Changemakers

Senior Housing News Series

By Erica Rascón on Jun 19, 2019 in People

Yardi is a proud sponsor of the new Senior Housing News magazine series, Changemakers. This series of interviews highlights industry leaders that are impacting the future of senior living.

The field of senior housing and services is changing rapidly. The ability to adapt to market changes has proven to be a differentiator for senior housing professionals. Those who forecast changes and adapt to consumer trends are leading the industry in exciting new directions.

The Changemakers series focuses on individuals who are leaning into the winds of change. They are bold, innovative, and proactive. Senior Housing News, sponsored by Yardi, has identified nine Changemakers. During these in-depth interviews, you can learn what motivates these industry leaders and explore how they are shaping the future of the industry.

Meet William Bullock

William Bullock, president of Latitude Margaritaville, Minto Communities USA, is one of the first featured Changemakers. He had an idea that was so simple and so spot-on that many wondered why it hadn’t been done before. Bullock partnered with Margaritaville to create sprawling developments that offers residents a “Jimmy Buffett-inspired lifestyle.”

What does that look like? Primarily, Latitude scrapped the traditional active senior housing model. The company based its new brand on feedback from its target demographic. It nixed words like “senior” and “retirement” and reimagined communities where wellness and fun were top priorities.

Check out this excerpt from the SHN interview.

SHN: What convinced you [to pursue Latitude Margaritaville]?

Bullock: What’s great about the Margaritaville brand is, it’s synonymous with food, fun, music, escapism. It naturally fit what we were discovering from folks wanting to get away from golf and get into more active sports and wellness and nutrition, the fun. What we were seeing down in Naples with this transition out of Mediterranean architecture into something more coastal, Key West or that type of thing, it fit like a glove.

In February of 2017 we came out with a formal announcement, which went viral in the press, that we were going to do the first Latitude Margaritaville.

We’re approaching 700 units in a little more than 18 months of sales in Daytona. Since then, we’ve launched a community in Hilton Head [South Carolina], which is right at 3,000 units, and we’ve also announced a third Latitude in the Florida Panhandle, partnered with St. Joe, who is one of the largest landholders in Florida. They have a piece of property with 15 miles of intra-coastal frontage. What’s amazing about this piece is it’s entitled for over 100,000 units. What we have on the drawing board right now is our first phase at right at 3,500, with a second 3,500 phase under planning.

We believe in the Panhandle that there’s an opportunity to take what we’ve done at Daytona and Hilton Head and really take it to the next level and create a city. There’s a lot of other really cool things that I can’t disclose just yet to assist with the aging in place. Some aging research centers and all of those different things that I kind of talked about in the four or five key elements, we’ll be able to put them all within the community up in the Panhandle which is going to be called Latitude Margaritaville Watersound.

Read the complete story on Bullock in Senior Housing News.