The big picture.

A new report from the American Seniors Housing Association offers a snapshot of the industry that's more flattering than the one Wall Street analysts carry around in their wallets.

BY LOOKING AT ONLY the performance of public companies, many lenders and investors have developed a skewed view of the long term care industry. Hence, the value of a new report from the American Seniors Housing Association (ASHA) titled, "The State of Senior Housing." Together with the American Health Care Association, the Assisted Living Federation of America, the National Investment Center for the Seniors Housing & Care Industries, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, ASHA distributed survey questionnaires to owners and managers of seniors housing residences, an effort which yielded a response from 248 communities totaling 50,929 units. The respondent companies were public and private, for-profit and not-for-profit, big and small, and scattered across the country.

"You're not seeing the industry's performance in an accurate way by focusing on the public companies," says David Schless, executive director of Washington, D.C-based ASHA. "If you took 25 or 50 providers of all types and put them in a room, many of them would say that they're doing just fine."

Another benefit of the new study is that figures are broken out for the lower and upper quartiles so you can see what the top performers look like and what the poor performers look like--making it a lot more useful than just showing the mean, or average (which is also included). "Some are cranking full bore and others are struggling, and you can pick that up," says Schless.

In addition, by trimming the number of questions in the survey--its roughly half the length that it was in 1992 when it was introduced--Schless believes the data is more reliable. "We do the survey so that hopefully one person can fill it out. With surveys that ask 500 questions, you end up with people guessing."

In addition to such cut-and-dried categories as community size, age, and ownership status, there are some more interesting statistics on occupancy rates, resident turnover and length of stay.

Annual financial results are provided for each product type according to lower decile, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, and upper decile. Revenues and expenses, sorted by individual line item, are per occupied unit.

Also of note are annual changes in rents, staffing ratios and labor costs, other key cost items (raw food costs, management fees), and key financial performance indicators (operating margins, debt service coverage ratios, and current return on investment).