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 Two years away from its 50th anniversary, Revera is in the midst of a rebirth. A senior care company with retirement homes, long term care nursing homes, and a small home health program, private ownership and capital reinvestments are helping the company live up to its mission of providing compassionate care and excellent service.
Started in 1961 in Canada with a group of private nursing homes in Winnipeg called Central Park Lodges, the company grew through acquisitions and mergers over time. Revera now has 220 sites, about 40 of which are in the US. It serves Canada from Quebec to the West Coast; in the US, it is predominantly in the Northeast with locations in nine states including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Vermont, and Connecticut, as well as several retirement homes in Oregon.
Private thoughts
During the late 1990s and past the turn of the century, the company was traded publicly as a real estate investment trust. In 2007, Revera was 100% purchased by the Public Service Pension Investment Board, one of Canada’s largest pension funds, and taken private. This move allowed the company to reinvest in its infrastructure.
“The advantage of being publicly traded as a pure real estate trust was you can distribute stable returns to unit holders if you have a stable return; however, we were also an operating company,” said Jeff Lozon, president and CEO for about two months. “To continue being an operating company, you need to reinvest capital in the properties, and the real estate investment trust model wasn’t the best for us in that respect.” 
Lozon was elected director of Revera’s board in 2007, and recapitalization of properties and streamlining of corporate processes became the main focus. The company now has 47 properties under active redevelopment, and it has been working to better align its long term care, retirement homes, US skilled nursing, and home healthcare. Lozon said they operated as quite separate entities in the past. Now, Revera is increasingly bringing them together as part of a coherent whole.
Upgrading properties is a must because many of Revera’s properties are large, older, and in competitive markets. With a large portfolio, annual evaluation of properties is critical to maintaining position in any given market. The company is aware of the trend to move away from the institutional model of care, and some of its properties are being renovated to take into account the desire most seniors have to age in place. The company is also focusing on its home health service to help more seniors stay in their homes.
Revera has a dedicated senior vice president responsible for US skilled nursing facilities and a separate division for US retirement homes. The business is different in the US, largely related to the rapid client turnover in US skilled nursing facilities for rehab and post-orthopedic surgery. In Canada, people coming to long term care homes generally have a much longer length of stay. Another major difference between the two environments is the fact that Canada has a single payor system—the one payor in long term care is the government while the one payor in retirement homes is the individual—whereas the US has a multi-payor system.
Changing times
As the needs of seniors today are very different than they were even 10 years ago, the company’s marketing programs are working to take into account changing expectations, different geographies, and dissimilar regulatory environments. “We try to be active participants in sector associations in both the US and Canada,” Lozon said. “We have a good handle on the changing demographics and expectations, and how to respond quickly enough becomes the challenge.”
One area where Revera is working to establish itself is in brand identity. Each Revera home has its own name, whereas the Revera corporate identity has only been around since March 2008. Each site, particularly those in retirement and US skilled nursing, has a liaison who works with decisionmakers in the local community to market its services, respond to questions, and get people interested in Revera at a local level.
“They are assisted by broader corporate initiatives, but we see this business as local, and we need to support local initiatives. This is largely a business built on human relationships, and we rely on people at the sites to create those relationships,” said Lozon. “We’ve done well in terms of getting the Revera name out there so people are starting to talk about us, but we need to brand our sites better. They need to be known by something like Meadowlands by Revera, so the site level is where our branding focus will be.”
As it moves toward its 50th birthday, Revera’s plans are to continue to expand its portfolio in Canada and the US. Lozon believes expansion will come more through acquisition than new construction, although the company does have significant development expertise and won’t shy away from the right opportunities. Right now, the company is in the midst of determining where it wants to go and what areas of the business it wants to focus on. Lozon predicts that by year’s end, Revera will have a blueprint for the next wave of growth for the company.
The company sees the soft economy as an immediate hurdle to overcome, but Lozon said the bigger challenge is improving the company’s performance both at the corporate and site level. Changing models of care and senior demands are something he sees as a simple reality of doing business in the senior care space. But creating a culture of continuous improvement isn’t quite as simple.
To that end, Revera has a broad spectrum of quality control, assurance, and improvement initiatives. Revera participates in relevant national, regional, and state accreditation activities. It has rigorous reporting on quality improvement initiatives reviewed on a monthly basis at the executive level. The performance of individual sites and the corporation is monitored against well-established industry benchmarks, and these efforts are starting to show results with improved outcomes in all areas.
“One thing that has struck me as I’ve gone around to see both our sites and other companies’ sites is that we differentiate ourselves through quality of care,” Lozon said. “There are enormous opportunities for us because of the company’s size and the many areas we are engaged in. That is a strength we need to leverage and create a synergy so we can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.”
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