CHICAGO — There is one surefire way to make sales hum in seniors housing, says Margaret Wylde, an industry consultant who has conducted research in this niche property sector for 34 years. Know who your customer is, the product they want and how much they will pay to get what they want. “If you deliver what they actually want, they actually pay more and feel there is value for the dollar spent,” says Wylde, CEO of Oxford, Miss.-based ProMatura Group. The problem is the industry’s knowledge of customers is “not good,” Wylde is quick to add. “We know them in a generic manner. We know their age, we know how many of them there are, and we know how much money [they have]. But we don’t know who they are. And once they get to that golden age, we think they want seniors housing, and that everybody who wants seniors housing is exactly the same because we are giving them a list of stuff.” What’s worse, she believes, is that the industry is by and large chasing the luxury market, which is less than 10 percent of the potential market. “The middle market is 320 percent larger than the market …
