014: Moving and Memories: The Unique Challenges of Later Life Transitions – Paul Lawrence

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (00:00)
Ever wonder what later life is like in some other part of the world? Come with me today on a podcast trek to New Zealand. Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom and Still Be On Speaking Terms Afterward provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding and humor.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (00:39)
I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner and here you'll find answers to many of your questions as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (00:50)
I'm so happy that Paul Lawrence is here from New Zealand. Thank you for bringing here, Paul.

Paul Lawrence: (00:56)
Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks so much for having me on board.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (00:58)
Oh, my pleasure. My guest Paul Lawrence is one of the co-founders of Senior Move Managers, the leading relocation business in New Zealand serving older adults. Paul and his partners launched their company over five years ago and now have seven offices that cover all of New Zealand. Senior Move Managers also has plans to expand to Australia in the next few years.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (01:20)
And Paul does have a personal side, he really does. He's engaged to Anna and together they have a five month-old son, George, as well as a dog named Taco. Tell me about your favorite memory of your grandparents.

Paul Lawrence: (01:32)
The one memory that instantly comes to mind is my grandfather got unwell quite early on. So the doctor encouraged him to stop drinking alcohol, but of course, being a Kiwi bloke, he wasn't too keen to give up his gin and tonic every night. So my grandma started mixing him gin and tonic with black current juice-

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (01:50)
Oh.

Paul Lawrence: (01:50)
... and she slowly started removing the gin from the drink and so ended up just giving him black current and tonic and he never knew.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (01:59)
Grandma was a genius. You're so funny. So talk to me about how you started Senior Move Managers in New Zealand. What inspired that?

Paul Lawrence: (02:08)
We've been going for coming up six years now. It came from personal experience. Brad, my co-founder and myself, he was playing professional miracle football in Germany. He came back to New Zealand and his grandparents were going through a downsizing process. They looked for some additional help outside of a traditional relocation company that would drop all your furniture off and your boxes in the middle of your bedroom.

Paul Lawrence: (02:30)
I was selling residential real estate. I had a lot of elderly clients who were moving into retirement villages as well, and they asked me, "Hey, look, is there anyone that can actually help us through this process?" So moving companies can't look after that emotional element. It's just the physical side of it. It's an aging population right across the globe. So Brad and I, we sat down and did a lot of research into the market in the United States and saw that there was about 12 move management companies in 2002.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (02:57)
That was just the beginning. We have over a thousand members of the National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers.

Paul Lawrence: (03:05)
... [crosstalk 00:03:05] and New Zealand is very different to the retirement industry and the United States and anywhere around the world. The way that things are done here, and I don't say this lightly, it is certainly looked upon as a really successful model for the retirement industry. It's certainly leaning more towards retirement communities as opposed to fixed homes or retirement villages.

Paul Lawrence: (03:26)
And the perception from myself growing up, my only real exposure to the retirement industry was my grandma after she had had a stroke. And so she was under 24/7 care and she had a studio apartment so she would go out a communal space and have her meals every day. Now, there's swimming pools, there's movie theaters, there's salons. There's full functioning bars where you get a beer for $2 as opposed to $12 if you actually go to a real bar. It's like resort living here in New Zealand.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (03:53)
And we definitely have communities here that feel like resorts. They're very expensive. Now, how does it work in New Zealand in terms of what other care might be provided by, I don't know if it's called a National Health Service, but you definitely have a national health system, which we don't have here in the U.S.

Paul Lawrence: (04:10)
Yeah. It's referred to just as Public Health System here in New Zealand.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (04:12)
[crosstalk 00:04:12].

Paul Lawrence: (04:12)
In terms of the retirement space, there is age residential care in these retirement communities. We look at them both very separately. The retirement communities are independent so essentially it's in an apartment building where you do everything yourself. So you do your own washing, you'll vacuum, you'll cook your own meals. And then you've got your aged residential care, which is more of what my grandmother was in when she had her stroke.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (04:38)
So I think here we call that assisted living.

Paul Lawrence: (04:40)
Yeah. Exactly the same. For the two different models, for your independent or your retirement communities, you pay a capital cost or capital fee upfront and that ranges depending of the region that you live in New Zealand. The way that it's set up is that everything that's provided that I mentioned before, those bowling greens, the swimming pools, the movie theaters and the beautiful grounds that they have, the security, it's a model that works really well.

Paul Lawrence: (05:06)
One really good thing is that we have a continuum of care, probably 85, 90% of village operators in New Zealand will actually have an assisted living option once you need that. So if you're no longer deemed independent, you can move into a different part of the village and get that care provided too.

Paul Lawrence: (05:23)
Now, some providers are providing that care into your independent unit, but then others will transfer you through that continuum of care. The way that the age residential care model works here in New Zealand is that it's subsidized by the government. So it might just be [inaudible 00:05:37] home level care where you're getting your meals provided and you've got a little studio or it might be highend dementia level care where you're in a secure area.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (05:46)
But there are communities called continuing care retirement communities, often called CCRCs because it's a lot faster to say, but that's where you make a big investment upfront. Same thing, you pay a monthly rent for the often well-appointed apartments that you have so you can move in and be independent, but then when you start needing more care, it's available to you. But then there's assisted livings where there isn't that big upfront investment, but you do pay substantial rent per month, but you are also getting food and cleaning care.

Paul Lawrence: (06:21)
Yeah, the population's growing at such a rapid rate that providers across New Zealand need to build 53 new units every week for the next 25 years, just to keep up with population growth.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (06:33)
Wow.

Paul Lawrence: (06:34)
Our workload, our business has essentially doubled year on year and [crosstalk 00:06:38]-

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (06:39)
Oh yeah.

Paul Lawrence: (06:39)
... it'll continue to double for the next two, three years as well.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (06:42)
Which is tremendous.

Paul Lawrence: (06:43)
Having management plans in place becomes really important. My business partner, Brad, he's got a degree in public health. He was a lecturer in a health division in the New Zealand defense force and he also has a bachelor's degree from university in pharmacology and microbiology.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (07:01)
I love this. He's a football player with a degree in pharmacology. Very interesting.

Paul Lawrence: (07:07)
I know, I know.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (07:08)
Eclectic background.

Paul Lawrence: (07:09)
Yeah, we both do. We've got very colorful backgrounds, but that suited us really well.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (07:13)
In what we do, you have to be really adaptable. Every situation is different environment is different.

Paul Lawrence: (07:19)
I agree. So, I studied a sports science degree at Otago University. From there, I went into hospitality, managing bars and restaurant. From there, I worked in commercial radio, organizing the promotions and being on air and a sales team. And then from there, I went into selling residential property and now I'm here. Certainly not a linear direction that we followed.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (07:39)
When you're a realtor, when you're handling real estate and hospitality, you really have to learn to understand customer service. Especially with real estate, you're handling most families' biggest financial asset and it's their home environment. So there's a lot of emotions understandably going on.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (07:56)
And in the work that we do, when they're older, a lot of people are feeling that they can touch the end of their lives. I don't know what it's like there, but here, they've lived in their home for 40 or 50 years. We once moved someone who was 89 years old out of the house he'd been born into.

Paul Lawrence: (08:12)
Really? Wow.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (08:13)
Yeah.

Paul Lawrence: (08:14)
So our longest standing client, they built their house in 1949. So they've been here 65-ish years and they hadn't done any work to the house other than renovated the kitchen probably-

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (08:26)
Oh.

Paul Lawrence: (08:26)
... 20, 30 years ago. Yeah. Similar story here. Everyone's been in their house at least 30 years. The big message we make when we are doing presentations out in the community and meeting with people is, that move when you can and when you want to, not when you have to. There's no point moving into a retirement community and not being able to enjoy the swimming pool or the gymnasium. Move when you want to and when you can, so you can enjoy it.

Paul Lawrence: (08:51)
But we are working with a lady at the moment who has a house in Christchurch, New Zealand. And she's been there 30 odd years and it's flood-damaged, it's earthquake-damaged. It's never been repaired. It was a big 1930s villa, two story place. There's no floorboards, insulation's hanging out of the ceiling, it's an absolute mess. She had no power. She was almost like a squatter and a hoarder.

Paul Lawrence: (09:12)
She had a fall, ended up in hospital and the District Health Board got in touch with me and I've been working with her since August last year. And we are now getting her house on the market ready to sell, but she's paying $1,300 a week now for here in this village and the government won't pay any of her cost because she owns a property, even though the property's is worth diddly squat, because it's going have to be demolished. So she's basically racking up this bill that she'll then have to pay. This is a very extreme case, but there are people that are on the end of the spectrum that don't have money, but still need that support and that care.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (09:48)
We're currently working with a client whose home is probably going to sell for anywhere from 1.5 to 2 million. And they bought it back at the seventies for 49,000. So there are a lot of people here who've been in their homes a long time, who are what we call cash-poor, but house-rich.

Paul Lawrence: (10:05)
Yes. Yeah.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (10:06)
And they are great candidates to sell their property also for reverse mortgages.

Paul Lawrence: (10:10)
Yep. Reverse mortgages are starting to become more popular here in New Zealand as well. It certainly becoming a more hot topic here.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (10:17)
Yeah. Paul, let's you and I talk about what we do on a daily basis. Project manage moves. I believe you guys are not just the only company in town that does this, but basically in the country, correct?

Paul Lawrence: (10:29)
Yeah, that's right. We started in 2016, but we've gone a little bit further than just project management. We decided that by bringing in outside providers, people haven't met the bill in terms of that level of customer service that we need. A traditional mover is not someone who would sit down with your grandma and have a cup of tea or your mom or your family. We want to get to know the clients that we are working with and build that relationship.

Paul Lawrence: (10:54)
Our values are transparency, integrity, empathy, and respect. For us, it's doing the right thing. We've got two ears and one mouth. So I'm a big believer in listening first talking second. And then also the respect element is that everyone has a story to tell. I believe that everyone's superior to me because they know something that I don't.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (11:14)
Isn't that so important to realize that everybody has their yields of expertise and they're not the same? Older adults would love to be able to tell their stories. Our tagline is, where compassionate meets knowhow, for clear home solutions. And when I'm hiring, I'd like to say that those of us who work here are friendly nerds who can't sit still. It's that blend of empathy, usually from some past experience they've had with their own grandparents or parents, also, just that wanting to get things done and a bit of inquisitiveness, not nosy curiosity. It's really being open to hearing what people have to say.

Paul Lawrence: (11:51)
Yeah. We heard Kendall on your podcast and one of the previous episodes-

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (11:55)
Hmm. Kendall Young, the realtor?

Paul Lawrence: (11:56)
Yeah. She made a comment that really sat with me. That was that, she was a super curious person, intent on finding solutions. For me, I think that basically described my personality down to an absolute T. Helping people is something I've always been really keen on and whether it's helping them get the next drink from behind the bar or helping them find the right home to buy. And it's certainly an area that I have a passion for.

Paul Lawrence: (12:22)
We hire all of our staff against our values and every single business decision that we make, whether it's to open an office here or disciplinary action with a staff member here, it is based on those values. That's really to the success of our business and that high level of customer service that we aim to deliver every single time.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (12:39)
It really is important for any company to have those core values. And like you say, hire to those core values. It takes courage to walk into a hoarding situation and tackle it. It takes courage when you're new to this industry, to work with someone with dementia and handling surprises that arise.

Paul Lawrence: (12:57)
When you mention hoarder, I'm going to have to share the story of one of our most challenging customers that we worked with. So on average, our tasks take between probably 30 and 40 people hours to sort, organize, pack, move, unpack, and clean their house. Obviously, there's outliers and some a bit easier. The most challenging client that we worked with was 268 hours.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (13:21)
Oh my.

Paul Lawrence: (13:22)
In New Zealand, we have skip bins. So essentially a portable rubbish bin.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (13:27)
We call them dumpsters.

Paul Lawrence: (13:29)
Yep. So it would hold nine cubic meters, essentially the size of a medium size four-wheel drive truck. It would hold one of those. So we filled up 19 of those with rubbish. There was plastic ice cream containers filled with organic food that had turned to liquid. If I could show you the photos, you would be horrified. We filled container after container with magazines. Here's probably the kicker. We found 28, a big dramatic pause here, 28 dead chickens.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (14:00)
No.

Paul Lawrence: (14:02)
Yeah. Unfortunately.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (14:04)
There are different kinds of hoarders, right? And you do have hoarders who love animals so much they bring them in and can't take care of them and that's what happens.

Paul Lawrence: (14:15)
And this particular lady, we would fill up the dumpster and at the end of the day, we'd leave. And then we'd come back the next day and she'd taken half of the stuff back into the house. No one was really interested in working with these people. And historically, the assistance has fallen on the healthcare provider. So the nurses and the social workers and the hospitals, and it's not their job. Hoarding has now been classified as a mental health illness in New Zealand in the last 12, 18 months, which is really good to see because then support does become available.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (14:46)
I often have to explain, they're not intentionally not taking care of the animal. And you'll find cat litter everywhere and maybe there's some rashes on these pets, but you'll also find, as you were noting, the expired food for the person. They don't take care of themselves either. They don't know how to, because that's what a hoarding disorder does.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (15:06)
Let's talk about the process of what we do as Senior Move Managers. You're basically the whole show in New Zealand with what we do. Here in the U.S., there are a number of companies and different people who do this sort of thing. It's most important that people work with whoever they are most comfortable with. That's why it's so important to take time and listen to their questions and their stories.

Paul Lawrence: (15:27)
Yeah. Like you said, it's the listening, it's the understanding, it's the respect, the compassion. So to actually get an understanding and a feel for actually what's required because everyone's situation is different. If you go in and you've got a template of what it looks like, and what's going to occur and what you are going to do to manage this project, then you're not tailoring that to the individual needs. Sometimes moving house isn't a happy experience because that house, yes, it would have a lot of memories to him, but he might be really sad he's actually leaving that house. But if you don't understand the grief that's associated with that, you're on a different path.

Paul Lawrence: (16:01)
And one of our team said to me last week is that, we don't actually move belongings, we move memories and feelings. And that really is true. It's certainly a process that can't be overlooked.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (16:13)
The sorting is always, especially with clothes and things like that, that's always fascinating. They're often living in two-story houses with a garage, maybe a shutout back, and they're moving into maybe a one bedroom.

Paul Lawrence: (16:25)
Yeah. It's a lot smaller. And maybe there's no comprehension of what will fit and what they can take. We hear one lady moving into a one-bedroom apartment and she took 11 occasional chairs. Most people have one or two in the house. She took 11 into a one-bedroom apartment as well as 16 chandeliers. And she had, [inaudible 00:16:43] about eight or nine wall mirrors as well. And this was a tiny little wee one-bedroom.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (16:48)
Here's the thing that if they are legally in charge of themselves, so if they want to keep it, we have to respect that.

Paul Lawrence: (16:54)
Absolutely, and we did in that particular instance, talk to the village management and raised health and safety concerns. If she was to have a fall in the apartment, there was no way to get a gurney into the room. She could fall and seriously injure herself. We're obviously looking out for the health and safety of our clients that we are working with, but at the end of the day, you're right. It's their decision. You can lead them to where they need to be, but if they don't get there, there's not really much you can do. 99% of people take too much.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (17:19)
They tend to. And if they're moving locally, I'll say, "Let's just pick out your favorite and most useful items. Let's just start with that and get that moved over there so you can be comfortable. Your house isn't going to fall off the cliff the day you move."

Paul Lawrence: (17:31)
New Zealand's a unique space. We've got two islands. We've got the north island and the south island, probably 3, 4% of our clients move between islands. So it's not a huge amount, but we are doing a thousand moves a year at the moment. So there's regulations in terms of what can and can't go and that makes it tricky.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (17:49)
Your furniture and other items that you're moving. The minute it hits the water and has to be transported that way, it's so much more expensive. There's a lot more forms. There can be taxes and charges and things. If you're going internationally, you really need custom agents, good ones on both sides of the move. That's why, when people are moving internationally or even to Hawaii, we just say, "Minimalize. Buy it there."

Paul Lawrence: (18:12)
That's what we say. Even moving inter-island, it can be cheaper to buy everything brand new. And that's a conversation we have with some of our clients as well. But like I said, you can lead a horse to water, can't you? 16 chandeliers. Exactly.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (18:26)
[crosstalk 00:18:26]. Oh my goodness. So you do the sorting and then make sure the packing is all done properly?

Paul Lawrence: (18:32)
Basically the complete service is the sort, organize the pack, the shift, the unpack, and then the setup of the home becomes really important. The little touches go such a long way. If you don't do them, then it becomes just a minor inconvenience, but if you've got 10 minor inconvenience on a day that should be exciting for you moving into this new property, then all of a sudden you've got this sense of, disappointment's not the right word, but lack of excitement is probably better.

Paul Lawrence: (19:02)
We'll always set the clock on the microwave. We'll always fill the jug with water. Connecting up their wifi and making sure that their cable TV is running and operational becomes really important. So 9 out of 10 times, got no idea what's happening behind the TV with all of the plugs and cables.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (19:17)
You and I know how carefully you have to pack all the remotes, all the cords, document where they go so they can be plugged in on the other side.

Paul Lawrence: (19:26)
Yeah. One element that seems that's common sense, and an absolute no-brainer, if we're in someone's house and they're moving a China cabinet, we'll open up the doors of the China cabinet and take a photo of each individual shelf. So we'll have the tea ups, the ornaments, the photos of the grandkids. And then when we move it to the new residence, we'll unpack it and set it up exactly as it was. Those comforts of home go a long way.

Paul Lawrence: (19:49)
Then when our clients walk in the door and the place is set up and there's familiarity there, that just goes such a long way to making their transition into a new home easier. Do you have preferred real estate agents that you work with? What's your process for helping the clients sell their home?

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (20:06)
There's a certification you can get here in the states as a realtor. If you see the letters SRES, senior real estate specialist. So they are certified. And so they'll understand the unique tax breaks here. They're more informed. Talk to people and see who you feel most comfortable with. Do your research.

Paul Lawrence: (20:24)
Agreed. For us here, probably about 50% of our clients have engaged real estate agent already. So what we have decided to do here in New Zealand, we thought our clients deserve true value. [inaudible 00:20:36] Senior Move Managers as providing that value to our customers over and above a moving company. So what we wanted to do now is, do the same thing with real estate, or have been licensed for seven years now. So what we are going to do here in New Zealand is, charge a competitive commission rate to sell homes and offer completely free marketing to offer a complimentary moving package as well. No one else at this point is able to do.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (21:01)
What's the population of New Zealand?

Paul Lawrence: (21:04)
Five million, or thereabout, less than LA. A lot smaller, but definitely still huge amount of population.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (21:12)
And like you said, more people moving there.

Paul Lawrence: (21:13)
And we're getting a lot of people moving back to New Zealand now. More the younger generations of the forties, 40 and 50 year-olds, comparatively speaking, to our clientele who have decided with COVID, it's time to return back to New Zealand. So a lot of people returning back here.

Paul Lawrence: (21:28)
From the real estate perspective, the New Zealanders are accustomed to paying huge real estate fees. What we wanted to do is, again, provide some real value to our clients and to our customers. We'll also expand outside of the senior demographic with that as well. We're starting now to have conversations with other agents to come on board and we'll begin a really strong marketing push in real estate here, and hopefully getting some momentum with it.

Paul Lawrence: (21:51)
We had a really thorough strategic planning session, and we decided that our mission is making lives easy or making life easy. The people that we are working with, they haven't moved house in 30, 40, 50, sometimes 60 years, the process is completely [unnorm 00:22:08] and for us to then come in, take care of their belongings and make this process easy, that's what we want to do.

Paul Lawrence: (22:15)
And one thing that we find is, that when people do engage us to use our services, they have this expectation of the move because of what's happened historically. These health concerns, they've just lost a loved one, whatever it may be that makes the move still stressful, that after the shift, when we sit down and we chat with our clients, as they say, "Oh, this was actually amazing. I didn't know moving house could be like this."

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (22:40)
Moving is scientifically and statistically, one of the biggest stressors in life. It's like in the top five, if not the top three stressors.

Paul Lawrence: (22:48)
It was death, divorce, public speaking and moving house. I didn't really understand the true value of the services that we provided until I moved house myself. My partner Anna's mom, Helen had really severe kidney and liver failure and we were really unsure what the future held there. This was on the Saturday morning and we were meant to be moving house on the Tuesday. Anna stayed up in Auckland until Friday following and being a typical Kiwi bloke over the weekend, I did absolutely nothing. So I didn't pack the house. Monday came around and I woke up in shock thinking, "Holy, I'm moving tomorrow."

Paul Lawrence: (23:27)
Thankfully we had a couple of additional staff available who came in and actually helped to pack up the house. And then we moved and then they helped unpack and set up the house as well. Just the amount of stress and workload it took off just me personally was absolutely amazing.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (23:42)
That's wonderful. It has been such a pleasure talking with you, Paul. Thank you.

Paul Lawrence: (23:45)
Yeah. Thanks Marty. I really enjoyed it as well.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (23:50)
Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom and Still Be On Speaking Terms Afterward. Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests in conversations.

Marty Stevens-Heebner: (24:07)
Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.