When families begin the search for assisted living or in-home care for an aging parent, almost all of them run into the same wall: it is confusing, emotional, and far more complicated than they ever expected. One fall, one hospitalization, one sudden decline, and suddenly adult children are scrambling to understand levels of care, pricing, insurance, waitlists, regulations, and how to even tell a good senior living option from a bad one.

For two decades, senior care professional Jessica Solomon has been sitting in the middle of that chaos. Her work in home care, senior living, and placement exposed her to just how unprepared most families are, and how opaque the industry can be. That experience led her to create Next Best Home, an online platform built around a simple idea: give families real information, real pricing, real choices, with as little sales pressure as possible.

This article walks through the core problems families face when looking for assisted living or home care, explains the hidden mechanics of traditional placement agencies, dives into the true costs of care, and shows how tools like Next Best Home and its AI-powered Care Concierge can radically shorten the learning curve for overwhelmed families. If you are trying to figure out what comes next for an aging parent or loved one, this is a grounded, practical starting point.

Why Most Families Don’t Plan Until They’re in Crisis

Ask almost any older adult what they want as they age, and you’ll hear some version of the same line: “I want to stay in my home as long as possible.” There is nothing wrong with that desire; it is deeply human. The problem is that very few people build a realistic plan around that wish.

Instead, families tend to drift along in a kind of uneasy status quo. Maybe an adult child notices subtle changes: a little more forgetfulness, medication confusion, a growing pile of unopened mail, less driving, more falls “that were no big deal.” Everyone tells themselves they will “deal with it later” because the topic is uncomfortable and the idea of major change is scary for both the parent and the children.

Then something happens. A fall. A stroke. A broken hip. A hospitalization followed by a discharge planner saying, “Your mom really shouldn’t go home alone.” What felt theoretical suddenly becomes urgent. In that narrow window of days or weeks, families are forced to figure out what level of care is needed, how much it costs, where their loved one could go, whether they can afford home care, whether assisted living is appropriate, and how to pay for all of it.

That is the precise moment Jessica designed Next Best Home to serve. The platform is meant to give families something most never get: a clear starting point and a realistic playbook instead of a maze of sales funnels, phone calls, and guesswork.

The Real Cost of “Staying at Home”

A lot of families start with one assumption: home is cheaper. On the surface it seems logical. The mortgage is paid off, the house is familiar, and the older adult may insist that they are “fine” with a little help. What most people do not realize is that once someone needs significant hands-on support, staying home can become the most expensive option of all.

In many parts of California, agency-based home care can easily run into the mid-40s to 60-plus dollars per hour, depending on the level of care. Agencies also tend to have minimum shift lengths, so the idea of “just one hour here and there” often doesn’t match reality. Once an older adult needs coverage for most of the day, or even twenty-four-hour supervision, families are often looking at care bills in the realm of twenty to thirty thousand dollars a month. That figure is just for human help; it does not include prescriptions, food, home maintenance, equipment, transportation, or the cost of the house itself.

Assisted living and residential care homes can, in many cases, cost significantly less per month while providing more structure and more consistent staffing. That does not make them cheap, and it does not mean everyone should move, but it does mean the “home is always cheaper” assumption is often wrong once care needs are high. One of the biggest contributions Next Best Home makes is simply to put real numbers in front of families so they can stop guessing and start making comparisons based on facts instead of wishful thinking.

How Senior Placement Agencies Actually Work

Many people’s first interaction with the senior care marketplace is not with a local expert, but with a national placement service. It usually starts with a Google search and a click on an ad promising “free help finding assisted living.” The website asks for a name, phone number, and email “to see local options.” Within hours, the phone starts ringing, emails start coming, and a list of recommended communities appears.

What almost no family sees is what is happening behind the curtain. Those services are paid by the communities they refer to. The community pays a referral fee when a new resident moves in, often a large amount equal to a month or more of rent. That cost gets absorbed into the community’s operating expenses and pricing. In other words, the service is not really “free”; the costs are just buried and spread across everyone.

There is another, equally important consequence. Because these companies only send families to communities that have signed contracts and agreed to pay referral fees, they almost never show the full universe of available options. A family might be told, “Here are four or five communities in your area,” when in fact there are dozens. Smaller residential care homes, especially six-bed homes in regular neighborhoods, are often invisible in these systems because they cannot afford or do not want to pay referral fees.

Jessica has watched this pattern for years. She has seen marketers teach people how to “start a placement business from your laptop” and earn big commissions by brokering seniors into communities. She has seen social workers, under pressure to move patients out of hospitals or rehab, rely on these services because the messaging has always been, “It’s free for the family.” The truth is more complicated. Many hospitals and skilled nursing facilities are extremely careful about which private-pay services they recommend, but senior placement has long existed in a gray zone with very little regulation or oversight.

The result is an industry that has helped many families, but also one that can be biased, opaque, and tilted toward whoever pays to play.

The Hidden World of RCFEs and Small Care Homes

Alongside the larger senior living communities, there exists another category of setting that many people have never even heard of: small licensed care homes, often called RCFEs (Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly). These are typically regular houses converted to accommodate up to six residents. They are licensed, staffed, and capable of providing significant support with daily care, medications, and supervision.

Despite being a huge part of the long-term care landscape, these homes remain largely off the radar for families. Jessica notes that in more than twenty years, roughly half the visitors touring a small care home will say some version of, “I never knew this existed.” That statistic hasn’t budged in two decades. These homes can be an excellent fit for older adults with higher care needs, dementia, or those who do better in a quieter, home-like environment.

Yet because many of these small homes do not work with national placement agencies, they are rarely shown as options to families who rely on those services for guidance. Next Best Home deliberately includes these smaller RCFEs, with real phone numbers, addresses, and pricing ranges, alongside larger communities. That alone is transformative, because it presents a more complete picture of what truly exists in a given area.

Why Jessica Built Next Best Home

The seeds of Next Best Home were planted during the COVID shutdowns. Jessica was working in home care and could see that families still needed to move loved ones into care homes and assisted living, even as outbreaks and restrictions made admissions complicated. Some communities had vacancies but were not accepting new residents. Others were full but still showing as “available” in various directories. Families were desperately trying to figure out who would take new residents, what it cost, and where to turn.

Instead of shrugging and saying, “That’s just how it is,” she began compiling data herself. She pulled together lists of care homes and communities, gathered addresses, capacities, price ranges, and whether they were open to admissions. The response from her senior care ecosystem was overwhelming. People in the industry said things like, “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” and “How has no one done this before?” The simple answer is that there is not much money in giving away information freely, especially when that information takes serious effort and grit to compile.

What started as a stopgap service in a crisis became the blueprint for a new kind of senior care platform. Jessica wanted a way to genuinely help families in crisis, give them clarity, and connect them not only to housing options but also to the funding strategies needed to pay for care. She partnered with mortgage strategist Mark Maimon, who had spent years building a suite of financial tools and products geared specifically toward older adults and their families. His expertise on bridging equity, financing care, and structuring long-term plans complemented her placement and ecosystem knowledge. The pairing felt, in her words, like an “Elton John and Bernie Taupin” moment: two different skill sets overlapping to create something larger than either could alone.

The Care Concierge: AI as a First Step, Not a Final Answer

One of the standout features of Next Best Home is the Care Concierge, a ChatGPT-powered assistant embedded into the platform. The idea is not to let artificial intelligence make decisions for families, but to give them a big head start.

A user can type in a scenario that sounds very familiar: “My mother is being discharged from a skilled nursing facility next week, she needs around-the-clock care, we want her close to us, we do not qualify for Medicaid, and we need to know what we can afford and what our options are.”

Within seconds, the system can outline likely paths: a comparison of home care costs versus assisted living, an explanation of what different levels of care mean, a realistic price range for various options, and a pointer back to specific local communities or RCFEs that match those needs. It can reference trusted advisors listed on the site—elder law attorneys, financial planners, senior living consultants—so the family can follow up with real humans when they are ready.

It is important to understand what the Care Concierge is not. It is not a replacement for professional assessment, and it is not the final word on complex medical or financial decisions. It is a way to turn “I have no idea where to begin” into “At least I understand the lay of the land and my next few steps.” That alone can make a massive difference for adult children trying to make decisions under pressure.

Beyond Housing: The Need for Trusted Advisors and Financial Clarity

Because so many older adults have a significant portion of their net worth tied up in their homes, the decision to sell, stay, downsize, or build an accessory dwelling unit is enormous. It intersects with tax law, capital gains, step-up in basis, long-term care planning, and family dynamics.

Jessica has had candid conversations with longtime placement specialists who admitted they do not understand capital gains or step-up issues at all, even though many of their clients are selling property to fund care. She has also spoken with former regulators who confirm that plenty of real estate agents are likewise unprepared to navigate these nuances and often do not know what they do not know.

That is why Next Best Home is not just a list of care homes. It is also a directory of carefully vetted professionals: estate planning attorneys, financial planners, senior-focused real estate agents with advanced designations, and senior living consultants with real operational experience. The platform intentionally gives families multiple options in each category instead of steering them to a single “preferred” provider. The assumption is that transparency and choice build more trust than funneling everyone through a narrow channel.

Jessica believes the future of trust in this space will look less like “five-star reviews” and more like old-fashioned word of mouth, amplified by technology. Families will look to people and platforms that show all their cards, explain how they operate, and provide more than one option.

Gen X, Adult Children, and the Coming Senior Care Wave

Most of the real conversations about senior care are not happening with the older adults themselves. They are happening with their children. Jessica notes that in twenty years, she has rarely had deep, proactive conversations about placement and care with seniors directly. It is usually the adult children—often Gen X—who are driving the search, coordinating logistics, and making final decisions.

Gen X has grown up with marketing, spin, and the internet. They are used to comparing options, reading between the lines, and spotting manipulative sales tactics. As Jessica puts it, they are “allergic to nonsense,” and they are not going to tolerate a system that feels exploitative or opaque. As more boomers move into their eighties and beyond, the demand for senior care options will surge, and the pressure on adult children to make smart, fast decisions will grow along with it.

At the same time, many senior living communities already have multi-year waitlists. The pipeline of professional caregivers is strained. Public programs are complex and underfunded. Jessica describes the current moment as standing on an empty beach after the water has silently receded. The massive wave has not yet hit, but it is unquestionably on its way.

That is why she argues so strongly for better preparation, more transparency, and stronger partnerships between senior care professionals and highly trained, senior-focused real estate and financial advisors. The stakes are too high to leave to guesswork.

A New Model for Senior Care Navigation

At its core, Next Best Home represents a shift away from treating seniors and their families as “leads” and toward treating them as people who need clarity, options, and support during one of the most challenging transitions of their lives. Instead of hiding information behind forms and funnels, it surfaces it. Instead of pushing families toward a small handful of contracted communities, it shows them the full ecosystem. Instead of promising “free” help while being paid by communities, it aims to align incentives more cleanly.

Families who use the platform can see care homes and assisted living communities laid out like a travel website, with filters, price ranges, and vacancy status. They can drop into the Care Concierge and describe their situation to get a general roadmap. They can click over to lists of vetted attorneys, planners, and consultants when they are ready to take the next step. And they can do all of this without immediately getting bombarded by calls and emails they did not explicitly ask for.

The senior care landscape is changing quickly. Costs are rising, regulations are in flux, family structures are more dispersed, and demographic realities are unavoidable. There is no single tool or professional that can make all of that easy. But platforms built on transparency, local expertise, and collaboration—like Next Best Home—can make it far more manageable.

For families trying to figure out how to help an aging loved one with dignity, safety, and financial prudence, the message is simple: you are not alone, the system is complex, but there are people and tools emerging specifically to help you navigate it with your eyes open instead of stumbling through it blind.