A few months ago my dad called me in a panic from his home in Texas. My 73-year-old mom had just had knee surgery and the hospital was about to release her. Problem was, she was still feeble and wobbly — not at all ready to go home. Would I get on the internet and find a place where she could safely stabilize?
Sounded easy enough, but after several hours searching the web for nursing homes in my mom’s ZIP code, perusing outdated websites and calling around to find out which facilities had openings, I felt frustrated and confused. If our society is aging as rapidly as everyone says, why hasn’t the technology caught up to meet the impending need? And, when time was of the essence (as it was for my mom), why would finding a place be such a time-consuming process?
So, no surprise that the story of Seniorly — a startup that’s tackling some of these issues — caught my attention. Specifically, it’s launching a new tool designed to make booking a short-term stay in an assisted living community as easy as booking a room on a site like Hotels.com or Airbnb.
“The senior housing industry is a highly fragmented industry,” says Arthur Bretschneider, Seniorly’s founder and CEO. “There are just so many options out there. And it’s really hard to find all these options.”