YourTour Success Stories: Oak Hammock at the University of Florida

“This generation appreciates the technology because you bring it to life. Everyone's just engaged, and it just makes it so much easier. When your tools enhance your efficiency, you feel like you can give 110% of yourself to 3 or 4 appointments a day because you're just automatically set up for success.

Amy Plank, Sales Specialist, Oak Hammock at the University of Florida

The Challenge: Selling the Unseen

Oak Hammock at the University of Florida, a premier non-profit Life Plan Community in Gainesville, Florida, faced a significant challenge with its independent living expansion, The Canopy. The project involved adding 56 new apartments, featuring six new floor plans. The primary hurdle in selling an expansion, often referred to as a "blue sky" or "green field" project, is that there is nothing tangible to show prospective residents. This lack of a physical product makes it difficult to secure presales and quickly generate the necessary financing. Marketing and sales efforts for expansions must be clearly defined to create success. The community needed a sales tool that could effectively "paint the picture" of the new product and lifestyle, converting long-term waitlist prospects who were hesitant to commit to a building that did not yet exist.

The Solution: A Functional, Tech-Forward Approach with YourTour

Oak Hammock adopted YourTour, a 3D visualization and virtual tour technology, as a crucial sales tool. The investment in YourTour enabled a highly efficient and empathetic sales strategy:

1. Deep-Dive Prospecting: The sales process began with an in-depth conversation designed to uncover the prospect's needs, vulnerabilities, assets, income, and downsizing preferences. This allowed counselors to address risk management and emotional barriers before presenting the product.

2. Tailored Virtual Tours: Once the prospect's needs were understood, the sales counselor could pull up YourTour and go directly into the floor plans that were perfectly tailored to the individual conversation. The technology brought the unbuilt expansion to life with rich 3D visualization of the floor plans.

3. Efficiency and Speed: The functionality of the virtual tour allowed appointments to be drastically streamlined. While appointments were initially plotted to take three hours, they were pared down to just one to one and a half hours (or two hours if the prospect was completely new to the concept of life care). This efficiency allowed counselors to perform 3 to 4 appointments per day and still deliver complete dedication to each prospect.

4. Digital Communication and Follow-Up: The technology supported efficient digital follow-up. Counselors could easily choose the floor plans and amenities that mattered most to each prospect and send a personalized link via email. This feature allowed prospects, particularly the highly educated demographic at Oak Hammock, to "play around on their own" and further solidified the sale.

5. Overcoming Emotional Barriers: The visual aid of YourTour proved instrumental in overcoming deep-seated objections. For one prospect who held negative perceptions of senior living from his childhood, addressing those tough issues and then transitioning immediately to look at the expansion via YourTour resulted in an instantaneous shift in perspective.

Record-Breaking Results and Financial Acceleration

The strategic combination of technology and empathetic salesmanship led to extraordinary metrics for The Canopy expansion:

• Sales Cycle Speed: 56 apartments sold in 11 weeks. Sales started the second week of February 2025 and were completed by mid-April.

• Financing Achieved: $93.5 million in bonds issued through the Alachua County Health Facilities Authority and underwritten by B.C. Ziegler and Company.

• Timeline Acceleration: The bonds were issued in July 2025, much faster than anticipated, allowing groundwork and construction to start in August 2025. The rapid sales meant construction and mission delivery were well ahead of schedule.

This rapid sales cycle allowed the organization to deliver on its mission faster, a factor that resonates strongly with investors and financial leaders.

Creating Urgency and Momentum

The speed of the sales was so rapid that it created an undeniable sense of urgency. The sales team had to abandon email communication during the priority sales period and resort to texting each other during appointments to confirm when apartments were reserved.

This real-time tracking (reflected visually in YourTour with "reserved" indicators) helped motivate prospects who were already engaged. As one counselor noted, using YourTour with the "reserved" status visible helps ease the uncomfortable conversation of closing, serving as an urgency driver that tells the prospect, "What are you waiting for?".

Conclusion: Empathy Leveraged by Technology

The success of The Canopy is a testament to utilizing tactical sales tools to execute a timely and efficient process. YourTour’s sales enablement technology proved incredibly successful, particularly in selling "blue sky" projects, and the team has integrated YourTour for existing sales across the community.

However, the case study also powerfully demonstrated that technology does not replace the human element. The ultimate success is derived from the sales counselor's ability to perform deep discovery and overcome complex emotional barriers using empathy and grace, leveraging YourTour to visualize the solution, and build trust. The technology provided the efficiency, but the counselors provided the emotional intelligence necessary to achieve a record-breaking conversion rate.