New Senior Living Referral Service Launches With Industry Backing, ‘Dating Profile Approach’

A group of senior living industry stakeholders are backing a new referral company aiming to match prospective residents with communities in the same way an online dating service might.

The new service, Referah, officially launched Tuesday. Unlike other more traditional lead aggregator services, the service is meant to give operators a smaller stream of more curated leads as opposed to a wide but shallow pool.

The service works by connecting prospective residents and their families with “family connection agents” who during a live conversation gather data on social interests, health, finances, geographic location and other special needs.

Chicago-based Referah will then use that information to match prospects with the three senior living communities in their desired area that best fit their preferences and needs. Operators working with Referah will only hear from the top three most suitable matches.

The company is partnering with digital marketing and internet company AmericanEagle.com to help power the tech. Overall, two years of design, planning, and engineering went into creating the new referral technology.

Referah is enrolling users with a financial structure that combines both membership-based fees with flat-rate move-in fees. The company’s launch is happening nationwide.

By taking the “dating profile approach,” the service is meant to help cut through the noise of the typical referral process, according to President and CEO Lesley Durkan.

“We must leverage better tech architecture and user experience, improved communication flow, a deeper understanding of what makes a good match, and constructive partnerships to move from the old model where prospective residents and community teams are alienated with unnecessary work,” she said in a press release about the company’s launch.

Investing in the new company is a list of industry stakeholders including Frontier Management CEO Greg Roderick, who is both investor and serving on the board; Charles Turner, who is CEO of Kare; and operator Priority Life Care.

“These are the types of companies that our industry needs to be not just thinking of, but supporting,” Priority Life Care CEO Sevy Petras told Senior Housing News. “And that’s one of the reasons why it was important for me to become an investor.”

Other backers include Alan C. Plush, who is CEO and Partner of HealthTrust; Jacob Gehl, chief vision officer with Blueprint HCRE; Calson Management; The Bridge Group Construction Founder and Bridge the Gap Podcast Co-founder Lucas McCurdy; Joe and Cindy Couey and Kare.

Shaking up the referral landscape

Referah’s launch will add a new player to an increasingly crowded senior living referral sector which already includes companies like A Place For Mom and Caring.com. But it also will serve as a potential disruptor for the sector.

Priority Life Care’s Petras said she hopes the new service will help make sales staffers’ jobs easier by streamlining the referral process. While she stressed that all referral companies have something to offer, she sees Referah as a significant new tool in the senior living sales process.

Petras added she sees Referah as less of a Tinder for senior living sales and more of an upscale executive matchmaker service.

“Referah is very unique in that it was developed by people who have been in the industry for a long time, and they really understand what individual communities’ programming, offerings and costs are,” she said. “When they give a referral to the individual community, they’re saying, ‘Hey, we’ve explained to the consumer what they’re looking for, and … here are the three best options for them.’ So, I think they’re really going to help make our sales people’s jobs at the building level easier.”

That curation aspect and the fact that prospects can weigh in on their preferred care, pricing, apartment style and location are what “sealed the deal” for Frontier CEO Roderick.

“Although I only have a modest interest in Referah, I am not short of enthusiasm about their success and appreciate the savings that my communities will realize,” Roderick told SHN. “We continue to have a positive relationship with other referral companies and can feel great about another one to team up with for even more move-ins in the coming year.”

For Kare CEO Turner, the service represents yet another point of sorely needed disruption for the senior living tech space.

“Just like Kare has disrupted the Staffing industry and saved communities thousands, I see Referah doing the same thing to the referral companies [by] bringing them into the 21st century and using technology to replace high cost and inefficient and misaligned referral vendors.”

He added that he hopes the service will ultimately replace the “highly costly middleman” of senior living referrals.

“I think it will open up an enormous qualified customer base, and will make sales and marketing people far more efficient with their time,” he said.

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