Data Sources & Scoring Methodology

Every RAL 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.

Last updated August 1, 2026 · a living document, revised as our data and models improve.

The overall score

Every market gets an Overall Score from 0 to 10 — the equal-weighted average of five categories, 20% each. Strong is 6.5+, Moderate is 4.5–6.4, 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.

1 · Demand 20%

The senior pool a market can draw from right now — a weighted blend of four inputs.

2 · Supply 20%

How much room there is for a residential (6–16 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:

• Small-home RAL saturation (50%). Licensed ≤16-bed beds per 1,000 seniors 75+, against a ~20-per-1,000 line. This is your direct competitive set, so scarcity here signals genuine opportunity — a big-box community isn’t really competing with a 6–16 bed residential home.
• Total assisted-living saturation (50%). All AL/MC beds per 1,000, against a ~50-per-1,000 balanced line (a 45-per-1,000 use-rate ÷ 90% target occupancy). This flags overall market glut — a market drowning in beds is riskier even if a few are residential.

Each is scored 0–10 (10 = wide open, 5 = balanced) with a floor of 2, then averaged. The blend means 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/total blend and its local, trade-area reconciliation are ours.

Coverage — and what we will not score

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 from large ones; 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 actually 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” — it is “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 instead the category is left unscored and the report says so.

• Full coverage — the roster spans both small homes and large communities and carries bed counts. All five categories score.
• Partial — one band of the market is licensed under a program our roster doesn't cover, so bed-based saturation isn't measurable. Supply is left unscored, the specific license program is named in the report, and the remaining four categories carry the score.
• No bed counts — the state publishes its licensed-facility roster without capacity. The competitor list is real and complete; supply is not scored. Homes per 1,000 seniors 75+ is still shown, because a facility count is a genuine, checkable supply signal that doesn't require bed data.
• Not available — no licensed-facility roster exists for the state, or the only published list licenses service providers rather than residential buildings. Site Intelligence cannot be purchased for these states; we would rather sell nothing than sell a report whose competitive section is empty.

Coverage is derived from the data itself, not set by hand, so a state moves up the moment its underlying 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.

3 · Growth 20%

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 65–74 cohort forward using standard survival rates — a high-confidence projection, not a guess. A flat cohort scores about 3, strong growth (~7%/yr) 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 5–10 years.

4 · Location 20%

Whether you can realistically staff and run a home here — a weighted blend of three signals.

5 · Financials 20%

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 actually 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 each year 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 (~8 years) sits mid-scale. A simple “income vs. rate” snapshot misses that most seniors fund care by spending down a house — the runway measures affordability the way families actually pay, and flags markets where the rate outruns local means. ★ The runway model is ours.

Regulatory — shown, not scored

Regulatory feasibility appears as a green / yellow / red light — from the state's small-home (6–16 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; Growth takes its slot in the composite. ★ Our own state-by-state RAL licensing matrix, joined to parcel zoning.

How it rolls up

Each category is scored 0–10 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 remainder 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. Tier-2 (Market Report) is the ZIP / 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 & 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.

★ What's original to RAL Market Scout

• The small-home competitive set. We gather and normalize each state's assisted-living license roster to isolate the 6–16 bed residential segment — the true RAL competitive set national datasets miss — with bed counts and license status.
• Real parcel-distance measurement. Every demand, supply and referral figure in a property report is measured from the exact address, not a ZIP or county average.
• The occupancy-derived supply model applied locally, with Underserved / Balanced / Saturated bands and a supply-confidence level.
• The Private-Pay Runway — an affordability model that spends down income and assets against an escalating local rate, rather than a one-year income snapshot.
• Referral scoring on patient volume — hospital, skilled-nursing, hospice and home-health capacity per senior — surfaced as a named, contactable partner directory.
• The state-by-state RAL regulatory matrix built for the small-home licensing pathway, joined to parcel zoning.
• The five-category composite, including acuity-weighted demand, a dedicated senior-growth trajectory, and metro-level staffing wages in the pro-forma.
• Annual re-baselining of every time-sensitive input so the score stays current without forecasting guesswork.