If you’re a sales or marketing director at a life plan community and you believe Continuing Care at Home competes with your independent living waitlist, I want to say this plainly: the data doesn’t back you up. Not even close.
Let’s Start with the Market You’re Ignoring
You’ve got a multi-year waitlist. Congratulations, but it’s not the flex it sounds like. A waitlist that long isn’t proof of overwhelming demand for what you’re selling. It’s proof that most of the people who want to age well are choosing something you don’t offer at all.
A 2025 survey found that 94% of older adults want to age in place in their own home, in their own community. The 2024 AARP Home & Community Preferences Survey found that while most people want to age at home about 50% doubt their current community can meet their needs as they get older, and 44% expect they’ll eventually have to move anyway.
Sit with that middle number for a second. Half of older adults don’t believe their current living situation will hold up and they’re staying put regardless. That’s not a captive audience waiting for your independent living tour. That’s a market actively telling you what it wants, and it isn’t a two-bedroom cottage or apartment on your campus.
Furthermore, for those who do want to make the move, we know that we do not have enough IL units to continue to meet the demand so what will happen to those individuals who want what you are selling but are stuck waiting.
Let’s Name the Competition Claim and Actually Test It
Here’s the argument, stated as bluntly as sales directors actually think it: “If a prospect could choose CCaH, they might choose that instead of moving into IL , so CCaH is siphoning off my conversions.” A senior leadership member told me once “how will I explain to my board the decrease in our conversions because of this program.”
Test it. I believe this statement is unfounded because for that to be true, the prospect has to be a genuine toss-up between two things: moving onto your campus now or staying home with a wellness membership. Look at who actually inquires about CCaH versus who tours IL, and they are rarely the same person at the same decision point. The IL-ready prospect has already made the psychological move most of the time. They’ve decided to leave the house; they’re comparing floor plans and dining plans. The CCaH-eligible prospect has made the opposite decision. They’ve told you, in some form, “not yet,” or “not ever.” That’s not a population sitting on the fence between your two products. That’s a population that already chose door two, long before you had anything behind door two to offer.
So when a sales director says “CCaH competes with IL,” what they’re actually describing is a hypothetical prospect who rarely shows up in the data: someone equally happy to move in or stay home. Ask your own team for real examples: how many actual households in your pipeline this year were genuinely deciding between an IL move-in and a CCaH-type arrangement? Not “could theoretically have gone either way” rather actually sitting across the table weighing both. In most communities, that number is close to zero, because those two decisions happen at different life stages, driven by different triggers.
If CCaH genuinely cannibalized IL, you’d expect to see IL move-ins decline in step with CCaH membership growth at communities running both programs. That’s not the pattern in the field. It’s not competition. It’s two different sales conversations, for two different decisions, at two different life stages. Treating them as rivals is how you end up defending market share you were never actually holding.
CCaH Doesn’t Compete for That Waitlist. It Recovers What Falls Off It.
The prospects CCaH is built for are the ones who were never going to make it onto your IL waitlist math in the first place. The 94% who want to stay home, the 44% who know they’ll eventually need more support but aren’t ready to leave their house today, the people at position #340 on a list that clears forty units a year.
You’re not choosing between selling them IL or selling them CCaH. You were never going to sell them IL. The real choice is between engaging them now through a program built for exactly this population, or losing them permanently to a home care agency, a family caregiver arrangement, or simply nothing. Why not keep them under your organizational “umbrella”?
If your community has a three, five, or ten-year waitlist, run this number honestly: how many people on your original inquiry list from a decade ago never converted, never got a call back, or aged out before their name reached the top? That number is your real competitor. It isn’t CCaH. It’s attrition you’ve never had to name because nobody made you count it.
CCaH gives you a way to keep those relationships engaged and revenue-generating instead of letting them evaporate quietly. Refusing to build it or embrace it doesn’t protect your IL pipeline, it just guarantees you keep losing that other market to somebody else without ever putting a number on it.