Why Juniper Communities, Goodwin Living, 2life Are Growing In-home Care Services In 2025

As new construction and development remains hard in 2025, some senior living companies are expanding home-based services as a way to grow and serve more older adults in the meantime.

Senior living operators growing home-based services in the year ahead include Goodwin Living, 2Life Communities and Juniper Communities.

Providing home-based services, including home care and home health, is not an easy feat and requires a high level of organization. Although home-based service lines – offered either in senior housing or in private dwellings – can help supplement revenue, some have backed away from in-home service lines in the last couple of years, with companies including Atria Senior Living citing “economic” reasons for doing so.

And indeed, many senior living organizations have historically stuck to their “bread and butter” of providing care and services to people living in congregate senior housing settings, according to Goodwin Living Chief Business Development Officer Andy Siegel. Still, nonprofits like Goodwin Living and 2Life have missions to serve as many residents as they can, and home-based services are a way to give older adults more access and affordability as senior housing remains prohibitively expensive for millions.

Private-duty in-home care is not only a way to expand nonprofit missions. For companies like Bloomfield, New Jersey-based Juniper Communities, it is also a way to help meet the demands of the incomer baby boomer generation, many members of which desire to stay at home or in their current lower-acuity units for as long as possible. Juniper also offers home care as a way to help residents return from the hospital sooner.

“You want to be able to get back to your home, to your common, known surroundings, to the people who support you regularly, and to a routine that really enables you to begin to get your mobility back,” Juniper CEO and Founder Lynne Katzmann told Senior Housing News. “Home care can help do that.”

Even so, while in-home care can be a competitive advantage, there are numerous challenges and pitfalls for operators offering such services, including reimbursement for services such as Medicare-certified home health or outpatient rehab services and the availability of workers in the years to come.

In-home services to expand access, affordability

Typically, senior living operators offer home-based care either to residents in their units in the community or in their homes off-campus. Services usually range from receiving site-based medical care in an assisted living setting to assistance with daily living, which revolves around private pay.

Although some companies have looked at in-home care as a way to expand revenue and margins, other operators see home care as a way to better senior living services as a whole and widen the scope of their mission.

Brighton, Massachusetts-based senior living nonprofit 2Life Communities partners with home care agencies to offer in-home services such as supportive care and medical services to residents living within its communities. More affordable in-unit services are also a cornerstone of the organization’s middle-market Opus brand in the Boston area, which gives residents the option to buy services in 30-minute increments. And President Lizbeth Heyer believes doing so can help ease the industry’s crisis in both access of care and affordability of services.

By arranging for home care services on the organizational level, 2Life can use its scale to keep prices lower. And allowing for shorter spans of home care can help utilize “a very scarce resource in a more streamlined and effective way,” Heyer told SHN.

Alexandria, Virginia-based Goodwin Living currently offers in-home services including skilled nursing services, therapy services, medical social workers and home health aides. The number of older adults currently living at home with no current plans to move is a big opportunity to expand senior living services to a wider group of customers, according to Siegel.

A new senior living project might cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but at the end of the day, it will only house about 500 residents, he said. But an operator can potentially have much greater reach through offering in-home services.

“We have 12,000 individuals turning 65 every day in the United States,” Siegel said. “In terms of sheer bang for your buck … you are certainly going to have the highest touch for individuals leaving them in their homes with these services.”

In-home services are also part of Juniper’s services to older adults beyond traditional senior living. The company offers services such as private-duty assistance with ADLs, medication management, mobility assistance, meal preparation, housekeeping, transportation assistance and care coordination alongside short-term rehabilitation. Juniper’s Connect4Life program also supports residents through services offered in community-based, ancillary and offsite settings.

Katzmann believes offering home health services is a “very viable” part of independent living for operators, allowing residents to remain in their home for longer periods of time, benefiting both the resident and operators.

That also has a trickle-down effect for Medicare Advantage and other similar value-based programs, which incentivizes operators to steward better resident health outcomes and therefore lower the cost of care. Juniper offers multiple health plans through the Perennial Consortium organization it co-founded, which recently expanded with the addition of senior living nonprofit HumanGood.

In many ways, Katzmann said she is already seeing independent living evolve with these kinds of services, and the way communities can offer services in smaller increments will only help with the affordability issue commonly seen for residents. As such, she believes offerings will continue to expand.

“In many places, what you’re seeing is IL-plus … so IL with access to home care services, which may be coordinated by the community or by a care manager,” Katzmann said. “In senior living … you can provide time critically. You can offer smaller increments, making it more affordable.”

Cost, staffing still barriers

While in-home services can help supplement senior living revenue and improve the quality of resident care, operational costs and staffing remain two big barriers for the industry to overcome.

For instance, when a staffer needs time off due to car trouble or illness, it’s harder to find someone to cover their shift than in a larger senior living community with a support staff, Katzmann said.

“In a community, we generally can find a way to work with those kinds of situations, we’re better at solving those types of problems,” she said.

Reimbursement, such as payments through Medicare for skilled nursing services, physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy also poses a challenge, Siegel said. Each health care service provided, such as hospice care and outpatient rehab, is reimbursed and regulated differently, along with having differing staffing requirements as well. Additionally, workers are in a workforce climate that has seen “increased regulatory scrutiny” over the past three years.

Operators looking to make a “tremendous amount of money” probably aren’t the right fit for growing in-home care programs, given that the “vast majority” of demand is coming from the lower end of the price scale, Heyer said. Instead of a big source of added revenue, she sees in-home as a supplement to achieving certain outcomes at scale – and that requires operators to be “realistic” about what in-home care is, who it’s for and what’s required to provide it.

“The people that are advancing projects like this are doing it because we really care about serving people who otherwise are underserved in this market,” she said.

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