Five Things Residents Wish Your Sales Team Understood
The final session of Living Room Live 2026 had no benchmarks, no charts, and no data. Instead, Rachel Flanagan and Luke Boeche invited three residents of Canterbury Court in Brookhaven, Atlanta onto the stage and asked them to tell us how they got there.
What was life like before the move? What made the decision feel necessary? What did they notice during the tour? Who influenced them? What surprised them upon arrival?
Earlier this year, our Voice of the Industry (VOI) report asked more than 600 senior living sales and marketing leaders what they believe is working in their communities, then connected those responses to actual performance. The VOI findings consistently pointed to relationship-led behaviors like building trust, listening closely, personalizing experiences, involving the broader community, and creating interactions that help prospects feel understood, not sold to.
At Living Room Live, we heard those same themes from the other side of the decision. The panelists didn't talk about sales strategy. They talked about their lives before the community, the moment that made them choose, and life after move-in. The moments they remembered most clearly were the very things our research says matter: someone taking the time to understand what was really happening, a resident making a community feel real, a staff interaction that built trust without trying to, and the confidence that support would be there when life changed.
Voice of the Industry showed us what sales and marketing teams say works. These three residents told us why. Here’s what we learned:
Lesson #1: The reason someone calls is rarely the reason they give first
Everyone on the panel had been thinking about senior living for years. What moved them was something much smaller and more concrete.
For one panelist, it was three surgeries in two years and a fourth on the horizon. She had leaned on friends to get through the first three, and she did not want to do it again. When she asked Canterbury what they could offer, the answer was specific: 15 days of nursing assistance in a different building, three meals a day, and around-the-clock nursing care. That answer moved her timeline up by several years.
For another, it was an exceedingly hard night at home with a husband who had Alzheimer's. After she got him to bed, she sat alone on the sofa and realized she had no one she could call who would know what to do as his condition progressed. What would she do if she needed help at 2 am? Her husband's neurologist had already told them not to wait, to make the transition to a community while he could still make friends and get around. That night, she made the call.
A sales leader described the same dynamic in our 2026 Voice of the Industry survey, in her own words: she listens not just to respond but to truly understand, because that's where trust gets built and where families start to actually share what's going on rather than what they think they're supposed to say.
For marketers: The topical reason someone calls is seldom the real one. The work in a first conversation isn't moving someone toward a tour, but rather slowing down enough that they can tell you what's really going on, then staying quiet long enough for the second answer, which is usually the truth. This is measurable, too: discovery and needs assessment is one of the behaviors that separates performance groups most clearly, and communities with strong growth report leaning into it far more than communities with flat or declining occupancy.
For families: If you're making this decision or helping a parent make it, it's worth naming the real reason out loud before your first call with a community, even if it’s harder to say than "we're just looking." The communities worth choosing are the ones that make space for that answer instead of rushing you to a tour.
Lesson #2: The loneliest people don't always seem lonely
One panelist spent her career in journalism, then PR and marketing, then eleven years leading a community leadership program. She sits on Canterbury's residents' council and on its recycling, gardening, and marketing committees. By any measure, she's one of the most active people in the building.
That’s why it was surprising to hear that the underlying reason she came to a community was loneliness. At the idea of facing illness and more surgeries, she suddenly felt more alone, and that was hard to say out loud with so many friends sitting in front of her. Since moving in, she said, she hasn't felt lonely once: "It is impossible to be lonely there." That distinction matters more than it seems. The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness links chronic isolation in older adults to a roughly 50% higher risk of dementia, on top of its toll on mental health.
While Voice of the Industry doesn't measure loneliness directly, it does ask sales teams what actually drives a family's decision. The top two answers, community feel and atmosphere (39%) and staff quality and culture (38%), outrank care capabilities, physical investment, location, and reputation combined. Her story is a lived example of what that 39% and 38% feel like.
For marketers: People rarely say "I'm lonely" as their stated reason for touring. They say "I want to be around people" or "I want somewhere with things to do." Community feel and staff culture score highest because they're the visible proxy for what families are actually trying to solve, even when no one names it explicitly.
For families: If loneliness is part of what's driving the search, it's a legitimate reason on its own, separate from care needs. How a community feels, i.e., whether people there seem to know each other or whether staff have been there a while, is just as important as floor plans and care levels.
Lesson #3: Residents sell your community better than your sales team
One panelist deliberately visited Canterbury on an ordinary day rather than an event day. It’s the same way she used to tour colleges, she said. She wanted to see the place when nobody was performing. She went to a lunch where the CEO and CFO were speaking, and ended up at a table with a resident who walked her around afterward. She told her husband that day she was going to be friends with her. They still have dinner together.
Later, a friend visiting from Florida for Thanksgiving came along when the panelist went to pick out her apartment. They walked the halls together, and the staff spoke to the friend exactly the way they spoke to the two of them. She was a guest, not a lead. By the time they reached the apartment, she'd asked the marketing person whether there was another unit just like it, and moved in three weeks later, from another state, after one visit. It was not because of a floor plan, but because she'd spent an afternoon among the people who live there.
This isn't unique to senior living. Nielsen's research has repeatedly found personal recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising that exists, with 88% of consumers saying they trust a friend's recommendation over any paid channel.
Across portfolios, non-professional and professional referrals consistently convert faster and hold onto residents longer than online channels. Nobody assigned this panelist her friend from Florida. She just did what residents who love where they live tend to do.
For marketers: This is the case for a resident referral program. The Top Performers data backs this up directly: referral sources outperform paid and organic channels on both conversion and length of stay. If you have a program, the next question is whether your residents even know it exists.
For families: Ask to talk to a resident without staff in the room. What a current resident says, unprompted, about daily life will usually tell you more than a brochure or tour script.
Lesson #4: Everyone in the building is part of the tour
One panelist described the moment the decision got made for him and his wife, and he was not there for it. His wife was visiting a friend in another wing when a caregiver came in to help the other resident in the room. The caregiver was kind and professional… and that was it. That was the moment. He said what they found afterward was that everybody is like that, caregivers and residents both.
Another panelist, who spent her working life in ministry, said the staff at Canterbury seem to hold their jobs the way people hold a calling rather than a job. She's friends with security, servers, housekeeping, and maintenance. They know her name, and there's a board in the building that tells them when her birthday is coming.
Nobody could have staged either moment. They happen because of who a community hires and what's expected of them on an ordinary afternoon, whether or not a prospect is on-site.
For marketers: The tour isn't the sales conversation. It's where a family checks whether what you told them is true. They're watching who greets them in the hallway and how staff talk to residents who aren't being sold anything. Staff quality and culture are the second-highest reason families choose a community, right behind the community feel itself. Long-tenured teams signal stability, and families trust communities where staff stay.
For families: Watch the staff when they think no one's watching. Notice how they talk to residents in the hallway and whether they know people's names. That's a more honest signal than anything said during a scheduled tour.
Lesson #5: Outdated ideas about senior living get corrected with a visit
Before she ever visited, one panelist's mental image of senior living was rows of people sitting silently in rocking chairs. It’s a bleak notion she carried from an earlier generation's experience with the industry. Visiting erased that notion. It wasn't a brochure or an ad that changed her mind. It was walking the halls.
Independence, once she was inside, was a residents' council the CEO attends and answers to, board meetings hosted in community meeting rooms, exercise classes six days a week, and water volleyball on the seventh (residents against staff!)
For marketers: Outdated mental images are still the default for prospective families, and those old perceptions are only correctable through direct exposure with a tour, a conversation, or a resident's own account. If your best material is a floor plan and a features list, you're answering a question the person with the rocking-chair image in their head isn't asking.
For families: If your picture of senior living is decades old, it's worth treating a tour as information-gathering rather than a formality before a decision you've basically already made. What you picture and what's actually there may be two different things.
What we learned, put simply
One panelist said that women reach an age where their hair goes gray and they become invisible, and that nobody at Canterbury is invisible. Another put it more simply: "I expected a lot of old people. But the thing I discovered being there is, it's a place of life… Nobody goes there to die. We go there to live.”
If you're a marketer, this week:
Add one question to your discovery script about what's changed in the last six months, and train your team to sit in the answer instead of moving straight to the tour.
Write down the exact answer to "what happens if I have a health event" (days, levels of care, names) so every person on your sales team says it the same way.
Ask five residents whether they know your referral program exists.
If you're choosing a community, this week:
Ask to speak with a resident alone, without staff present.
Visit on an ordinary day, not an event day.
Notice how staff talk to residents who aren't being sold anything. That's the tour that matters.
Death is inevitable. Being lonely while you face it is not. The old story about senior living, the one this panel kept quietly correcting us on all afternoon, was never really about the buildings. It was about whether anyone was there. That story isn't the only option now. People get to choose a different one.
This panel gave us a glimpse into what actually moves someone from thinking about senior living to choosing it, and what made them choose that particular community. Our Voice of the Senior research, coming later this year, answers many of these same questions at scale: what makes someone open to senior living in the first place, what moves them from "someday" to reaching out, what makes a community stand out, and the misconceptions holding people back.
Keep an eye out for our Voice of the Senior (VoS) report later this year.
