Last updated August 1, 2026. A living document, revised as our data and models improve.
Every Market Scout score is built from authoritative public data and our own residential assisted living market models. This page explains what we measure, how each category is weighted and calculated, and where the data comes from, so you can trust the numbers behind your decisions.
★ marks the parts that are original to Market Scout: our own data gathering or model design, built on top of public data.
Every market gets an Overall Score from 0 to 10: the equal-weighted average of five categories, 20% each. Strong is 6.5 and up, Moderate is 4.5 to 6.4, and Thin is below 4.5.
Why five equal categories? Five different things independently make or break a small assisted living home: enough seniors, room in the market, a growing pool, a location you can actually operate in, and residents who can afford to pay. In a real go/no-go decision no single one dominates. A market needs to clear a reasonable bar on all five, not ace one and fail the rest. Weighting them evenly enforces that, instead of pretending we know the “true” ranking. Markets with too few seniors 75+ fall below a viability floor and aren’t rated, so thinly populated areas don’t look “wide open” just because little has been built there.
The senior pool a market can draw from right now, a weighted blend of four inputs:
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (population 75+, age share, senior migration); CMS Mapping Medicare Disparities (chronic-condition prevalence).
How much room there is for a residential (6 to 16 bed) home, not just whether the overall market is full. We measure supply two ways inside a 25-mile trade area and blend them 50/50:
Each is scored 0 to 10 (10 is wide open, 5 is balanced) with a floor of 2, then averaged. A market thick with big-box communities but thin on residential homes still reads as a RAL opportunity, while a market saturated on both is correctly a pass. Supply is measured from the actual licensed bed roster within 25 miles. Where a state’s roster cannot support that measurement, supply is not scored at all rather than filled in from a broader average. ★ The small-home and total blend and its local trade-area reconciliation are ours.
Every state licenses residential care differently. Some issue one license spanning a four-bed home and a 300-bed community; others license small homes under an entirely separate program; a few publish a facility list with no bed capacity at all. We hold a declared scope for each state, recording which license categories our roster covers, and we score only what that scope can support.
The rule: we never score what we cannot measure. If a state licenses small homes separately and we hold only the large-community roster, the honest reading is not “no small homes here” but “small homes are not counted in this state.” Treating an absence of measurement as an absence of competition would inflate every opportunity score in that state, so the category is left unscored and the report says so.
Coverage is derived from the data itself, not set by hand, so a state moves up the moment its roster improves. Where a figure is an estimate rather than a measurement it is labeled as one, and estimated figures never feed a score or a ranking. The live status of every state is on the coverage map.
Sources: state assisted living license rosters (bed counts, loaded state by state ★); CDC National Post-acute and Long-term Care Study (use rate); CareScout Cost of Care (rate context).
Where the 75+ pool is heading, not its size today (that’s Demand). The people who’ll be 75+ in five years already live in a market now, so we age today’s 65 to 74 cohort forward using standard survival rates, a high-confidence projection rather than a guess. A flat cohort scores about 3, strong growth (about 7% a year) tops out at 10, and a shrinking cohort falls below 3. Job, population and housing momentum corroborate. Growth earns its own 20% because a market can be big today but aging out, or small today but about to surge, and buyers underwrite the next 5 to 10 years.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau ACS (age cohorts, population, housing); Social Security Administration (survival rates); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics QCEW (job growth); Genworth / CareScout (private-pay rate trend).
Whether you can realistically staff and run a home here, a weighted blend of three signals:
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau (urbanicity, labor market); BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (metro caregiver and CNA wages and labor pool depth); CMS provider data (hospital, skilled nursing, hospice and home health locations and patient volumes). In Site Intelligence, distances are measured from the exact parcel. ★
Can local seniors actually afford private-pay care, and for how long? This one isn’t a weighted blend; it’s a simulation we call the Private-Pay Runway. We take a typical local 75+ household’s income plus the assets it could draw on (home equity, weighted by how many local seniors own their homes, plus savings) and run it year by year against the local assisted living rate, with rent rising a little faster than income and the shortfall pulled from assets. The score is how many years that household can sustain the local rate before the money runs out, anchored so the national median (about 8 years) sits mid-scale. A simple income-versus-rate snapshot misses that most seniors fund care by spending down a house; the runway measures affordability the way families actually pay. ★ The runway model is ours.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau ACS (senior median income, median home value, homeownership); CareScout Cost of Care (local assisted living rate).
Regulatory feasibility appears as a green, yellow or red light, from the state’s small-home (6 to 16 bed) licensing pathway and, in Site Intelligence, the parcel’s zoning read for residential care use. It’s context for whether you can open here, not part of the number. ★ Our own state-by-state RAL licensing matrix, joined to parcel zoning.
Sources: state assisted living licensing agencies and administrative code; Regrid parcel and zoning data (Site Intelligence).
Each category is scored 0 to 10 on its own, benchmarked so a score means the same thing everywhere, then the categories that could be scored are averaged equally into the Overall Score. Where a category is unscored for coverage reasons, the average is taken across the rest and the report states how many of the five were scored. A missing input is never filled with a substitute or treated as a zero.
The Market Report is the ZIP and county read. Site Intelligence scores the same five at your exact address (four carry over unchanged and Location sharpens to the parcel) and adds the parcel and zoning record, the named referral directory, the licensed competitive roster, and a full pro forma. Property-level figures are measured on real distance from the address (typically 10- and 25-mile rings), not a ZIP or county average. The model is a current-year snapshot; time-sensitive inputs are re-baselined annually. The specific formulas, thresholds and anchors behind each category are proprietary. Figures are directional market intelligence to guide diligence, not a property appraisal.
Data availability varies by state and locality. Where an input isn’t published for an area, the affected category is shown as unavailable or carries a lower confidence level rather than being invented, and the composite is averaged across the categories we can measure. Reports are informational and are not investment, legal or financial advice. Questions? Contact us.