Senior living companies are evolving their models to better suit the needs of universities as they seek new partnerships with them.
Among the latest such projects is a new intergenerational community from senior living company Varcity coming together near Texas A&M’s main campus in College Station, Texas, with an opening date slated for 2027. As planned, the community will house residents villas, townhomes and concierge apartments, with an array of services and perks including a university ID and access to lectures, sporting events and university facilities. Varcity also has a similar project in the works with Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Varcity won over the university with a community design that fit into the university’s plans for Century Square, a 60-acre mixed-use development adjacent to the university’s main campus that includes dining venues, luxury apartments, shopping centers and a variety of event spaces. The mixed-use development is coming together in collaboration with real estate developer Midway and is meant to provide a place for children, students and seniors to mingle and share spaces. Varcity’s response to a request for proposal from the university, and its “compelling vision” to appeal to lifestyle offerings and services to former students, helped win over the university in the end, Clint Cooper, executive director of the Texas A&M real estate office, told Senior Housing News.
“They had a great proposal with thoughtful design … additionally, the deal structure they proposed commits significant ‘skin in the game’ to this project,” Cooper said. “They really captured the spirit of what we have already going with Midway there at Century Square.”
Varcity did not land a partnership with a well-known university by sheer luck, according to Co-Founder and CEO Les Strech. Instead, the company has a larger plan to reimagine the senior living experience as something that is more amenable to college life and university’s priorities.
“It took three years of work to get to where we are today,” he said. “We’ve built our platform based on the university development timeline … the ability to communicate some of those things are what’s really helpful in speeding up the process.”
Universities are also shifting their priorities in the years ahead with an eye on their “new customers” – older adults. Specifically, academic institutions are seeing the writing on the wall in the form of a demographic cliff ahead, and are broadening campus life to fit the wants of more people than just recent high school graduates.
“Now that doesn’t mean that a couple hundred senior living residents are going to replace all of your lost students or all your lost tuition,” said Andrew Carle, an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University who has held a variety of senior living leadership positions over the years and currently manages UniversityRetirementCommunities.com. “But it does mean that they are looking for new avenues to address either excess capacity or new avenues to bring some critical mass to their campus that would otherwise be lost.”
How Varcity stands out among other university projects
The university model for senior living is not new. According to Carle, the first university senior living communities came together in the mid-1980s at Iowa State University and Indiana University. He currently estimates there are between 75 and 100 such communities in the U.S. today, including at Stanford, Duke, Notre Dame, Penn State, University of Virginia, University of Florida and the University of Alabama.
Many university-based retirement communities follow the life plan community model, with a complete continuum of care for residents, including memory care and skilled nursing.
Varcity is taking the opposite approach with a model that differs from other university-based retirement communities by largely avoiding emphasizing its higher levels of care and focusing on more active adult offerings and lifestyles. The company sought to move away from the traditional university-based senior living model and teach universities that “they don’t actually want traditional senior living on campus or near campus,” Strech previously told Senior Housing News.
The company’s pitch to universities centers on listening and understanding what a university wants from them. Strech doesn’t describe Varcity projects as “senior living.” In fact, when pitching the concept to universities, Strech stresses that the company’s projects are aimed at older adults who want to move into senior housing but don’t need to. He said he often leads with, “If you want senior living, you shouldn’t pick us.”
“That usually leads to a discussion,” Strech told Senior Housing News. “The reason why is that no one in America has set a life goal to one day move into senior living.”
Varcity first pitched Texas A&M on its vision for a new senior living community around 2022. At the time, the university was taking new requests for the Century Square development after changing some of the details in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Relationships with universities tend to take between two and three years to build and execute on, and Strech added a lot of time was spent learning the macro environment around higher education and attending higher education conferences rather than senior living ones. The end result comes about from a four-year, multi-million dollar brand investment, Strech said.
Strech and Varcity weren’t the first people to pitch the university on a new senior living concept, but they were the first to actually get one over the finish line. Cooper added he was won over by how the Varcity team seeks to “maintain the quality design” of Century Square while catering to older adults, potentially former students, who desire to live in rental housing on or near campus.
Dozens of Texas A&M alumni have reached out to Varcity with interest for the community.
Varcity also is continuing to garner interest from multiple schools other than Texas A&M and Purdue, and Strech said that other Division 1 schools have contacted the company with interest in starting a new project.
As the number of more traditional students declines, older adults are helping to fill that gap in a small way at communities like Lassell Village, a community on the campus of Lassell University in Newton, Massachusetts. Universities like Lassel are attracted to senior living projects as a way to boost census on campus and fulfill their missions at the same time, according to Zehra Abid-Wood, president of Lassell Village.
Senior living communities can benefit from shared resources from the university. Lassell Village shares IT and security services with the university, an “unheard of” cost for the community alone to carry.
University projects remain tricky
If senior living operators want to work with universities, they will need to get used to moving at a slower pace. Unlike in the commercial real estate world, university projects are subject to approvals from governing bodies and boards. Senior living operators and universities must also negotiate what residents get in terms of programming and how deep any partnership will run.
Winning that approval and landing on concrete details can take years and push project timelines to between five and 10 years from conception to completion, Carle said.
“University time is not real time. It will take them five years sometimes just to decide to lease you a piece of land,” he said. “You have to be very patient. They’re very bureaucratic and extraordinarily slow moving.”
Abid-Wood added universities are particularly difficult to navigate internally, and can be “almost impossible” to navigate from the outside.
“Higher education is very unique. Each organization has its own way of being navigated,” Abid-Wood said. “Until we figure out a way to crack that and make sure we can get the buy in … you could have the president of the university say one thing, but every department operates autonomously in many ways. It is challenging, operationally.”
However, for the senior living communities able to navigate those challenges, there are plenty of ways that more independent living and active adult properties appeal to seniors. Abid-Wood said around 90% of the population at Lassell Village moved in because of its affiliation with the university and they “like the idea of moving to that rather than feeling like moving to a retirement community.” Even if they never take a class, she said, they feel relevant by association, leading to the success that projects like Varcity are seeing, especially when it brings in more diverse forms of revenue.
“I think universities are at a crisis point right now, in general, especially with what’s happening nationally,” Abid-Wood said. “I think they’re the most open they’ve ever been … we’re at an inflection point with people’s perspective of what’s possible and what the right thing to do has been shaken.”
