Senior Living · Client Intake & Lead Response
Your best inquiries arrive when nobody is free to answer the phone
An adult daughter calls at 12:40 on her lunch break. Your front desk is signing in a hospice nurse and taking a delivery. Your sales counselor is forty minutes into a tour. The call rolls to voicemail, gets returned at 4:15, and by then she is back at her desk and cannot talk — and she has three other communities on her list.
That is not a staffing problem you can hire your way out of. Inquiries cluster at lunch, after six, and on Sunday afternoons, and no community can justify a counselor sitting by the phone for those windows. It is a coverage problem, which happens to be the exact shape of problem AI is good at.
Four ways an inquiry dies before it ever becomes a tour
The 12:40 call rings at a front desk that already has three other jobs
Your receptionist is also the concierge, the package room, the visitor log, and the person who walks a confused resident back to the elevator. When the community line rings during a busy stretch, the family gets voicemail from a business that is asking them to trust it with their mother. Nothing about that first impression is recoverable at 4:15.
Referral-portal leads land at 9:47pm and the clock starts immediately
A Place for Mom, Caring.com, and the discharge planner at the local hospital all send leads by email, at whatever hour the family filled out the form. The community that calls back first usually gets the tour — and you owe the referral fee whether or not that community is yours. Your team works it at 8:30 the next morning, third in line, on a lead you are already paying for.
The website form goes to a distribution list, not to a system
Somebody has to read the email, decide which community it belongs to, and retype it into Yardi, Enquire, or Sherpa. On a Tuesday that takes an hour out of someone's afternoon. On a Saturday it does not happen at all, and Monday's follow-up call opens with an apology instead of an answer.
Nurture stops after the second voicemail
Move-in decisions run on the family's timeline, not yours: a fall in March, a hospital stay in June, a decision in August. The inquiries that convert are the ones somebody kept touching for five months. A sales team of one per building does not have five months of follow-up capacity, so the family moves into the community that stayed in touch.
What changes when the phone is always answered
We put an intake agent in front of your community lines, your web forms, and your referral inboxes. It answers on the first ring — at 12:40, at 9:47pm, on Sunday — and it sounds like your community, because it is built from your own tour script and your own care-level language, not a generic script with your name dropped into it.
It asks what your counselor would ask. Who is this for. What happened recently. What level of care they are looking at. What the timeline looks like. Private pay, long-term care insurance, or a VA benefit. Which of your buildings is closest to the family. Then it books the tour into the right counselor's calendar, writes a complete record into your CRM, and texts the family a confirmation before they have closed the browser tab.
Anything it should not handle — an active crisis, a clinical question, a family who simply wants a person — routes straight to a human with the full context already captured, so nobody has to start over. It is a net under your team, not a wall in front of them.
What we build toward
- < 60 secFirst response, any hour
- Every inquiry — phone, web form, or referral portal — gets a real answer before the family opens the next tab. You stop losing the first-response race to a competitor who is paying the same referral fee you are.
- 6–10 hrsBack per community, per week
- The callback tag, the retyping into Yardi, the voicemail triage, the Thursday thread asking whether anyone followed up with the Hendersons. Hours that go into tours instead of into transcription.
- 0New headcount
- Coverage for lunch hours, evenings, and weekends without a per-building hire and without an answering service that reads a script and takes a message a counselor still has to call back.
These are the targets we size a build against, using your inquiry volume, your inquiry-to-tour rate, and your rate card — not averages borrowed from somebody else's case study. Running your numbers is the first thing we do, and it is free.
What actually gets built
Voice intake on the community line
Answers overflow and after-hours calls in your community's voice. Handles the questions families actually open with — what does it cost, do you have anything available, do you take memory care, what happens when she needs more help — and never invents a price you have not given it.
Referral-portal parsing
Watches the inbox where A Place for Mom, Caring.com, and hospital discharge leads land, pulls the family's details out of the email body, and starts outreach within a minute of arrival instead of the next business morning.
Tour booking against real calendars
Reads counselor availability by community and books the tour directly — including the Saturday morning slots families actually want — instead of promising a callback that becomes a second missed connection.
Write-back into the CRM you already run
Yardi Senior Living, Enquire, Sherpa, RealPage, or whatever your group standardized on. The record lands complete: source, care level, timeline, payer, and a transcript, so the counselor walks into the tour already briefed on the mother, not just the daughter.
Long-horizon nurture
The five-month follow-up nobody has time to staff. A per-family cadence that adjusts to what they actually told you, pauses the moment they re-engage, and hands the relationship back to the counselor when the family is ready to move.
Modeled, not claimed
What the math looks like for an eight-community operator
Eight buildings, one sales counselor each, roughly 45 inquiries per community per month across phone, web, and paid referral.
Assume four inquiries per community per week arrive when nobody can pick up — a conservative figure once you add lunch hours, evenings, and weekends together. Across eight buildings that is 32 conversations a week the group never has. At a normal inquiry-to-tour rate a handful of those were tours; at a normal tour-to-move-in rate, one or two a month were move-ins.
Set that against your average monthly rate and a single recovered move-in per month, across eight communities, pays for the entire build several times over inside the first year — before you count the referral fees you are already paying on leads that go unanswered.
- 32/wk
- conversations currently missed
- 1–2/mo
- move-ins the gap likely costs
- Week 1
- when we run this with your numbers
This is arithmetic, not a case study. It shows how we size a build; it is not a result any client achieved. We run it again with your actual inquiry volume, close rates, and rate card before anyone signs anything.
The three things operators ask us first
Families want to talk to a human. Won't an AI feel cold at the worst moment of their year?
It would, if we used it that way. The agent's job is the first ninety seconds — the part your team currently misses entirely — and it identifies itself as an assistant rather than pretending to be your counselor. Anything emotional, clinical, or urgent goes to a person immediately, with everything already captured so the family never repeats themselves. The honest comparison is not AI versus your counselor. It is AI versus voicemail.
Is this a HIPAA problem?
Pre-admission inquiry data can absolutely contain PHI, so we treat it that way from day one: a BAA in place, data kept inside your tenant, zero retention on the model side, and a deletion schedule set to your policy rather than ours. We also scope the agent so it never gives clinical guidance — it collects and routes, and anything clinical goes to your nurse.
We're on Yardi and it took two years to get it clean. I am not migrating anything.
You are not migrating anything. The agent writes into what you already run — Yardi Senior Living, Enquire, Sherpa, RealPage — through its API, or where the API is thin, through the same import path your team uses today. Nothing about your CRM changes except that records start showing up complete and on time.
Straight answers
Can one agent handle inquiries for multiple communities on the same phone number?
Yes, and that is the usual setup for a group. The agent asks where the family is looking and what care level they need, then routes to the right building and the right counselor's calendar. If two of your communities are a reasonable drive apart, it can offer both rather than losing the family to a competitor because your nearest building has no availability.
What happens when someone calls in a genuine crisis — a fall, a hospital discharge tonight?
Urgency detection is part of the scope. Language that signals an active crisis or a discharge within 48 hours triggers an immediate escalation: the agent stays warm with the family while it pages the on-call counselor by phone and text, and the record is flagged in the CRM before the counselor picks up.
How long does a build like this take to go live?
Four to six weeks from kickoff to live on one community, which includes recording and reviewing real call handling before it ever answers a family. Additional buildings take about a week each after that, because the hard part — your tour script, your care levels, your CRM mapping — is already done.
Do we keep our answering service?
Most operators drop it. An answering service takes a message; this books a tour. If you keep the service for clinical after-hours calls, the agent can hand off to it for anything that is a resident or family-of-resident issue rather than a new inquiry.
Find out what your unanswered inquiries are worth
The Pulse AI Operations Index scores where AI actually pays in a senior living operation — intake first, because that is usually where the money is sitting. Twenty minutes, and you leave with the number.