Which channels produced entrance-fee contracts?

A life plan community sells a contract, not a lease: a refundable or declining entrance fee in the hundreds of thousands, plus a monthly service fee for life. Households take years to decide, usually with a priority deposit and a waitlist in the middle.

That makes the gap between the campaign and the cash the widest in any segment we serve. A two-year lag defeats every tag-based tool by construction, because no identifier survives it.

Reconciling a contract export against the inquiry history closes the gap without needing anything to have been installed two years ago. The household appears in both files; that is the whole mechanism.

Priority deposits are refundable and many never convert. Counting them as sales flatters whichever channel is best at generating interest, which is usually not the channel that produces signed contracts.

Every row in the sales file is counted as revenue, so refundable deposits belong outside it: export entrance fees and monthly fees as your finance office recognizes them, and keep deposits in a separate list. That distinction is the one most likely to change how a board reads the marketing budget.

With new development at its lowest level in more than a decade and occupancy recovering, the marketing question has shifted from filling units to filling them with the right contracts at the right rate.

Ranking channels by entrance-fee revenue rather than inquiry volume tends to reorder the list, because the channels that produce the most inquiries and the channels that produce the largest contracts are rarely the same ones.

Most of what a life plan community sells in any year is turnover: a cottage or apartment vacated through a move to health care or a death, refurbished, and sold again. A smaller and much noisier part is an expansion or a new building, marketed with a launch, a sales center and a budget to match. The two are funded differently and they draw on quite different demand. One is a steady operational task running all year and the other is a project with a launch date, and they are almost never measured against each other.

Turnover inventory is unpredictable in timing and specific in form — one two-bedroom cottage, available now, at this rate. Expansion inventory is known months in advance and sold off plan. A channel that is excellent at converting a depositor list into an expansion contract may be almost useless at filling an individual cottage that came free last Tuesday, and the blended report will not tell you which you have bought. Filling one specific cottage that came free last Tuesday is a matching problem rather than an awareness problem.

A column marking each contract as expansion or turnover inventory, mapped as Product / service, shows the two as separate lines, each with how much of it traces to a channel. It matters more than it sounds, because the marketing spend that fills turnover units runs all year at a low level and is the first thing cut when an expansion campaign needs funding — often on the strength of a cost per lead comparison that was never measuring the same thing twice. The result is a year of turnover marketing judged by a comparison that was never valid in the first place. Splitting the two by column costs nothing and forecloses an entire category of that argument.

A contract signed this quarter may trace to a seminar registration from two and a half years ago. In that time the sales counsellor who took the inquiry has probably left, the CRM may have been replaced or reconfigured, the agency running the media has changed at least once, and the picklist of lead sources has been edited by somebody trying to tidy it up. The institutional memory that a source field depends on does not last thirty months. None of it was designed to be read back thirty months later by somebody else entirely.

What does survive is the raw record: a name, a phone number, an email address and a date, sitting in an export from whatever system was in use at the time. Those files can be uploaded years later and matched against a contract list produced today, because the join is on the household rather than on any identifier either system generated for its own purposes. Those records were produced to send invitations, chase deposits and reconcile a sales pipeline, which is why they were kept properly and why they remain legible years afterwards.

This is the practical reason a segment with the longest cycle in senior housing is one of the easiest to reconcile after the fact. Nothing had to be planned. A community that never measured anything for three years can still produce a defensible ranking this month, from files it kept because it needed to send people invitations and take their deposits. The only requirement is that somebody kept the inquiry lists. Most communities did, in an inbox, a spreadsheet or an old export nobody got round to deleting, and that is sufficient.