Reaching high occupancy may be worth celebrating, but senior living providers know their work does not stop there. To maintain strong census levels, many operators are refining sales and marketing strategies with tactics to keep demand steady.
Maintaining a high census comes with its own set of operational challenges, largely focused on improving resident satisfaction and managing staffing once a community is full.
In order to sustain a strong sales and marketing culture, operators are turning to curated waitlists, hosting exclusive events for prospects and coaching sales leaders to help preserve the strong sales culture that helped propel the community or portfolio to stabilization and high census.
“The game changes from chess to checkers,” Jaybird Senior Living Senior Vice President of Sales Christy Van Der Westhuizen told Senior Housing News. “In the process toward stabilization, we focus on urgency, activity, tours and volume move-ins. At high occupancy, the focus shifts to strategy on staying high occupancy.”
The Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based senior living provider focuses on zero lost revenue days, improving resident satisfaction, maintaining rate integrity and expanding waitlists when a community reaches high occupancy. The primary job of a community’s sales team is to “keep momentum alive” in seeking even higher occupancy through building relationships with prospects and nurturing those relationships.
Senior living providers including The Aspenwood Company, Beztak, Jaybird Senior Living and LCS are taking steps to improve sales and marketing efforts while maintaining communities at high occupancy during a period of strong senior living demand.
In the second quarter of 2026, NIC MAP data shows average senior living occupancy at 89.5%, while median occupancy stood at 92% – a potential sign that many markets are performing stronger than the average levels alone would indicate.
Maintaining relationships, waitlists at high census
Senior living providers are taking steps to revamp waitlists, with some operators requiring deposits to maintain a prospect’s spot in line for a residence at a community.
At high occupancy communities, LCS has shifted its sales focus to waitlist development and ongoing engagement with waitlist depositors, according to LCS Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer Jim Pusateri. Sales teams have bolstered their efforts to nurture relationships with prospective residents while seeking out older adults to join a sought-after community’s waitlist. To succeed, LCS sales teams must focus on consistent communication, personalized follow-up messages and reinforcing the value of the community a waitlister is preparing to join, Pusateri said.
Meanwhile, lead generation efforts have now shifted to seeking referrals from residents, families, third-party referral sources and local market influencers, all of which has cut expenses on one front: As room at a community or portfolio of communities has become limited, operators are relying less on paid lead sources, reducing spending on lead aggregators, digital and print advertising and certain digital marketing efforts, Pusateri said.
“This shift allows resources to be directed toward higher-quality referral opportunities and relationship-based lead generation strategies,” Pusateri added.
Identifying a sales team’s strengths and weaknesses is also important to maintain a strong sales culture as communities shift from lease-up to stabilization. In lease-up, sales teams focus on volume, urgency and move-in activity, while high occupancy sales tactics revolve around nurturing and relationship development, Van Der Westhuizen said. And so, hiring the right sales staff – a mix of “builders and maintainers” – is critical to shifting from lease-up to stabilization and high occupancy.
As Van Der Westhuizen sees it, some sales staff thrive during lease-up but struggle to maintain occupancy, while those who are strong at maintaining a community’s occupancy may struggle during lease-up.
“It’s important to hire for this motivation, too, and it’s important to ask: ‘Is this person a builder or a maintainer?’” Van Der Westhuizen said.
At high census, Farmington Hills, Michigan-based senior living provider Beztak focuses on quality over quantity, from managing waitlists to proactively connecting with prospects who have completed a tour or engaged in an exclusive event for waitlisters.
“When you’re at or near 100%, you can’t penalize the team for not having a great tour-to-move-in ratio,” said Executive Vice President of Senior Living Jason Kohler. “So it goes from tour to waitlist deposit, and that’s a new metric as waitlist management becomes more critical.”
The luxury senior living provider has shifted from putting on lead-generating public events to hosting events exclusively for waitlist prospects that have made a deposit, in part to help them “feel like part of the community.” As Kohler sees it, strong occupancy and waitlists are the “byproduct of resident satisfaction, referrals and delivering a consistently excellent experience.”
Getting to know the preferences of waitlist prospects is also important, allowing sales teams to notify prospects when their desired unit type becomes available. A tactic that has worked well is contacting waitlist prospects when an adjacent or similar unit type becomes available, creating a sense of urgency to drive a move-in even if a specific unit type still may not be available, Kohler noted.
In this regard, two communities stand out in Beztak’s portfolio. Beztak’s All Seasons Oro Valley community near Tucson, Arizona maintains “upper 90s” occupancy rates, having reached full census multiple times so far in 2026, Kohler said, along with census success at All Seasons Birmingham. At the Michigan community, Beztak expanded to add 24 new units. Those units were filled with rate integrity in mind and stemmed from waitlist management and internal transfers, according to Kohler.
“You really need waitlist management because you have people that are ready to move,” Kohler said.
For some communities, VIP waitlist events have helped keep prospective residents engaged and can be financially rewarding. After all, waitlist prospects can pay half of a $10,000 community fee upfront to secure a future place at a community.
Sales teams as ‘revenue protector’ at high census
In switching up sales tactics for the current high-level occupancy environment, operators are constantly mindful of a simple principle: Lease-up requires volume and urgency, while stabilization requires focusing on momentum and nurturing prospect relationships.
For the Houston-based Aspenwood Company, sales leaders are expected to help protect the momentum that was built during lease-up, focusing on being more disciplined and selective about move-ins, according to Vice President of Sales and Operations Joshua Bentley.
“Once you get to that high occupancy, that salesperson is a revenue protector,” Bentley said.
To do that, Aspenwood sales teams focus on rate integrity, pushing rate growth where possible and maintaining a community’s overall readiness to welcome new residents. This is because resident satisfaction and referrals are “central” to maintaining a strong culture at a community with a high census.
Resident relationships are also a powerful tool to inspire prospects to move in. For example, at Aspenwood’s Village on the Park Onion Creek community in Austin, one resident was responsible for over a dozen conversions through a resident referral program.
“Mastering what the resident referral program looks like goes directly back to the resident experience,” Bentley added. “It’s those relationships that we build that gives them their reason ‘why’ and it gives them pride to help the community as a whole.”
Shifting sales, marketing spend and new KPIs
When a community reaches high or full occupancy, the metrics senior living providers track change along with the way in which they spend marketing budgets to attract new prospects.
This shift focuses on reputation and storytelling—inspiring prospects regarding “preparing ahead” for a transition to senior living by joining a waitlist for a community.
“We want people to feel the vibe of the community through photos, videos, stories and real moments,” Van Der Westhuizen said.
Operators must focus on shifting from move-in conversions to securing waitlist deposits, while engaging with waitlist prospects routinely, Kohler said.
In the end, successfully pivoting from lease-up to high occupancy is dependent upon a community’s long-term strategic plan and the goals of its nonprofit board or ownership group, LCS Chief Marketing Officer Rick Westermann said. For example, an LCS-owned community, Sagewood, reports high occupancy and a waitlist of over 300 prospects. To make a shift, LCS reduced paid search and focused on “targeted brand investments” to build sustained awareness about the community’s future expansion project.
“We are also creating programs that allow waitlist members priority access to health care on our campuses as well as other community specific benefits,” Westermann said.