Laurie, after our personal experience with three family members trying to find senior living options and not really knowing where to turn, my wife and I started seniorDECISION.com in September 2007.

The site is solely dedicated to consumer ratings and reviews in senior care and housing. Like several sites that have involved themselves in this discussion, we provide a great way for consumers to sort through all the provider choices available.

Our primary research indicates that families, especially if they are out of town, are often in a panic to find a senior provider solution. The goal of all of these tools should be to narrow down the choices to two or three for the purpose of a visit.

Consolidation is already taking place in this industry, but you are right, more and more of these type of companies are coming up each week. This is not a bad thing. At the end of the day, consumers will decide with their clicks who stays and who goes.

Laurie - as others have said - THANK YOU for addressing this important issue. When I was trying to help my father select a senior living facility 18 months ago, I was continually frustrated that I would find sites claiming to offer a comprehensive database, but then it would only pull up a handful of options around my hometown of Orlando, FL. I knew there had to be more choices. What I didn't realize till later was that I was only seeing facilities that had PAID to be listed. That's what lead me to create Florida Senior Living Advisor, which includes a comprehensive, searchable database of facilities in Florida. I've only been online about 5 months, I'm still definitely a work in progress, and right now this is simply a "labor of love" (ie - my only funding is the little I get from Adsense). I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to compete with the big guys, but as long as I continue to get a great response from visitors to my site, it will all be worth the effort. I hope that as we raise awareness of the need for transparency and disclosure in senior directories, ultimately we can create a better system for everyone.

Free Web sites are often a gravy train for eldercare service providers
During these tough economic times, more and more stressed caregivers are gravitating to the web for help and guidance. With the plethora of "free" internet referral, placement, and on-line directory services for families in search of eldercare products and services such as homecare and assisted living, it is important to know exactly how these services make their money and how it might affect you and your loved one in the end.
Yes, they do provide their service to you at no charge; however the service providers that they refer you to pay them for their services. Since most employees of these "free" services work on a commission basis, it stands to reason that most will refer to providers who have agreed to pay the "free" agency a fee for your information rather than the provider that offers the services that best suit your loved one's needs.
Typically, these "free" service providers are only interested in assisting families that can afford to pay privately for eldercare and at best send a cursory response referring people to their local Area Office on Aging office if they are not "financially" qualified. The "free" services that assist families regardless of their ability to pay, sadly, are the exception, not the norm.
There are also a host of listing or directory services which are actually lead generation services for senior care providers. They ask questions directly related to your care needs, finances and geographical requirements and then in turn "broker" your information to providers that pay them for your contact details. One overwhelmed caregiver that completed one of the online questionnaires on the web site of a leading provider of qualified lead generation/listing services, received 16 telephone calls in a 30-minute time frame from a variety of eldercare service providers who had paid this listing "broker" for her information. Not only was she barraged by the calls, but also it happened at work since she included her work phone.
So, "buyers beware" ……. be sure to read the fine print on these web sites so you are prepared to deal with the "cost" of utilizing these so called "free" services.

Laurie- Great topic- I see you've sparked some discussion from industry which is great. I think your post is spot on. We're already starting to see some consolidation in the industry, and I suspect it's just the tip of the iceberg. We'll continue to see great stories like the wonderful Gilbert Guide/Caring.com news of the past week... and we'll also see sites scuttled aka TeeBeeDee.com.

I suspect the growing number of online resources is related to a number of factors including the "sexiness" of the boomer/senior demographic, the relative ease of building a site today, and the lack of brand leaders in this space thus far. Those of us that can find the right mix to distinguish our brands will live on, and those of us that don't will be working on other projects (can you say fishing??? :)

Thanks for your great work-
Chris
The Senior List.com

Interesting post, Laurie. When I started Gilbert Guide over 5 years ago, I had a difficult time even trying to find a directory and now we are inundated with them. I do tend to agree with Adam on this one.

Gilbert Guide was the first site that implemented a ratings system covering the whole spectrum of senior care (housing AND services). We actually began our business focusing on quality of care – sending experts out into the field to perform unbiased quality assessments of facilities and services and providing a quality seal for those that met or exceeded our strict standards and criteria.

But as far as professional reviews go, the consumers won’t pay for them so no one can provide them but the government. That’s it! It is no win situation. So we created a national directory that includes every provider in every category so people will know all of the options in their area. All we can do is provide the public information for the consumers to make the best decision for themselves, provide them the best decision making tools and give them the space to provide feedback to help other consumers along with way. We also promote other resources, e.g., GCMs, that are extremely helpful to assist them in making the best decisions. Our Care Planner always suggests GCMs and other professionals who are important resources in these decisions.

While we still believe that is the best model to serve consumers. We now only utilize the seal of approval for our service categories (non-medical homecare, gcm) based on the way they practice their business. We moderate user reviews from consumers. We receive numerous reviews daily, but there are so many thousands of facilities (and we just launched the directory in March of 2008) so I imagine saturation will take some time.

As far as transparency goes, like RetirementHomes.com, we have always disclosed our entire team to the public. Our address and contact information has been available from every page so people have been able to pick up the phone and talk to me at any time. And they have. It's how I learn about what our readers need. If we aren't serving people well, we aren't going to get people using the site. Our job is to continue getting people to find places and services that fit their needs at the time they need them. It is a necessity to figure out a business model so we can serve these people in the best way possible. I hope we can do a better and greater job at it so we can serve more. That will be a service worth continuing.

*There is one other review website called The Senior List out there that is dedicated solely to reviews.

**One other note, yesterday we announced that we joined forces with Caring.com! So we are part of their family now and looking forward to building out Gilbert Guide's directory to help even more people.

Thank you for sharing this; most directories are simply that ..a directory (similar to the yellow pages or any other type of advertising media), our directive is to provide detailed  content and contact information on senior living options across the continuum of care.  

In regard to your final  point, we are not a regulatory body nor do we profess to be one. Our  team and their bios are  listed on our website, as well as the ways in which a property can advertise themselves.  Our business is to market properties and provide information to those who are looking online for senior living options.

Even if we were to vet the properties ourselves, who is to say that our set of criteria is the benchmark (who qualifies the qualifier?) and then who’s responsibility is it to ensure ongoing compliance?

I think that you have identified a much larger issue; the need for national standards across all types of senior living options (IL, AL, ALZ). Further to this issue, is that once these standards are established how can they then be  communicated to the mass (directories and senior portals may be a good outlet).

Until these standards are in place, I would recommend that any person do their absolute due diligence, prior to making a final decision as to which senior living option they choose to move in to.

L-

Your bringing to light the issue of the legacy senior care directory players and their inherent conflicts of interests in serving families was spot on (and incredibly timely). The fundamental problem is that, at the end of the day, it is the care provider that is the customer of these legacy businesses - not the families themselves. That is why there is such a reluctance to shine the light of transparency on the whole decision-making process.

I would encourage you to take a look at OurParents.com - we launched early this Summer with a goal of being the largest truly independent senior caregiver directory on the web, and I am happy to day, we are succeeding.

We combine care quality data from Medicare and other sources with user reviews, price information, and other useful information to paint a more complete picture about any given care provider. The whole experience is modeled after good travel search engines, where you can easily trade off price, location, quality and special needs to see which alternatives meet your aging loved one's unique situation.

Beyond the core search experience, we also provide simple-to-use tools like our Care Options Advisor, which eliminates all the confusing jargon that has crept into the senior care industry over the years, and allows a family to complete a simple 3 minute survey that then lays out the major senior care options, and how they each fit again the family's unique situation.

Finally, no Senior Care solution can ignore the huge challenge of paying for senior care. We have lots of useful information on the available government programs, and make it easy for a financially challenged family to narrow their search for Medicare/Medicaid eligible care facilities, should that make sense.

Most importantly, our service is absolutely free to consumers, and we don't charge either the consumer or the care provider for our matching service. That independence allows us the ability to show the good, the bad, and the ugly about any given provider. We think that's an important founding tenet of our business, and why we are seeing the uptake of OurParents.com by consumers.

Please give it a try, and tell us what you think - we'd love to make it even better.

Regards,
John McKinley
CEO & Founder
OurParents