If your sober living home is designed to appeal to everyone, then it is actually appealing to no one.
Getting specific about what makes your target market tick—and who your ideal resident is—helps you focus your efforts on designing a sober living home that caters to a specific type of person. When you start designing a home for real people, you naturally attract residents that are a good fit for your home. Your sober living home stands out among the crowd to these people and they choose to live at your sober living home because of the unique and thoughtful features you’ve chosen to incorporate. This means an easy flow of residents for you and a strong brand identity that helps get the word out about what your unique home has to offer the community.
Today, let’s look at how to define your ideal sober living home resident.
Look for Holes in the Market
As we discussed earlier, defining an ideal sober living home resident starts with a survey of the marketplace for what’s already available to would-be sober living home residents in your area. Make a spreadsheet with defining characteristics of each facility and look for holes. Consider the costs of each, the demographics allowed and the “extras” on offer like pet friendliness, pools, etc. Once you’re done, look for what’s missing and consider if there’s a demand for that missing feature in your area. Use that missing feature as a starting point for developing your ideal sober living home resident.
Good and Bad Examples of an Ideal Sober Living Home Resident
Continue to refine your ideal resident until they’re very specific.
Bad “ideal resident:” A person in early recovery who needs a safe place to get back on their feet.
Why it's bad: We have no idea who this person is, other than the fact that they are in early recovery. Most sober homes are based on this non-person, so a sober living home with this bad ideal resident will look like every other sober living home in the area. The end result? A drab home with no personality, filled with nondescript furniture and unremarkable programming.
Good “ideal resident:” A 38 year old, middle class woman with an interest in natural living.
Why it’s good: We have a very clear picture of who our ideal resident is. We can talk to other women like her to determine what she’s probably looking for in a sober living home. We have a general sense of what the home should be called, where it should be located, how it should be decorated, and what types of “extras” it should include. She’d probably be interested in an in-house yoga class and she would appreciate that the home only uses unscented natural cleaners.
Ideal Residents Will Pay More to Live in a Sober Living Home That Suits Them
If your sober living home is a nondescript place for newly sober people of all kinds, then it blends in with the rest of the generic sober living homes.
And if a resident is comparing nearly identical sober living homes, then they will base their decision primarily on the cost.
If your house is the cheapest, then it will beat the competition in the race to the bottom.
Have you really won in that scenario? Maybe. If your business model is solely based on providing a lot of rooms to the highest number of residents possible, then perhaps you have won.
In many instances, though, sober living home operators want to provide excellent housing options for people in recovery. Dealing in “lowest price” sober living doesn’t leave enough margin to provide a quality experience.
The truth is that residents will pay more for a sober living home that caters to them specifically.
It’s Never Too Late to Define Your Ideal Resident
If you already have your sober living home open—even if it’s been in operation for years—it’s never too late to get clear on your ideal resident. Sometimes all it takes is a few small tweaks to your program to make your sober living home issue a siren call for a specific demographic.
Whatever type of ideal resident you’re targeting, you’ll need powerful and intuitive tools to help keep your sober living home organized, efficient, and profitable. At Sober Living App, we’ve built the best all-in-one tool for managing every aspect of sober living housing. From bed management to rent collection to admissions paperwork and resident scheduling, everyone at your sober living home—including the residents!—can have instant access to everything they need from the convenience of their phone. Why not give the Sober Living App a try today?