Silverassist Expands Digital Footprint With Acquisition Of Senior Living Referral Platform Caring.com

SilverAssist has announced the acquisition of national senior living referral platform Caring.com, a move that will help expand the company’s growing digital footprint into referrals.

SilverAssist’s current senior assistance network includes Oasis Senior Advisors, a national network of advisors that help older adults understand senior living resources in their area, and ElderLife Financial, a company that helps older adults and their families pay for senior living. The move to acquire Caring.com bolsters SilverAssist’s network with a referral company and a platform of millions of users searching for information regarding senior living services.

SilverAssist did not disclose terms of the deal.

The acquisition creates a company with a network of services that now includes qualified and digital referrals and financial navigation, all in an “operator-first” manner. As leaders of other referral companies have mentioned, the landscape for searching for senior living online is evolving.

According to SilverAssist CEO Greg Mason, users search for senior care approximately 26,000 times in an hour alone. That frequency reflects urgency, but also a need for transparent and educational advisory services that help ease the transition into senior living. He believes that a company like SilverAssist is uniquely positioned to help families given its scope covers not only online referrals, but navigation and financing.

“This acquisition gives us a much stronger digital footprint,” Mason told Senior Housing News Monday. “The bigger payoff for us is our ability to do things differently than what the industry has come to expect.”

Overall, SilverAssist’s goal is to empower families “to navigate the complex realities of aging,” he added.

Mason said he believes senior living communities are “burned out” from the low move-in conversion rate of the leads they receive from digital aggregator partners. He added that third-party referral firms like Caring.com or A Place For Mom (APFM) must rethink the online referral process and put greater emphasis on personalization and building relationships between operators and prospects with localized data collection.

This is in the name of providing senior living operators with stronger, better-qualified leads. By collecting more data from families from the start of the discovery process, SilverAssist can share with operators to help them make a sale. At the same time, it helps families find the right fit sooner.

“It’s pretty clear that digital aggregators have cast a long shadow on the industry in their approach of how they collect leads, and how their call centers drive a mentality around generating lead credit,” Mason said. “But it comes at the expense of the family experience.”

Some operators, like Sonida Senior Living and Brookdale Senior Living, are bolstering in-house sales and marketing functions and creating call centers to improve lead quality and flow.

These changing dynamics come as search habits and buying patterns of families are changing as AI summaries and AI answer engines become more widely available online. But Mason said he feels traditional online search functions will remain consistent due to currently strong demand for senior living.

Mason is positioning the SilverAssist suite of websites to “appeal to AI search,” but that it remains a “fraction of the volume” currently. 

“We believe that there will be tremendous opportunities in AI search both from an organic perspective but from a paid perspective as well,” Mason said. “So I think it will be very interesting. Opportunities for folks like us to leverage AI and data over time to develop more enriched information that can enhance what someone can discover about a community and a community’s capabilities.”

Senior living operators are throwing sizable resources and time into data collection efforts. But too much information or too many leads can cause burnout and inefficiency. Operators also don’t always have back-end software that can handle resident biographical, social and financial data.

That’s why Mason sees local knowledge and a deeper market presence as the key to better referrals and ultimately leads.

“There is so much more than what meets the eye,” Mason said. “That’s an amazing level of personalization that can only be delivered by local knowledge, and that’s what we’re trying to focus on.”

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