 for a free consultation.