The Continuum Care Complex Tour Bus

The senior hall up where I used to live has long had outings where they take twenty-five people on a bus to various continuum care complexes for tours and lunch and, of course, the sales pitch. I’d been on quite a few of them when I was trying to decide if I wanted to buy a condo, a cottage on lake or a smaller house. All I knew for sure was it was chancy for me to stay in such a big, lonely house. It was time to downsize while I could still do it on my own and not wait until a medical issue forced me out and others would have to make the critical decision for me as to where I'd live out the rest of my life. I didn’t know much about the CCC concept of living but after touring most of them in town and following their newsletters online I warmed up to the idea. I just didn’t think I could afford to buy into one. 

The guy who takes these buses around has a business like the national chain “A Place for Mom”. These kinds of placement businesses are not unusual but we usually don’t hear about them until you’re in a situation where you have to find a place in a hurry after someone has a medical issue that makes it impossible to go back to their home and a hospital social worker puts you in contact with one. They get a flat fee of several thousand dollars per placement they arrange, no matter where you end up and it’s paid by the CCC, the nursing home or other facility where you end up in. The fee is regulated by law so the placement people have nothing personal to gain by directing someone to one place over another; they can base their recommendations on the best fit for your income and situation. 

I’ll call this guy DeWayne because that’s his name and I had a personal appointment with him before finding the CCC I’m in now and he went over my finances, picked five places that he knew I could afford and would have personally driven me around to see each of them had I been ready to do a serious search. Two came off the list right away when I told him I didn’t want a “churchy place” and a third one was located too inconvenient for my family should I start needing them to oversee me more. DeWaye spent his entire career in this field and knows the social  structure and everything else worth knowing about the senior living places in town. I found this CCC on my own through a TV ad so he didn’t get a finder's fee but it was because of him that I was able to recognize a good deal when I saw it. Being one of the first 25 people to sign up it saved me thousands of dollars. The moral of this tale is that if you use a service like this get someone whose been in the business more than a minute and a half. There's a lot to consider besides price and location. 

I had occasion to see DeWayne again this month when I got wind that my old senior hall was bringing a bus load of people down to tour this campus and have lunch and two of my old Gathering Girls pals were going to be on the tour. So I talked to the head of the marketing department and asked if there would be time for me to show my friends my place while they were on the campus and to make a long story short, my apartment became one of the units the entire bus load of people toured and I got to have lunch with my friends. 

It was fun! I knew seven or eight people who came on the tour and I was excited to show my apartment because so few people had actually seen it since I moved in. They broke the group up into smaller groups and I got to hear them remark about my decorating choices. Mine was one of three on the tour and the other two were models, setup with sleek, modern furniture so mine was really different. The marketing director wants to talk later about featuring my place in one of their advertisements because “it’s fantastic!” in her words.

The only down side to having my place on the tour was the cleaning guy was off his schedule so I ended up having to clean the place myself beforehand. And on the up side the CEO finally got to put a face to the three emails I’ve sent him because I was wearing my name badge and the two marketing gals during their sales pitch kept saying my name, using me as an example and asking me questions. I’d only had one, one-on-one conversation with the guy since I started this whole process with the CCC and that was two and a half years ago, while a few others here are constantly flagging the CEO down to “take their problems to the top.” 

The marketing department afterward also asked me if I’d be willing to tag along on future tour groups and have lunch with them. I don’t know how I feel about that but at least it’s an indication that I didn’t make a complete fool out of myself. I was bubbling over with excitement, seeing my old friends. Not sure if I could recreate that enthusiasm for a random group or if I'd even want to try. ©