Insights in Seniors Housing & Care
I’m excited to tell you about new reports that have been launched on our NIC MAP® web client platform. Called the NIC MAP Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment and Wage Reports, they aim to help our clients assess and benchmark local labor pools and wage rates.
More specifically, the reports provide metropolitan area, state and national level employment and wage data for occupational job categories associated with the seniors housing and care sector. They provide data that will give operators, developers, and capital providers the ability to benchmark occupation-specific wage rates being used in business plans and pro forma models against national and state-level figures. They also offer users the means to compare metropolitan area wage rates within states for relevant occupations. Among the benefits of this new report are simplifying the task of acquiring and downloading data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) into property level P&L statements and modeling specific wage rates for each of the labor groupings within an organization.
The catalyst for these new reports were client requests to have a better understanding of local labor market conditions and costs. With roughly 60% of a typical operator’s expenses associated with its workforce, labor is a critical component of operations at a seniors housing and care property. And, today with the U.S. experiencing tight labor markets across broad-based industry sectors and geographic locations, more attention than ever is being paid to labor availability and wage rates. Competition for employees to fill positions ranging from housekeeping and maintenance managers to CNAs and LPNs increasingly extends beyond seniors housing and care operators to other industry sectors as well. Anecdotal stories of decision makers aborting or postponing development or expansion plans or choosing one market over another due to a lack of skilled labor are ever more common. Moreover, tightening labor markets and rising wage rates are directly affecting the bottom line.
Under the federal government’s industry classification system (NAICS), NIC has accumulated data from five separate BLS data files, collected from the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) surveys, to facilitate easy access to occupational-level wage data for the two seniors housing and care industry categories tracked by the BLS. Specifically, the reports provide state and national employment data and corresponding annual/hourly wages across occupations for the skilled nursing and CCRC/assisted living sectors. In addition, the reports provide state-wide metropolitan area comparisons of key occupational job titles and display employment levels along with corresponding annual/hourly wages across these occupations.
An in-depth user guide and documentation is available in the Document Library of the NIC MAP Client Portal. Two examples of applications of the data included in the report can be found here, while a few of the standard charts can be seen below. Take a look and let us know if you find the reports helpful.
Beth Burnham Mace is a special advisor to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) focused exclusively on monitoring and reporting changes in capital markets impacting senior housing and care investments and operations. Mace served as Chief Economist and Director of Research and Analytics during her nine-year tenure on NIC’s leadership team. Before joining the NIC staff in 2014, Mace served on the NIC Board of Directors and chaired its Research Committee. She was also a director at AEW Capital Management and worked in the AEW Research Group for 17 years. Prior to joining AEW, Mace spent 10 years at Standard & Poor’s DRI/McGraw-Hill as director of its Regional Information Service. She also worked as a regional economist at Crocker Bank, and for the National Commission on Air Quality, the Brookings Institution, and Boston Edison. Mace is currently a member of the Institutional Real Estate Americas Editorial Advisory Board. In 2020, Mace was inducted into the McKnight’s Women of Distinction Hall of Honor. In 2014, she was appointed a fellow at the Homer Hoyt Institute and was awarded the title of a “Woman of Influence” in commercial real estate by Real Estate Forum Magazine and Globe Street. Mace earned an undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College and a master’s degree from the University of California. She also earned a Certified Business Economist™ designation from the National Association of Business Economists.
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