What does a move-in from your own website cost?

A placement agency's fee is roughly a month's rent and it arrives as an invoice attached to a named resident. That makes it the one channel in the whole mix with an honest, countable cost per move-in.

Every other channel is measured in enquiries and tours. So the comparison an operator most wants to make — what a move-in from our own website costs against what the agency charges for one — cannot be made, and the aggregator keeps the volume by default.

Uploading the agency's placements as a source file puts both on the same axis. Sometimes the answer is that the agency is good value, and that is a finding worth having in writing rather than a suspicion.

Senior living CRMs are built around the sales process, and the sales process ends at the deposit. What the resident then pays every month, and how that changes with level of care, lives in the billing or property system.

That means the honest version of this report needs two exports and a join, and any vendor promising a single-click answer is either only using the CRM's own source field or quietly ignoring the revenue. Saying so up front is more useful than pretending otherwise.

The join is the responsible party's contact detail, which both records carry because both need somebody to contact.

Two channels can produce move-ins at the same cost while one produces residents who stay nine months and the other residents who stay two years. Cost per move-in rates them identically and is wrong by more than double.

Because the match is on the resident's household, every month billed credits the channel that produced the enquiry, and level-of-care increases credit it too. That is where much of the revenue growth in assisted living actually comes from, and no enquiry-based report can see any of it.

The person who filled in the form is an adult child, often in another state. The person on the billing record is their parent. A join on name finds nothing and the report reads as though the website produced no move-ins at all.

The match runs on the contact detail that appears in both files — the family member's phone or email, which the CRM keeps on the prospect and the community keeps as the responsible party. Weak links are flagged for a person to confirm rather than counted.

Senior living sales run through stages that behave very differently: a tour, a deposit, a move-in, and sometimes a deposit that is refunded when a family's circumstances change. Counting deposits as conversions flatters whichever channel is best at generating interest, which is frequently not the channel that produces residents.

A stage column keeps them apart, so a deposit is reported as a deposit and billed rent is reported as revenue. For an operator reporting occupancy progress to an owner, that separation is the difference between a number that has to be restated and one that does not.

It also makes deposit-to-move-in conversion visible per channel, which is usually where two apparently similar sources turn out not to be similar at all.