Maravilla, a $70 million property in Santa Barbara, took 10 years to develop, thanks to the usual opposition and the land’s proximity to a monarch butterfly nesting zone. “It created an enormous amount of problems for us,” Camia remembers. “We went to all the city meetings and worked hard to get all the approvals, because between November 1 and February 1, we couldn’t do any construction” because of the butterflies. “We couldn’t even paint.”
But SRG got it done. “It was brilliant how they worked with the contractor to do the skin of the building” so that interior work could continue, keeping the project on schedule, Camia says.
Maravilla was an undeniably tough project to do—but SRG prefers it that way. “If we got our entitlements too quickly, that means there will be three or four guys right behind us,” Grust says.
That’s important, because SRG residents generally come from a five- to seven-mile radius of the property. “Each market has something to tell us, a nuance we have to listen to,” Grust says. “[The project] has to be integrated into the fabric of the community, the churches, the synagogues, and the doctors.”
So, SRG conducts everything from market studies to focus groups with likely residents and their adult children. “It’s a customer-driven approach, where you look at the prospective residents and you lead the market” rather than simply replicate the last successful project, Gollis says.
Grust says they have to. “We’re inventing a business and educating a marketplace. You can’t pull a book off the shelf and ask what cycle we’re in.”
Graceful Aging That idea—that SRG is creating a new type of housing for the aged, with different values and priorities—is echoed by others at the company. “Aging is not an illness—it’s just a way of life, says Kayda Johnson, the company’s COO. “We support residents in whatever setting they’re in.”
It has resulted in senior apartment communities that are managed in a very different way than one might expect. While SRG offers everything for elderly residents—independent living, assisted living, care for the memory-impaired—you’d never know it by walking through a property.
That’s by design. “We do so much behind the scenes,” helping residents with bathing, dressing, and numerous other daily needs, Johnson says. “But we do it in their private apartment, so that the face they give when they leave is their public one.”
Such care isn’t cheap. Assisted living apartments at La Vida Real, for example, start at $3,380 per month; a private unit that offers Alzheimer’s care goes for $4,435 and up. Independent living units, which range from an “alcove” apartment to a two-bedroom, two-bath deluxe unit, rent for $2,480 to $5,405 and up, depending on the unit’s size and number of occupants.