Knoxville, TN-based Solinity has launched its new Hometown Living brand with the acquisition of an assisted living and memory care community in Johns Creek, GA, a suburb of Atlanta.
“The Hometown Living brand has kind of been a long time in the works,” Solinity founder and CEO Josh Crisp told the McKnight’s Business Daily on Thursday. “We’ve been getting [requests] not only by potential investors but families and stakeholders in communities around the Southeast, in particular over the last several years, that say, ‘Hey, when are you guys and can you open, can you create a community or help us in our smaller towns?’ And that’s typically a secondary or tertiary market.”
He said the brand is intended for areas where small, individual owners and operators have been forced to shutter their doors due to the rising cost of recruiting labor and maintaining labor as well “as the increased sophistication in marketing and the limited services in these areas.”
At the same time, Crisp said, the issue presents a problem for individuals who have lived in a smaller market for years.
“They’ve been raised there. They’ve lived the latter part of their life [there], and when they start looking for services such as assisted living or memory care, they’re not finding much to choose from,” he said. “There’s not many options for a high-quality living environment in these smaller markets. And so they’re having to find themselves moving away from everything that they’ve been accustomed to.”
The newly acquired community, now dubbed St. Ives Hometown Living of Johns Creek, will be renovated. Construction will begin next month. Crisp said the property is projected to open again in the middle of January.
“So it’s about a six month total process as scheduled. We’re already, as of today, starting to take inquiries for team members as well as residents and their families,” he said.
Solinity’s Hometown Living brand initially will be focused on secondary and tertiary markets throughout the Southeast.
“We wanted to be able to grow within about a six-hour radius of Knoxville, which is where our headquarters are. Part of the scalability that we’ve learned, in talking with other scale brands and other verticals, was ensuring that community operations and community administrators at teams had a robust infrastructure to support them.” Crisp said. “The first phase of buildout is within that six-hour radius.”
He said that Solinity has six other properties in the pipeline for Hometown Living, three of which are acquisitions and three of which are master plan developments.
