Senior living CRM: what it has to do, and the systems communities actually use

What is a senior living CRM, and how is it different from a general one?

A senior living CRM is a database of families and referral sources with a sales process built around how a move-in actually happens. That process differs from a software sale or a car sale in four ways. The person inquiring is usually the adult child, not the person who will live there. The decision takes weeks or months and often stalls after a hospital stay. There are two kinds of contacts to manage, the family and the professional who referred them. And the finish line is not a signature. It is an assessment, a care level, a unit and a lease, so the sales record has to become a resident record without someone retyping it. A general CRM assumes one contact, one deal, one close. The senior-living-specific systems come with the two-contact model, the care levels, the unit inventory and the referral source list already built.

I built and sold a software company before Care Growth, and I evaluate systems for a living. The first question I ask of any CRM is what happens in the first five minutes after an inquiry arrives at 7 p.m. on a Saturday. Most of this post follows from it.

What does a senior living CRM have to do?

Eight jobs, in the order we most often find them missing when we audit a community’s setup.

1. Capture every inquiry in one place. Web forms, phone calls, website chat, paid ads, referrals from A Place for Mom and Caring.com, walk-ins, and the discharge planner who calls the executive director directly. If phone leads live in a notebook, every report from the CRM is wrong.
2. Alert a person within minutes. A push notification to a phone, with the family’s name and what they asked. Not an email to a shared inbox that someone checks after the 2 p.m. tour.
3. Schedule and track tours. The date, who gave it, the outcome, the no-shows.
4. Run follow-up cadences. Day one call, day two text, day four email, day ten call, with tasks that survive the sales director’s vacation.
5. Credit referral sources and campaigns. Which professional referrer, which ad, which page on the site. The source has to be set when the record is created, from a fixed list, not typed in later from memory.
6. Show the pipeline against occupancy. Inquiries, tours, deposits, move-ins and move-outs next to available units and the waitlist.
7. Integrate with the website, call tracking and the ad platforms. The form posts straight in. The tracking number logs the call as an activity. The UTM parameters from the ad ride along on the record.
8. Hand off to billing and care. The move-in becomes a resident record with the assessment and the rate already attached.

Every senior-living-specific vendor claims all eight. The differences are in how much is native and how much is a partner logo. We cover how to tell the two apart at the end.

Which CRMs do senior living communities actually use?

Six systems come up in nearly every conversation we have with an operator. We checked each vendor’s own site in November 2026 for what it says it is and what it bundles. Prices appear only where the vendor publishes them.

Aline

Aline is what Enquire, Glennis Solutions and Sherpa CRM became. The three announced their merger in October 2022 and took the Aline name on May 4, 2023, calling the combined product "a senior living operating system" (Aline). Its site today lists the CRM next to billing, care, eMAR and accounting modules, with named partners including A Place for Mom, Caring.com, Seniorly and HubSpot (Aline). The CRM page promises referral attribution that can "accurately attribute move-ins to the referring party" (Aline CRM). No pricing is published.

WelcomeHome

WelcomeHome calls itself "The CRM for Senior Living & Home Care" (WelcomeHome). It is the only senior-living-specific vendor here that publishes prices: Core at $550 per community per month and Enhanced at $700, with Enhanced adding call tracking with five lines, a visual email builder, expanded automated sequences, post-tour surveys and campaign-to-move-in attribution (WelcomeHome pricing). Its integrations page names each property, care, call tracking, referral and chat partner (WelcomeHome integrations), which no other vendor here does as plainly.

Yardi Senior CRM

Yardi positions Senior CRM as "a mobile-friendly CRM solution designed for senior living" inside its Senior Living Suite, next to Voyager Senior Housing, EHR, eMAR, Senior IQ and the RentCafe Senior Living Portal (Yardi). The current version, RentCafe Senior CRM IQ, shipped May 28, 2024 with a Communication Hub for calls, texts and emails, lead stages that automate common tasks, and dashboards for waitlists, occupancy and campaigns (Yardi press release). The case for it is the hand-off into Yardi EHR at move-in. If you are not on Voyager, it is hard to justify.

Continuum CRM

Continuum is "designed specifically for CCRC, Life Plan, and Life Care Communities", and its feature list reads that way: entrance fee and deposit structures, merged agreements, a workflow engine for long sales cycles, inventory that tracks each residence from move-in to move-out, and referral network tracking (Continuum CRM). Its site names no integration partners. Wrong tool for a rental assisted living community, often the right one for a life plan community with a priority waitlist.

Eldermark

Eldermark sells EHR, eMAR, billing and a CRM under the line "Senior Living Software That Runs Your Community" (Eldermark). The sales side is the Growth Suite, "Three tools. One connected system": the CRM, marketing automation for immediate responses, drip campaigns and tour reminders, and eMedia, a managed digital marketing service for paid search, social, SEO and call tracking that feeds results back into the CRM (Eldermark Growth Suite). No pricing is published.

HubSpot

HubSpot is not a senior living CRM, and plenty of single communities use it anyway. The free tier covers two users and 1,000 contacts. Starter is listed at $20 per seat per month, and Sales Hub Starter allows up to 15 pipelines and one personal meeting link (HubSpot pricing). You do not get care levels, unit inventory, the two-contact model or a referral-source report. For a 30-bed community with one salesperson who will actually open it, that trade is often fine.

Why doesn’t a CRM fix response time by itself?

Because a CRM records the inquiry. It does not call the family. Bild & Co. analyzed more than 250 web and phone mystery shops of senior living communities in 2023 and found that 53% of web inquiries got no response within two hours, 13% of calls never got a response at all, and the inquiry-to-tour rate was 22% (Senior Housing News). Those communities had CRMs.

Here is how it goes wrong. The form posts into the CRM at 6:40 p.m. The alert goes to the sales director, who is at dinner. An automated email leaves within a minute, thanking the family and promising a call. The task appears on tomorrow’s list. By 10 a.m. the daughter has toured the community across town, because someone there picked up.

The automated email is not a response, and families know it. A response is a person on the phone who can answer "do you have a room" and "what does it cost". There are two ways to get one within minutes. Staff it yourself: a rotation across sales and the front desk, phone alerts, a backup for nights and weekends. Or hand the first call to a team whose only job it is, which is what our lead handling service does: a person on our team calls new inquiries within minutes, qualifies the family, follows up and books the tour onto your calendar. We laid out why who answers matters more than who generates the lead in SEO agency or full-service partner.

Either way, make the CRM measure it. Time to first human contact, per inquiry, reported weekly. If the system cannot produce that number, it is because nobody logs the first call, and that is the first thing to fix.

What should you report from a senior living CRM?

Three numbers per source per month: tours, cost per tour and cost per move-in. Most CRM reporting stops at inquiries by source, which flatters the channels that produce unqualified contacts and buries the referrer who sends two families a year who both move in.

The monthly report we build from a community’s CRM, call tracking and ad accounts has seven lines:

1. Inquiries by source. Organic search, Google Business Profile, paid search, paid social, each referral directory, each professional referrer, walk-in.
2. Time to first human contact. Median, and the share under five minutes.
3. Tours by source, and the inquiry-to-tour rate for each. The rate is the quality signal.
4. Cost per tour. Spend on the channel divided by tours from it.
5. Move-ins by source and cost per move-in. The number that decides next month’s budget.
6. Professional referrer scorecard. Referrals, tours and move-ins by hospital, home health agency and placement agent.
7. Pipeline against open units. Deposits and scheduled move-ins next to available units and expected move-outs, by care level.

A worked example with round numbers, not a client’s: a community spends $3,000 on Google Ads in a month and gets 30 inquiries, 9 tours and 2 move-ins. That is $100 per inquiry, $333 per tour and $1,500 per move-in. The same community gets 6 inquiries from a hospital discharge planner, 4 tours and 2 move-ins, for the cost of two lunches. Only the first shows up as a top channel in an inquiries-by-source chart. For what a sensible budget looks like next to those numbers, see paid ads.

Getting these numbers needs three things set up before the first lead arrives: a source field set at creation from a fixed list, call tracking numbers that log the call to the record, and UTM parameters carried from the ad through the website form. Our analytics service exists because almost no community has all three, and without them the CRM report is a guess with a chart on it.

Single community or a group: how should you choose?

For a single community, the right CRM is the cheapest one the team will open every day. If you already run Eldermark or Yardi for billing and care, the attached CRM wins on the hand-off alone. If you do not, WelcomeHome is priced per community and publishes the number, and HubSpot is free until you outgrow it. What matters more than the choice is whether a phone buzzes when a form comes in and whether anyone answers it. Our assisted living page covers what the rest of that setup looks like for one building.

For a group, the questions change. You need roll-up reporting, permissions so a sales director sees her community and the regional sees all of them, lead routing when a family inquires at the wrong location, and one source list every community uses the same way. That is where a general CRM starts to hurt. We work through this with senior living groups often enough to have a short list of questions for the demo:

• Show me the alert on a phone, from a form submitted during the demo.
• Show me tours by source for last month, across all communities, without exporting to Excel.
• What happens to a web form at 9 p.m. on a Saturday?
• Which integrations on your partners page are live today, and which are "available on request"?

For a CCRC or life plan community, the entrance fee and the waitlist change the sales process enough that Continuum is usually the first demo.

What goes wrong after the CRM is bought?

The same four things, in almost every community we look at. None of them is the software’s fault.

• Phone calls are not logged. Half the inquiries come by phone, and the sales director writes them on a pad. Fix it with call tracking that creates the activity automatically.
• The source field is free text. "Google", "google ads", "web" and "internet" are four sources in the report and one in reality. Lock the list.
• The integration was a logo. The partners page said Yardi. The live connection was a nightly CSV someone had to upload. Ask to see the data move during the demo.
• Reports nobody opens. Put the seven numbers above on one page that goes to the owner monthly, and delete the rest.

Care Growth works with assisted living communities and multi-site groups across the country. We answer the inquiries within minutes and report tours and move-ins by source from whichever CRM you already have, for a fee per move-in rather than a retainer, with a 30-day move-out refund. For a second opinion on your current CRM setup, ask for a free growth audit.

Related: Lead handling · Analytics · Paid ads · Senior living groups · SEO agency or full-service partner · Senior living marketing guide