The easiest way to explain what a Placement Agent does is to equate them to a Real Estate Agent. Like a Real Estate Agent looking for the best house, a Placement Agent is looking for the best fit of a community or a care home for your senior. To start, a good Placement Agent will assess your senior, understand their care needs, discuss their wish list, understand your geographic area of interest, and get dialed in on your budget. Then they go to work making calls, understanding pricing, previewing homes and communities, and narrowing the selection to a few choices that best meet your senior’s needs.
Like Real Estate Agents, Placement Agents are typically free to the family. That’s right, FREE! They get paid by the community or home once your senior moves into a place you toured together. The community or home gives them a one-time payment as a thank you for giving them a new client because of their introduction.
Of course, you are not required to use a Placement Agent to navigate the process. You can go to websites and look up all the licensed communities and care homes you need. But then what? Where do you start? What place is best? In your lifetime, you may need to search for placement for one parent, maybe two. But you cannot possibly have the institutional knowledge a Placement Agent will have in the short time you have to do your search. A more critical question is, why would you even try?
That is why it is important to understand why using a Placement Agent can be critical to your success. It’s what they do for a living! It’s their job to know all the communities, the services they offer, the prices, the amenities, their strengths, and their weaknesses. They can give you third-party stories about past placements they’ve made in communities or board and care homes, including how families felt about the care or the experience. They will be plugged into a community of care partners, with an ear to the ground about successes and failures at communities, staffing shortages, or changes. In short, they will be an advocate in the senior living space to ensure that when they tour and help a family find assistance for their loved ones, it matches the needs of the senior.
In short, it just isn’t possible for you to do the search thoroughly, and with the knowledge required, in the time frame you’re often given to make the move. In addition, it’s impossible for you to know the finer points of the communities and homes, like who is best with dementia clients, who does a better job with activities, and so many nuances of the senior living space. In a nutshell, it’s their business and their full-time job, so take advantage of their expertise to make the most of your available resources
