The following article was written by Mark Ogilbee for AgeTech Collaborative™ from AARP following an interview with LivNow Co-Founder and CEO, Maureen Longoria. In this conversation, Maureen shares how LivNow helps older adults and their families navigate later-life transitions with confidence, compassion, and trusted guidance.
The article below has been republished with permission.
As anyone who has helped an older loved one move knows, transitioning into a senior living community involves far more than packing boxes. Finding realtors, scheduling movers and dealing with a lifetime’s worth of belongings can quickly become overwhelming for older adults and their families.
That’s where LivNow — an AgeTech Collaborative™ (ATC) startup participant — steps in. Connecting them with trusted local service providers and doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, LivNow helps families navigate later-life moves with confidence, reducing the stress and uncertainty that often accompany a major life transition.
We spoke with LivNow Co-Founder and CEO Maureen Longoria about the company’s growing suite of services, how LivNow is collaborating with fellow AgeTech Collaborative participants and how partnering across the ATC ecosystem can both improve the client experience and amplify each company’s impact.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about LivNow.
At LivNow, we manage later-in-life transitions and the associated downsizing that comes with them, usually for someone who is moving into a senior living community. A lot of times, older adults want to move into a community; they know they would eat better, enjoy the activities and make friends. But the process can feel overwhelming, and they wonder, “How am I supposed to do this?” We exist to help people get over that hurdle, so they can move into that community and start living their best lives now — which is why we called the company LivNow.
We work with more than 200 senior living communities across the country and have managed more than 6,000 transitions. That’s the biggest part of our business. More recently, we have also started managing estate settlements: When someone passes away, we help the adult children sell their parents’ home and deal with all their belongings.
How does the process work?
Typically, a community that we contract with will refer an incoming resident to us. We then step in to coordinate everything. We recommend local realtors, moving companies and similar services, all of whom we have thoroughly vetted. We don’t own any of these companies; our goal is to act as an objective advocate throughout the process and provide people with vetted choices and give them options.
For example, we firmly believe that people should have estimates from at least two moving companies so they can compare. Behind the scenes, we do the heavy lifting: We have those providers call the client and set up an appointment. But the clients are in total control — they meet with the movers and get the information. We’re here to help them sort through all the information they gather, but the final decision is theirs. This helps clients feel more confident in their decision, and when they feel more confident, they feel a lot less stressed about it all.
It sounds like you’re really involved in the nitty-gritty details of all this.
I like to say that LivNow is like the adult child with a Type A personality who is looking out for their parent making the transition, setting things up and vetting providers but letting the older adult maintain full control over their decisions.
Crucially, the providers must be companies that we feel comfortable recommending. For example, we’ve had some national handyman companies reach out to us. We love the idea of offering handyman services to our clients, but we said no to those big companies because we had no way of knowing about the actual people who would be going into our clients’ homes. We did find a company that met our criteria — Helpful Heroes — that uses local, vetted firefighters and EMTs to provide handyman services, and we have partnered with them.
You mentioned you now also provide estate settlement services. Can you say more about that?
When someone passes away, the people appointed as executors, trust officers and the like don’t usually have real estate expertise. So we coordinate the process by having two full-time, top-producing local realtors provide a comparative market analysis on the home, then share that information with the executor. We’ll give them our advice, but the executor makes the decision on which realtor to go with. We’ll continue to manage the process by doing things like checking to make sure the pictures in the listing are professionally taken, asking for market updates every two weeks, querying about adjusting the pricing, and so on.
But before you can sell the home, you have to have someone clean it out, right? We also help clients do things like find trusted people who can go into the home and go through all the belongings and arrange to donate what can be donated, sell things that are of value, and remove and dispose of junk. We can even help coordinate getting furniture or other belongings shipped to family members who want to keep those things in the family. Again — the decision is the client’s; we’re just here to coordinate behind the scenes.
Along those lines, you’ve partnered with ATC startup participant Artifcts, which helps people deal with all their belongings when they’re trying to downsize.
When people make a big transition such as moving into a senior living community, they can’t take everything with them. They say, “I have all this stuff, and I don’t know if it’s worth anything.” We say, “Great! Let’s talk about Artifcts.” With Artifcts, people can take a photo of an object, upload it, and Artifcts can let them know if it might be worth selling. Just as valuable, people can share the story behind the object — maybe it’s an heirloom — so that loved ones can forever have the history of granddad’s pocket watch, for example. People’s eyes light up when they hear about Artifcts and what it can do for them.
You’re also working with Prisidio and Remento, which are also ATC startup participants, to help people safeguard both their important documents and their life story.
Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for people as they prepare to make the transition to community living. Frequently, people have a filing cabinet full of documents, but they can’t take the filing cabinet with them. So as part of our offerings, we recommend the services of Prisidio, which lets people digitize important documents such as wills, birth certificates and mortgage deeds. Prisidio then securely stores those documents online so that loved ones and trusted users can always have access to them. It’s smart for our clients, and it’s smart for their families.
We also like to encourage people to think about capturing their legacy for posterity. That’s why we also promote Remento, which allows users to record their memories and life stories, then automatically turns those recordings into a quality hardcover book.
By and large, these are all new technological solutions that our clients are completely unaware of and might not otherwise discover. It can be difficult for those B2C companies to get in front of potential customers. But since we’re B2B2C and contract with senior living communities, they get exposure to that marketplace through us. Their solutions make sense for us to include in our offerings because they’re relevant to that time in people’s lives when they’re making a big transition.
That’s a terrific example of the AgeTech Collaborative ecosystem in action!
We’re so proud to be part of the AgeTech Collaborative. All the time, you are announcing new companies and providers joining the ATC and making introductions to them. That means we’re always in the know; we find out about these companies before most people even know they exist, and we can bring those companies to our clients. What we’re doing with these relationships shows how the AgeTech Collaborative ecosystem can build a better future for everybody.
What are you most excited about in the coming months for LivNow?
We’re launching the LivNow mobile platform that for the first time will allow clients to go into LivNow and see all the information relevant to them at a glance. They’ll see Prisidio, Artifcts and Remento. It will show them everything related to the transition process, from moving estimates and company contact information to comparative market analyses from the realtors they’ve chosen.
It will also make it really easy for families to support their loved ones through the move, or coordinate with each other on the estate settlement side. Grown children or others can go into the platform and see all the information, assign each other responsibilities and even communicate directly right in the system. For the first time, there’s a place for everyone to organize and have visibility into everything, and we’re really excited about that.
We are honored to have LivNow featured by AgeTech Collaborative™ from AARP and grateful to Mark Ogilbee for highlighting our mission and the work our team does to help families navigate life’s biggest transitions.
Thank you to AgeTech Collaborative™ from AARP for the opportunity to share our story and for your continued commitment to advancing innovation that improves the lives of older adults and their families.
