In November 2023, Priya Living opened its first community in India when it started welcoming residents to Priya Flower Valley, a 42-unit facility near New Delhi. Priya already operated four communities in the United States, and the expansion into India had an unusual spark – wanting to create a place where Indian expatriates living in the U.S. could go for an extended stay while visiting family and friends in India. During stays of at least 30 days, residents will get concierge support, housekeeping, chef-prepared meals and access to a private chauffeur service.
Arun Paul, founder and CEO of Priya Living, said Flower Valley has quickly found its footing and attracted both short-term and long-term residents from the U.S. and India. He sees the community as just the beginning of a global network of communities that will provide senior living residents greater flexibility to call multiple cities home. Paul spoke with Senior Living Executive about Priya’s progress so far and its ambitious plans for the future.
SLE: Can you share the backstory of Priya Living and how you became involved in the industry?
I got into this by accident. I was trying to find a place to live for my parents. The thought process at the time was I was going to get a duplex in the San Francisco area, where I lived, and my mom and dad were going to live there with their best friends – just two couples total. But they started talking to their friends about this, and somehow the story gets out there, and this thing becomes, ‘Oh, there’s a community that’s being created in San Francisco.’ So I started getting phone calls, and people were so excited about this community that was going to be for Indian expats. They were calling from Atlanta and Philadelphia and Virginia – all over the place – saying that this is something they’ve been talking about for a long time.
What we ended up doing was trying to create a community that spoke to people who come here from India – people like my parents. These were people who had immigrated here in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and they were now aging, and the product out there didn’t really speak to them from a food and programs perspective. We ended up opening communities that are open to all – we do have people who are not from India – but a lot of our residents are folks who grew up in India and came to the U.S.
SLE: How did the idea to open a community in India develop?
As we started doing this in the U.S., what we started hearing from people is that there’s a desire to spend time in both places. They want to spend part of the year with family and friends in India, too. For our current customers, their aspiration is not to live in one place for 12 months. We studied this and realized there’s a lot of demand for this. And it’s not just coming from the U.S. into India, but also from other countries – from Canada, the U.K., UAE, Singapore, Australia. There’s a lot of demand from seniors who want to spend time in more than one spot.
What we’ve done as an industry is that all we’ve given people is a 365-day product. You move in, and you live here every single day unless you go on a vacation for a couple weeks.
There are a lot of people now who are aging and who have kids living in different cities, and they might want to spend a few months in those cities. That’s what we saw, so we decided to go to India in order to serve our U.S. customers who are spending time in both places but also to serve customers within India and from the rest of the world.
SLE: How are bookings managed and what’s the response been like so far?
Everything is fully online. You just check in online – you put in your name, your credit card info and your dates. The response has been great. We’re building relationships and starting the process for people who are thinking about senior living. They have the option now of coming and staying for a week or two weeks or a month and they get to experience it. Then, when they’re ready to settle down and do want to spend most of the year in one location, we have a relationship with them.
And our new product in India is actually at a much higher level than our products here. The reason is the service levels are much higher because you can have a lot more staffing so that you can create a better experience for residents.
SLE: Why is that?
Labor costs. Obviously, the single biggest challenge in the U.S. is the availability of people. India’s got the world’s largest workforce. There are lots of young, highly trained, highly motivated people at one-tenth the cost. From a service standpoint, instead of doing housekeeping once a week, we’re doing it daily. For food service, we have a 24/7 dining operation – there are no mealtimes. We have private drivers and personal concierges. It’s a one-to-one staffing model. Our business is about humans serving other humans, and you need people to do that – and the more you can do for folks obviously the better.
SLE: Are the people who are staying at Flower Valley largely residents of your communities in the U.S.?
We have had residents from our U.S. residents go there, but we’re also attracting folks from other parts of the U.S. and other parts of the world. And then the domestic market in India is more than half of our business there today. We had gone into this thinking we were going to start with the focus on the U.S, but what we’re seeing early is that people in India like this too. Because the same dynamic is happening within India as in the U.S., which is that people are aging, their kids have moved away, and they want to be mobile within India. As people age, one of the things they most want is to spend time with the people they love.
SLE: What are the operational and management challenges to the model allowing short-term stays?
There’s a cost to turnover, especially when you’re turning units over like this. If there are vacancies, you have to manage that, and it is more operationally intensive that way. There’s definitely a value to long-term residency, and we have long-term residents, both in India and the U.S. The thing is people want senior living, but they don’t necessarily want to buy so much of it. The analogy I’ve used is that it’s like if somebody really loves chocolate and they really want to buy three or four chocolate bars, but we force them to buy a pallet-full of chocolate. We’ve got to figure out how to serve them better. People are saying that they want some senior living, but they don’t all want the 24/7, 365 version of it.
SLE: Can people also do short-term stays at your U.S. locations?
Yes. We want all our communities to have that capability because there’s a value to a network that has multiple locations where they can stay. It gives them options. If someone living in San Francisco has brothers and sisters in India and kids here in New York and Virginia, they’re going to want to be in all those places. So, we want to have that ability in more places.
SLE: What are your current expansion plans?
We’re operational in one city in India. We’re going to be operational in three cities by the end of the year, and then we’ll be in seven cities next year. That’s all in India, but the way that we see the demand is that it’s here in the U.S., it’s in India, but it’s also in places like London, Toronto, Dubai, Singapore and Australia. These are the places where the diaspora from India is, and there’s a huge connection in all those places with India. So having that kind of network is what we’re ultimately working on.
SLE: Could you share your perspective on today’s senior living market in India?
The U.S. is much more advanced in senior living because you’ve got at least 40 years of history here and India is just getting started. There’s just a handful of players there. The government is still trying to figure out what this industry is, but there’s a lot of support for it. It’s very early, but the demand is definitely there. There’s a huge population, and incomes are growing very fast.
SLE: It must be exciting to be a part of that momentum that you’re seeing there.
There’s definite excitement to being a pioneer there. I’d encourage more U.S.-based companies to think about foreign markets like India. From a senior living perspective, the U.S. really has the best product in the world, and there’s definitely a lot of opportunity in India.
SLE: You have such a specific niche that you’re targeting for your communities. Are there advantages that you’ve seen to being focused in that way?
I think everyone wants customized products, right? The question is, how do they want to customize? If you think about how we watch TV now, there are a million possibilities. People find their interest. If they like fly fishing, they’re going to find that content. It’s a similar thing with communities and what we’re doing is just one example. I call this affinity housing, where there’s housing to customized interest groups. It could be people who love golf. It could be people who love wine. It could be veterans. It could be teachers. We’re seeing university-affiliated housing with alumni. I think anytime you can do that – build around that affinity – you will create a much more powerful product because you are giving a group of people what they really, really want.
Too often you get afraid and say it’s not broad enough for everyone, but as that saying goes when you try to be all things to all people you’re going to be nothing to anyone. It just leads to a middle-of-the-road kind of product. The way we view it is that we’re just one channel out of lots of channels out there, and we can focus on that. It’s something everyone should think about. In my view, it’s the future.
