Belmont Village Senior Living’s Chief Marketing Officer Carlene Motto spoke with the Senior Care Growth podcast on hiring and employee culture. Read an excerpt from the transcript below or click here to listen to the complete podcast.
Winston: Welcome to this episode of the Senior Care Growth Show. My name is Winston. I am super excited today to be joined by Carlene Motto. She is the Chief Marketing Officer at Belmont Village Senior Living. Today we’re going to be talking about how you can hire a top tier senior living sales team to beat out competition. Carlene, welcome to the Senior Care Growth Show.
Carlene: Thank you so much, Winston. It’s a pleasure to be here. As you said, I’m Carlene Motto. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer with Belmont Village Senior Living. I’ve been in the industry for a little over 25 years. In all facets of health care, from assisted living to independent living; memory care. Early in my career I worked in acute care and also skilled nursing. I currently have responsibilities for the sales and marketing organization at Belmont, which includes innovation, product development, social media, public relations, marketing efforts, and all of our communication in the company. I absolutely love the industry. I’m excited about the growth, the challenges that we currently face, and all of the great opportunities that we have to continue to improve quality for the seniors that we serve and also the employees.
Winston: Yeah. That’s awesome, Carlene. Well, I’m excited to have you on the show. Obviously you have a wide breadth of responsibilities and you’ve got just a ton of great experience and so given that that depth of experience, maybe you could shed some light on a question of how has the industry changed in recent years? What have you seen in the senior living space? How does it look today versus say five, 10 years ago?
Carlene: Sure. There’s no denying that occupancy levels are a critical factor that keeps many senior housing operators up at night. Nick just recently released their first quarter 2018 data that reflected senior housing occupancy for the primary markets fell to 88.3%. That was a 90 basis point decline from one year earlier. AL occupancy is at an all time low rate since Nick began. Previous low for assisted living was 86.5 % in 2009. I think most would agree that the decline in occupancy in our primary markets is the result of annual inventory growth. AL pay seen annual absorption for both assisted living and independent living. Many operators were also hit very hard in the first quarter by the flu season, which did impact our occupancy levels and now many of them are just starting to recover. New supply like we’re going to talk about today. New supply does not just put pressure on occupancy levels, but our ability to recruit and retain best in class sales associates and employees at every level. So I’m delighted that we’re going to spend some time today talking about, on the podcast, human capital people and how that’s really different in this senior sector. How people truly do make the difference.