The Challenges of Picking the Right Senior Living Facility

Your mom needs to move into assisted living. You Google "assisted living near me," get a list of places with star ratings, read some reviews, and schedule tours at the ones that look nice. This is how most families make one of the most consequential decisions for their loved ones.

What you're not seeing

Here's what's publicly available about every licensed facility in Washington State:

• DSHS inspection reports -- detailed findings from trained inspectors, documenting specific violations and how the facility responded
• Secretary of State filings -- the legal entity behind the facility, when it was incorporated, and where its principal office is located¹
• County property records -- who owns the building and land²
• Reviews across multiple platforms -- different review sites rate the same facilities differently
• Proximity data -- distance to the nearest hospital, pharmacy, grocery store, and park

Almost nobody looks at any of this except the Google reviews. And a 4.5-star rating from 12 reviews is statistically meaningless, but it looks identical to a 4.5 from 200 reviews in search results.

The same facility, different ratings

The same King County facility can have a 4.5 on one review site and a 3.0 on another. Each platform attracts different people with different motivations. If you only check one, you're getting one self-selected perspective.

The data is scattered and nobody has time

Inspection reports are PDFs on the DSHS website. Business filings are on a separate state portal. Property records require searching county assessor databases. Reviews are scattered across multiple sites. Nobody has time to piece this together, especially not someone who just found out their parent needs care in the next few weeks.

We built SeniorAIQ to aggregate all of it. We collect every piece of publicly available data, score facilities across multiple weighted categories, and make the results comparable. Every number traces back to a specific public source. We don't editorialize and we don't sell placement.

In the next few posts, I'll break down what this data actually shows for King County: inspection scores, aggregated reviews, ownership records, and how it all combines into a single comparable score.