Referral aggregators typically charge 50 to 100% of first month’s rent per move-in. They are also, according to category ad spend data, the largest advertisers in senior living, outspending the operators whose units they fill.
Both facts are widely known. The arithmetic that connects them is the part that rarely reaches a board deck.
The first-order number
Take a community at $6,000 a month.
| Channel | Cost per move-in | As % of first month |
|---|---|---|
| Aggregator referral | $3,000–6,000 | 50–100% |
| Owned assisted living campaign | $2,600–4,500 | 43–75% |
| Owned independent living campaign | $1,800–3,200 | 30–53% |
On its own that comparison is closer than most operators expect, and for assisted living it is genuinely close. This is why the aggregator conversation usually ends here with “it’s about the same, and theirs is pay-for-performance.”
Two things are missing from that framing.
The second-order effect: they raise your own costs
The aggregator is bidding on the same paid search keywords you are.
When the largest advertiser in the category is a middleman, every operator’s cost per click rises, because the middleman can afford to outbid any single community. It monetises leads across dozens of them, and it does not care which one takes the resident.
So the aggregator invoice is not the whole cost. Some portion of your owned-channel cost per lead is also the aggregator, showing up as competition on your own terms. You are paying twice, once visibly and once not.
The third-order effect: you never build the asset
An aggregator move-in produces a resident. An owned move-in produces a resident and a search ranking, an email list entry, a review, a programmatic retargeting audience, and a data point about which creative worked.
Run entirely on aggregators for three years and you have filled the building repeatedly while owning nothing. Cancel the contract and enquiries go to zero, because there was never a pipeline. There was a purchase order.
This is the part that shows up as a valuation problem rather than a marketing one. Two identical communities at identical occupancy are not identically valuable if one owns its demand and the other rents it.
What the honest comparison looks like
Not cost per move-in. Cost per move-in, plus what you keep.
| Aggregator | Owned | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per move-in | $3,000–6,000 | $1,800–4,500 by care type |
| Cost when you stop paying | Enquiries → 0 | Ranking and list persist |
| Effect on your own CPC | Raises it | Neutral |
| Resident relationship starts with | Them | You |
| Data you keep | Almost none | All of it |
| Time to first move-in | Days | Weeks to months |
That last row is the aggregator’s real advantage, and it is a genuine one. They are fast. For a distressed building, a new opening, or a sudden block of vacancies, speed is worth paying for and nothing owned matches it in the first month.
So the answer is not zero
This is where most agency writing on the subject becomes useless, because the agency has an obvious interest in the answer being “cancel them and hire us.”
The defensible position is a share question, not a yes-or-no:
- A community at 78% and falling should use aggregators. Speed matters more than economics when the building is bleeding.
- A community at 92% using aggregators for a third of its move-ins is renting demand it could own, and paying a premium to compete with itself.
- A new opening should use them heavily for six months and taper deliberately, with an owned pipeline built during the taper, not started after it.
Occupancy is near 90% and rising industry-wide, with supply at a 2012 low. That environment moves the sensible share down for most operators, because the scarcity that used to make aggregators necessary is easing.
The number to actually put in the deck
One line, tracked quarterly:
Share of move-ins from rented demand, and the trend.
Not the aggregator invoice. The share. An operator who cannot state that number does not know how much of the census is theirs, and an operator whose share is flat over three years has not been building anything, whatever the marketing budget says.
If the share is above 30% and not falling, that is the finding, and the fix is not cancelling the contract. It is funding the owned digital channels enough to take share from it deliberately, one quarter at a time. What the owned side actually costs by care type is the other half of that decision.
Source: Category ad spend and channel mix from MediaRadar 360, August 2024 to July 2025. Cost per move-in ranges from published 2026 senior living benchmarks. Aggregator commission rates are the commonly published 50 to 100% of first month’s rent; individual contracts vary and we have not audited them. Our method and its limits are on the methodology page.