Brian: Good morning.
My name is Brian Spitz, president of Big State Home Buyers.
And we are speaking with Scott Yokley today.
And Scott is with Bright Star Care, which is a home health care facility.
And what we want to talk about right now is basically, what homeowners’ options are.
I want to see what your clients do, once they’ve got home health care, you know, what are their
options?
Do they stay in the home?
At some point, do they transition out into long-term care?
And when is a good time to sell a house and what you see families doing?
So, thank you very much for joining us.
(0:00:40.5) Homeowner Options Scott: Well, thank you, Brian.
I’m very happy to be here.
And, yeah, to your question a quick answer is we see every scenario.
We have clients that we take care of in their home and they choose to stay there until they
eventually pass away.
But frequently, because of medical issues, they end up going into hospitals.
Sometimes they come home for a while.
Sometimes they don’t.
Frequently, they will go from hospital to a, either rehab or skilled nursing facility.
Brian: Right.
Scott: And, at that point, they may come back home.
But depending on what’s going on, they may not.
They may need, because of the type of care they need, they can’t get at the home anymore
because they need much more medical intensive care.
So, the cost of doing that in the home can be prohibitive, if you’re talking about
very extreme care.
So frequently, families will make the decision, at some point along that timeline, that perhaps
mom or dad’s not going to go home again.
Brian: But you guys are able to go with your clients, if they choose to, to the next facility.
Is that correct?
Scott: We have many clients that we actually go and take care of them, in addition, to
like an assisted living facility or an independent living facility, where they require more care
than maybe the facility can provide.
Facilities often have folks on staff who can help with the little issues here and there,
but they don’t necessarily always have someone who can be with them continuously at their
side for 8, 10, 12, 24 hours.
(0:02:15.3) Staff Assigned to Clients Brian: Right.
And do you have the same person that’s with the client all the time or the same?
How do you rotate?
You know, if I get, they get used to the people that are caring for them?
How does that work?
Scott: What typically happens is we build a team approach of caregivers.
And that depends on how often and how much time they are looking to have us there.
Brian: Right.
Scott.
You know, if we’ve got clients that want around-the-clock care, then, obviously, we
could end up with a team of 4, 5 or 6 caregivers that rotate in shifts.
If someone wants us for kind of like a work week schedule, then it may just be one or
two people.
But we always try to, we try to balance between having as few different folks, different caregivers
involved to keep continuity, but at the same time, we want to build a good back-up team
so that we always have someone familiar with the client.
(0:03:09.8) Family Options for Client Real Estate
Brian: Right.
So once a client decides, or a family decides it’s time to move out of the house, or perhaps
a client passes away, what do you think, what do you see people doing with that real estate
itself?
You know, one of the, like I said, one of the most common reasons that people sell a
house to Big State Home Buyers is that they have inherited it or they just can’t take
care of it anymore, which is also real common.
And what that house becomes is really more of a burden.
I mean, it’s an asset, you know, it’s worth something.
But it requires family members to come in and have the lawn cut and the house maintained,
insurance and utilities and then holding costs, if there’s a mortgage.
And so, for a lot of those people, it makes sense to sell a house quickly to a company
like mine.
But what do you see people doing?
Scott: Once again, we see some pretty big extremes.
We have clients that have all of these things figured out in advance.
They have a plan.
They know what they’re going to do when mom or dad isn’t coming home again.
They’ve already got a realtor ready to go or whatever their plan is, or the, one of
the children already set to come in and handle the details.
So we’ve got some clients that have it all lined up and we’ve got many, many other
clients that really have no plan.
And they’re so consumed with the issues going on with their parent, you know, rightfully
so, that it’s, they haven’t given a lot of time to it at all.
They don’t really know what they’re going to do and it isn’t something they really
deal with until, all of a sudden, they have to.
And what we also see is not just when the family of the individual has to go to a facility
or hospital or is not coming back and leaving the house empty.
We often see is when one spouse will be left alone.
Brian: Right.
Scott: And they no longer really wish to be or need to be in that house.
They can’t handle the upkeep.
I just had a client last week, whose husband passed away and the house was on the market
within 24 hours.
They were ready to go.
She knew she didn’t want to be there anymore.
But she wasn’t going to move until things went through the process and her husband passed
away.
So she was ready with a plan and she already knew where she was going to next and she actually
talked about that with her husband earlier on in the process.
So she had a lot of comfort from that.
That it was a mutual decision, even after his passing.
(0:05:41.3) Requests for Referrals Brian: Right.
Well, like I said, it’s a very common reason and, I imagine, like we talked about in another
tape, that you can provide a contractor, or you can refer people out to people that can
make the home ready and safe for someone who’s going to stay in the house but is elderly.
And you must get asked, I ‘m just curious, for referrals or for opinions about what people
should do.
Opinions would be a better word.
What do you guys do when you’re asked for an opinion on what a family should do?
Scott: We do get asked for a lot of different types of resources, just because we tend to,
especially when we’re towards the end of a relationship where a client is passing or
going into a facility, is, they lean on us pretty heavy for a lot of things.
It’s a difficult time and usually we’re able to provide a lot of help.
So they’ll ask us questions about every kind of medical resource and we’ll try to
put them in the right spot.
But also everything from, you know, as we mentioned before, making accommodations in
the home, do you know a realtor, you know, cause all of a sudden they’re having to
deal with it.
And, you know, a realtor is Senior Certified.
There are some certifications in the realty business.
Brian: Interesting.
Scott: And a lot of that involves around being sensitive to the conversations that the client
needs dealing with seniors.
Brian: Right.
Scott: Yeah, we will refer to folks that we know in the area that we are comfortable with.
It’s not our business, but we feel comfortable that they’re a reliable and credible group.
Brian: Yeah, we do the same thing.
So at Big State, we try, we don’t get anything for our referrals necessarily.
We just try to refer people to companies that we’ve used or that we like.
But I also think it’s important as a company, not to go out and have a whole bunch of opinions,
but just offer education and options.
And from what I know about your company, I think you guys probably feel the same way.
Scott: Absolutely.
Every family’s got a different set of circumstances.
Brian: Right.
Scott: Our goal is that we try to get them help and there are certain things that we
provide, but there’s a lot more that we don’t provide, a lot of services that fall
outside of our scope.
We still want them feeling comfortable contacting us and we’ll do our best to connect them.
Brian: Right.
I mean, you want, it’s about a full service.
So even if you, we feel the same way, even if we can’t do or fill your need, we want
to be able to help you fill it by sending you to the right people or coming up with
the right suggestions and you mentioned on your website, which is … what is your
website again?
Scott: BrightStarCare.com.
Brian: You’ll find information on how to prevent falls in the home and blogs about
that and other topics so a really great resource for education for kids or people that want
to look and come up with a plan for a family member.
Same at, you can visit BigStateHomeBuyers.com and also learn more about our services, about
how we buy houses quickly and about similar topics, actually.
We offer a lot of information like this as well.
Scott: Absolutely.
There are, all of the scope of services we provide and a variety of topics are there
and hopefully, easy accessible through our website that makes it pretty easy for them.
So, I would welcome and encourage anybody to look there.
Brian: Right.
Well, again, Scott, I appreciate your time today.
Thank you very much for coming by.
Scott: Thank you for having me.