Questions to ask a senior living advisor

Someone is offering to help you find a home for your mother, and the help is free. That is not a red flag. It is a question.

Five questions, actually. They take about four minutes, they work on any service in any town, and they are the difference between advice and a sales channel.

Here they are, with what a good answer sounds like. We answer all five for ourselves at the bottom, because a checklist whose author dodges it is worth nothing.

Five questions to ask any senior living advisor

Who pays a senior living advisor, and how much?

Most free senior living advisors in Canada are paid by the residences they refer families to: commonly a share of the resident's first month's rent, and usually only when a move-in actually happens.

A good answer to this question is one sentence long and arrives without being chased. Something like: the residences pay us, on move-in, at a rate set in our agreement with each one.

A poor answer talks about how the service is "always free to families." That is true and it is not the question.

It is also worth seeing through. A residence pays a placement fee out of revenue that comes from residents, so the money still reaches the service through your parent's rent. It simply takes a longer route than an invoice would. Free at the point of use is not the same thing as free. The full mechanics are in our explainer on how senior living advisors get paid in Canada.

Does an advisor earn more from some retirement homes?

A senior living advisor can earn different amounts from different residences, because fee agreements are negotiated one home at a time and there is no standard national rate.

So the sharper version of the question is this: does anything you earn change depending on which home we choose?

A yes is not disqualifying. Plenty of honest professionals work on differential commission. What matters is whether you are told, because then you can weight the recommendation yourself instead of taking it flat.

How many licensed Ontario retirement homes are in the network?

Ontario has more than 750 licensed retirement homes on the public register, so the number that matters is what share of them a service can actually place your parent into.

Ask for the count, not the adjective. "Extensive" is not a number.

Then ask the follow-up that people forget: what happens to a home that has not signed an agreement with you? In most fee-paid models, nothing happens. It simply never appears.

A network is not a market. The register is the market. Any service can describe its own network as comprehensive, because it is comprehensive of itself, and the only way to see the difference is to hold the two numbers side by side.

Will an advisor show you a home they earn nothing from?

A senior living advisor willing to show you a residence they earn nothing from is telling you their advice is not bounded by their network, and that is the most revealing of the five questions.

Ask for two such homes. Specifically. In your parent's area.

Watch what happens next. A service with genuine coverage will name them and explain why they might fit. A service that cannot will change the subject to how thoroughly it vets its partners, which is an answer to a different question.

There is a practical reason this question bites. Municipal homes, not-for-profits and small single-site residences are the least likely to sign fee agreements with anybody, and they are often exactly the homes a family on a tight budget most needs to hear about.

What happens to your parent's information after a senior living enquiry?

An enquiry form usually forwards your parent's details to several residences at once, because that distribution is the mechanism through which a referring service gets paid.

There is nothing sinister in that, as long as you know it is happening before you press send rather than when the fourth residence phones.

Four things to ask: which residences receive it, whether anyone else does, how long it is kept, and how you have it deleted.

Ask them in writing, by email, so the answer exists somewhere afterwards. The families who regret this step are almost always the ones who filled in a form at eleven at night and then spent a fortnight fielding calls they had not expected.

Reading the answers you get from a senior living advisor

How should a senior living advisor answer the money question?

A good answer names the payer, names the trigger and names the rough size, in one breath. Anything that takes three paragraphs to reach the payer is not an answer.

AARP, in guidance for families updated in September 2025, tells readers that agencies "may receive compensation from facilities. So, while they can be helpful, watch for potential conflicts of interest." That is the mainstream position, not a fringe one.

Conflict of interest is not the same as bad faith. It is a structural fact you should be told about, so you can hold it in one hand while you weigh the advice in the other.

What should you do if a senior living advisor will not answer?

When a senior living advisor will not say who pays them, keep the help if you need it and do the verification yourself.

That is the honest position, and it is worth saying out loud. In a small market a commission-paid service may be the only real expertise within reach, and refusing on principle can leave a family with no help at all.

So verify around it. Check every recommended home on the Retirement Home Public Register. Confirm what the regulator actually covers. The Retirement Homes Regulatory Authority licenses homes under the Retirement Homes Act, 2010, and we found no Canadian regime that licenses the businesses that refer families to those homes. If someone tells you they are "regulated," ask under which statute.

Answering our own senior living advisor questions

Publishing our own answers is the whole point of the exercise, and the method behind the third and fourth rows is set out in Agewise’s own ranking method, and where money touches it.

Our own answers, since a checklist that cannot survive being pointed back at its author was never a checklist. Every licensed community in a coverage area is listed whether or not its operator has any relationship with us. Agewise is not paid a referral fee when a family moves in. No operator can buy a position. Completeness does feed the ordering, so a fuller listing can outrank a thinner one, and any operator can fill one in for free. Turn the five questions on us any time.

If you would rather start with the decision than the vetting, our guide to choosing a home without an advisor in the middle is the place to begin. Avery, our free senior living guide, will work through the shortlist with you — and will happily answer all five questions again.