Fantasy Franchise Portfolio, Week 3: Visiting Angels and Estate Sales

By the year 2030, there are several generational and economic milestones that will have an impact on one population and industry in particular:

1. All baby boomers will be 65 or older. (The National Institute on Aging, 2020)

2. The home care scales will tip toward franchising. (Home Healthcare News, 2021)

3. The senior care franchise market will reach $5 billion (Senior Care Report, 2020)

This represents an opportunity to enormous value as an investor. If you want to build a winning franchise portfolio, we have two teams that make a whole lot of sense together:

Fantasy Franchise Week 3: Visiting Angels and Estate Sales

Let’s meet our teams!

Visiting Angels: In-home care for senior citizens who can no longer care for themselves 24/7. 

They provide amazing care services for the elderly, but there is also an inevitable end to the need for their services. None of us are immortal, and none of us get to take anything with us when we depart. Estate sales can become an important event in the transition families undergo when their elderly pass on.

Grasons Estate Sales: The gold standard for estate sales. People hold estate sales to liquidate the belongings of a family or estate. This sometimes occurs after a divorce or bankruptcy, but the most common estate sale is held after the death of a loved one.

A family will often go through the belongings of the deceased to collect heirlooms and other items of value, whether emotional or monetary, and then look to sell the remaining items. Sometimes this includes high value items like cars and expensive jewelry, and often includes things like rugs, furniture, and art. However, it’s a big undertaking to itemize, price, and sell hundreds of items collected over decades, so companies like Grasons are hired to manage the project, typically charging nothing to the family other than a percentage of the sales from the estate.

Why pair these together? 

Like most of our fantasy franchise portfolio matchups, it’s all about trust. You’ve entrusted the care of your loved one to Visiting Angels and they’ve come through for you time and again. Naturally, if the owners of that same company offered to handle the sale of your loved one’s estate, you’d trust them again.

Now, this is sensitive stuff. Obviously there’s a mourning and grieving period where promoting your estate sale services would be insensitive, unkind, and perhaps unethical. 

However, as an owner of Visiting Angels, you truly care about the families you’ve built relationships with. And as an owner of Grasons, you want to help those same families deal with the sometimes heart-wrenching tasks that follow the death of a loved one. If both of these are genuinely true, families will recognize that and actually appreciate you reaching out to them after a period of time to grieve. 

Marketing Efficiencies

While you only want to market Visiting Angels to the families of the elderly, and only want to market Grasons to the families of the deceased, there is a chance to increase the lifetime value of the customer you’ve generated through your marketing budget for Visiting Angels. You’ll still need to market each separately, but marketing ROI is all about lifetime value. When Shaq used to muscle his way to the bucket for an emphatic dunk, he was only planning on scoring two points, but ended up getting fouled and heading to the free throw line for a chance at turning two points into three. He didn’t always make the free throw, but at least he had a shot at it. Owning Grasons in addition to Visiting Angels gives you an opportunity to turn two points into three. 

Ultimately, we’re confident that the intersection of in-home care and estate sales is an investment opportunity that’s only going to grow in value over the next decade. Considering the generational and economic milestones on the population and industry, we recommend you put your money down on these two teams as a matchup that’s poised to win.