NIC Founder Bob Kramer Launches Senior Advisory Services Firm
The new company, Nexus Insights, will focus on innovation in serving older adults.
Bob Kramer, Founder & President, Nexus Insights Image courtesy of the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care
Senior housing maven Bob Kramer has launched Nexus Insights, a new advisory firm dedicated to disruptive ideas in aging services, as the current global health crisis forces a rethink of large swaths of the economy. Kramer, the founder & former CEO of the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC), started the new company to serve clients across a range of industries that, he says, need to sharpen their focus on older adults.
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The urgency to announce the new business was provided by the COVID-19 crisis, which has compressed years’ worth of “incredible disruptive innovation” into a period of several weeks, Kramer told Multi-Housing News. While senior housing providers, operators and investors are rightly focused on issues of protection and care, he said, there is also a need to envisage and plan for a post-pandemic reality.
“Things are going to look very different across our economy, in healthcare, in aging services, and most specifically in seniors housing and care,” said Kramer, who stepped down as CEO of NIC in the summer of 2017 and will continue to serve the nonprofit in a part-time strategic advisory role.
Thinking ahead
Nexus Insights, which Kramer describes as a “quasi think tank, quasi consulting firm,” will tap into a network of advisors to generate thought leadership and other services for a spectrum of industries, from aging and aging services, to education, healthcare, technology and consumer products. For example, universities and private liberal arts colleges may need to retool their programs to appeal to the Baby Boomer generation as they struggle to recruit students in a time of economic turmoil.
The firm will have a senior housing angle—“Those are my roots, and I’m not by any means abandoning those roots,” Kramer said—but will also address the pressures facing the real estate industry more broadly. “Coworking, co-housing, co-living situations, the whole move to the city and to micro-apartments and micro-spaces—that’s all challenged now,” he noted.
