Will Your House Work for Assisted Living?
Jul 19, 2026
Maybe you already have a house, a spare room, or even a duplex. Now you're wondering if it could become an assisted living home. That is a great question, and it's one I hear all the time.
Want the full breakdown? Watch the video below👇
Your House Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle
A lot of people think the first question is, "Will my house work?" The truth is, that is only part of the answer.
I have seen people spend months searching for the perfect property before they even knew if assisted living was the right business for them. That usually leads to wasted time and frustration.
Instead, start by learning what makes an assisted living business successful. Once you understand the business, you will know what kind of property actually fits your goals.
âś… Focus on learning the business before falling in love with a house.
Start With Your Goals Before You Choose a Property
Before you think about bedrooms, bathrooms, or floor plans, ask yourself what you really want.
Do you want to replace your income? Build long-term wealth? Create a business that gives you more freedom? Your answers matter because they shape every decision you make from this point forward.
When you know your goals, it becomes much easier to decide if your current home will work or if you should look for another property.
đź’ˇ The best property is the one that helps you reach your business goals, not just the one you already own.
Learn What Your State Requires
Every state has different licensing rules for assisted living homes. A house that works in one state may not qualify in another.
Some states have rules about the number of residents, bedroom sizes, bathrooms, accessibility, fire safety, and other requirements. That is why you should never assume your house is ready without checking the regulations first.
Once you understand the rules where you plan to operate, you can quickly see whether your property is a good fit.
âś… Learn your state's licensing requirements before making expensive changes.
Do Not Skip the Foundation
One of the biggest mistakes I see is people jumping straight into finding a property or remodeling a house. They skip the foundation because they are excited to get started.
The foundation includes learning how the assisted living business works, understanding your market, knowing who you want to serve, and creating a clear plan.
When you build that foundation first, every step after that becomes much easier. You make better decisions because you know what you're looking for.
Your Current House Might Work, But Ask the Right Questions
The good news is that many homes can be converted into assisted living. Even a duplex or a home with extra space may have potential.
The important question is not simply, "Can I use this house?" The better question is, "Does this property fit my business plan, my state requirements, and the people I want to serve?"
When you answer those questions first, you avoid costly mistakes and move forward with confidence.
âś… Evaluate your property based on your business plan, not just convenience.
Wrap Up
If you already own a house, you may be closer than you think to starting an assisted living business. But remember, the property is only one part of the process. Build a strong foundation first, understand your goals, and learn your state's requirements before making your next move.
If you need help creating a business plan for your assisted living business, check out the Free Business Plan Checklist.
And if you’re ready to figure out your next step, join me for the next Roadmap Challenge, where I’ll walk you through how to get started.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
Do you have a house or a room? Maybe you have a duplex and you're thinking, I could actually turn this into assisted living. But you're like not sure how to get started and you're like, would it actually work? Can I actually do this? What would the process look like? If that's you, this video is going to help you out a ton. We're going to talk about that in today's video and helping you understand if that room, that home, that duplex, that suite that you have, if you can actually turn it into assisted
00:00:30
living and create some passive income for you on the side. So, stick around for today's video. We're going to help you out with that. Hey friend, my name is Brandon Gustafson. I help healthcare workers own their own assisted living business so they're not stuck trying to figure it out and know exactly what they should do next. By the way, if you need some help and some guidance with this, head over to my website assistedlivinginvesting.net and you can get a little bit of help and guidance over there on the website. And
00:00:54
check the description down below. I've got a bunch of free resources and other things for you to help you get started. Now, let's talk about it. Will your home work for assisted living? Now, I want you to realize when it comes to this that bedroom count is not going to be enough when it comes to trying to decide if this is going to work for you for assisted living or not. So, just because you have three bedrooms, four bedrooms, whatever number that you have, doesn't mean, oh yep, that's the threshold. Now you're good.
00:01:24
What you need to understand is square footage is actually going to be more important than the number of rooms that you have. So, if you want to maximize this, each state is going to have a specific regulation on if you can do shared rooms or if they are single rooms. And even single rooms have a square footage designation. So, I'm going to use a number that is pretty typical, but you're going to want to check the numbers in your state. And just comment your state down below and that will help me maybe give you some
00:01:52
guidance on which of these states are going to be best for you. So, just comment which state you're in below. But, typically what I see is for a single room for a resident, it's going to be 100 square feet. That's how big a room needs to be if you want to use it for assisted living. So, if you're thinking, "Okay, cool. I got three four bedrooms. I could turn this into an unlicensed home. We could bring some people in here and we could have four residents in here." Then, you need
00:02:21
to make sure that those rooms are at least 100 square feet, which is like a 10 by 10 room. So, if your room is smaller, it's not going to qualify and you can't do that. You're also going to need to have closet space in these rooms. Now, that can be an actually built closet, like, you know, in in the walls or whatever, or it could be like a wardrobe. For some states, it's okay that you do that. But, you're going to have to have something where they can store clothes. And you're going to need
00:02:46
to have room for a bed and most likely a chair as well. Those are the types of things that at a base at a minimum you're going to need to provide. Now, if you want to do a shared room and you want to really maximize this, what I typically see in most states is it's 80 square feet per resident in that shared room. So, that means if I wanted to have two residents in a room and I I would not suggest doing more than two residents, by the way. I I don't think it works very well. But, if you wanted to have two residents
00:03:12
in a room, you would need a room that is 160 square feet. So, that's like 10 by 16, just to use really quick easy math for you to understand what that looks like, okay? And that gives you enough space that they can each have their own bed and they can have their own chair, they can have their own closet space, and all the things that they would need to meet those requirements. You may think, "Oh, like, I'm not going to do that." I'm here to tell you we do shared rooms in our facilities and it works really well.
00:03:37
We make sure that our residents know that they're a shared room. We make sure that they're comfortable with it and that they have good roommates and when they are having a bad experience that we're listening to it and we're shifting people around. Now, we don't do this just because somebody's complaining. We're going to dig deeper if there's a problem between residents, but we also don't want to rock the boat. And what we've actually found is a lot of our
00:03:59
residents like those shared rooms because then they have a roommate. They have somebody that they can talk to. They have a friend, somebody that they have been lacking for a long time. It actually works out really well. But if your rooms are too small, you're not going to be able to do this. So, you have to pay attention to the square footage of your rooms to see if this is going to work for you, okay? Square footage of the house is fine. The bigger you get with the house, the the better it is. The more spaces
00:04:24
that you have in the home that are going to benefit the residents, right? But from a how many residents can you put in a home, you have to go by square footage of the bedrooms. That's what you need to be looking at. So, make sure you look at that first, okay? You also are going to want to look at the type of home that you have. So, when it comes to assisted living, you can actually have stairs in a home. So, which a lot of people are like, "Can you have stairs?" And yes, you can. My
00:04:49
home in Colorado before we sold it a little over around a year ago, it was four stories. Like, it was big. I think I have a video on the channel that's called um like the tour of my my facility as well we were doing some renovations through a grant program that we had uh received funding through. If you're interested in it, just type in tour down below. I'll try to get you the the link to to that video so you can see the walk through and see what it looks like, but you'll see there it's a
00:05:13
four-story building. It's and it's a residential home. It just has four stories in it. It was built in the 1890s. But there were a ton of stairs, like so many stairs. And this was 1890 stairs. They're very steep stairs, right? And so, that's something that um what it does to you when you have stairs is it limits the type of resident that you can bring into the facility because they are going to have to do stairs. We had to turn away a lot of potential residents that were unable to do stairs because
00:05:43
they were wheelchair bound or they had some kind of disability or something along those lines that would just wouldn't allow them to do stairs. So, you have to be aware of that. You could even bring people in that maybe they can do stairs today, but 3 years from now they're not going to be able to handle it, and then you're going to have to discharge them. But, you can get started if you have stairs. Now, check local laws, local rules and regulations to confirm that, but in my experience, you
00:06:09
can do that. It just limits you in the type of resident that you can be in you can bring into the home because you're going to have to meet their care needs, and if they can't do stairs, you're not meeting a care need, and so you're going to have to discharge them and put them somewhere else. Now, home layout is important. There's no big requirement for this, but you want to look at it and see what's going to make your resident feel comfortable in the home. You want to make sure you're you're
00:06:34
going to have to have a kitchen, some kind of a dining space. Like, there's going to be rules and regulations around this in the states that you are operating in. So, you want to make sure you have those things, but apart from that, you're going to need to have some kind of living space. You're going to probably need to have some kind of a game area. You want to make sure that this feels good to the residents because otherwise, they're not going to come to your facility because you might think, "Oh, cool. I could turn
00:06:58
this into something that's going to generate money for me." But, if it doesn't feel good to those potential residents, they're not going to come and live in the home. So, you have to have this fine balance of, you know, wanting to generate money, generate a profit for yourself, and meeting those care needs and desires that a resident might have in a home that they're looking to live in. So, you need to kind of find that balance and make sure you're meeting those needs. And another big one is going to be the
00:07:24
number of bathrooms. There's actually going to be a regulation in your state that tells you how many public-facing restrooms you have. And sometimes this actually goes down to the fire department. And by public-facing restroom, what I mean is it's not a private en suite. That bathroom, while it might be nice for the resident, does not count when it comes to a resident to bathroom ratio. Most states you're going to see what we've seen is it's typically eight residents for every one public facing
00:07:54
restroom that you have in the home. So, you want to make sure that you understand what that rule and regulation is and if you have, you know, three bathrooms but two of them are on suites, those two bathrooms aren't going to count. So, you really only have one. So, it is going to limit how many residents you can bring into the home or you may need to, you know, do another bathroom or something like that. Okay. Those are the things that that you just need to be aware of as you get into it. This is why bedroom count is not enough.
00:08:21
Just saying, "Oh, cool. I have four bedrooms." and just assuming that everything's going to be fine is not going to be enough for you. You need to pay attention to all of these other things because that's what's going to really dictate if you can have that many people in there. So, let's talk a little bit about zoning and licensing things um here. So, what does zoning say? That's what you got to figure out because the zoning, there's going to be different classifications. Um each municipality is
00:08:47
different. So, I can't tell you like, "Yep, R1. If you have an R1 zoning, that's going to always be good for assisted living." because that's not the case. R1 might be fine for me where I live and where you live, R1 doesn't even exist or R1 means something that's totally different like it's high-density residential which would not, you know, like think apartment buildings. Probably not going to be best for assisted living. So, you need to look at this and figure out what zoning actually says in
00:09:14
your municipality, in your city, in your county. See what it says and then see if there's anything in there that allows for assisted living. And it might not be explicitly stated there. So, maybe you need to get some kind of a special use permit that allows you to do it. Sometimes those permits are really simple. You're just saying, "Yep, I need that." Sometimes there's a fee associated with it. Sometimes you've got to like go out for public comment and go to city council and get
00:09:40
approvals. Like it just kind of depends on where you're at and what that looks like. So, you need to figure out what zoning is actually saying you can do. See if you need any special use permits. You need to look at any other local regulations. So, sometimes you're going to find that um you can't have a facility within a certain amount of feet or miles from another facility. So, you need to pay attention to that and see if that's going to do anything to your ability to get started. You're going to need to
00:10:11
maybe look at parking as well. Like do you have to have a certain amount of parking spots? Can you do street parking? Like does any of this work? Do you have to have certain visiting hours? You need to pay attention to those types of things as well because that can very quickly determine for you if it's going to work or not. So, pay attention to zoning, licensing, understanding what that process is going to look like for you. Now, let's talk about licensed versus unlicensed and some use cases there. And
00:10:39
what I want you to do down in the comments is if you're thinking to go licensed, just type in licensed. If you're thinking unlicensed, type in unlicensed. I want to tell you a little bit about each of these as well. So, a licensed facility is usually going to mean, usually by the way, I want to like emphasize the word usually. It means that there's more authority. You're providing a higher level of care which results in more money, right? It's just you're able to do more. You have
00:11:04
two levers when it comes to assisted living and the money that you can generate. You have how much you can charge people on a monthly basis and you have how many residents you can bring in. Now, you can pull both of these levers at the same time if you'd like to and in a licensed facility, it's going to typically be easier because you provide a higher level of care, you can charge more, and you in a licensed facility can typically have more residents, so you can pull that lever as well, which brings in more income for
00:11:29
you, right? It opens it up. Lets more money flow through and that can generate more profit. Now, with an unlicensed facility, it's usually going to be faster and there's less regulations. So, there's less red tape to get you started. You can start pretty quick and bring people in, but you're going to generate less income on the front end because you don't have you're capped at those levers. Rather than pulling them all the way down, you have like a little bit of a governor. You can
00:11:57
only pull them halfway or pull them a quarter of the way. Like you can pull it you're a little bit limited there. And that's because there's less residents that are coming in and they're providing a lower level of care. And so, you just have to pay attention to that. Now, with a licensed facility, you're probably going to have to have higher staffing. And you're going to have more residents, so your grocery and your your electric bills and those types of things also are going to go up. So,
00:12:21
you have to pay attention to that. But, what I want you to do is do your underwriting. Type in calculator down below, by the way, if you're interested in this. I have a free tool that you can go grab. Going to help you work through the finances of assisted living and help you see if this is going to work for you or not from a financial aspect, okay? I've got another tool as well. It's called the profit path tool. Just type in profit down below and we'll get you access to that. Two free tools that can
00:12:44
help you out as you're trying to figure out if this is actually going to make you money. All right? Now, let's talk a little bit about here is what to verify on all of this before you start spending money. Before you're just like, "Okay, cool. I confirmed this, you know, I've got the right size house and everything and I'm I'm right size bedrooms. I I think I'm good to go. I'm just going to jump in and we're going to make this work." Which, by the way, I call that the
00:13:07
hustle zone. If you're interested in learning more about the hustle zone and the different zones of getting started in assisted living, type in road map down below because I do my road map challenge and I would love to have you in there. We go through all of that. So, just type in road map, I'll give you some of the details and we'll get you over there and help you figure out if assisted living is going to be a good fit for you or not. Now, what I want you to do before you get started, what do you need to verify, is
00:13:30
zoning approved. So, we absolutely have to check that. Whether you're going licensed or unlicensed, you're going to need to check zoning because if not, you can get shut down like fees, fines, just you want to avoid it. Make sure that you figure out zoning. Make sure you spend some time on that. You need to figure out also what renovations you might need to do in the home before you can get started. Don't just assume, "Okay, cool. I have four bedrooms. They're all at least 100
00:13:58
square feet. I can bring four residents in here." And then you don't pay attention to anything else because when you have that many people living in a home, then it's a different scenario than just like raising your kids or whatever. You may have to have certain things in the home that make it ready for assisted living. Even if you're going the unlicensed route, you may need to have like grab bars in the bathroom or something like a non-slip stuff in the shower or fire extinguishers, extra fire extinguishers,
00:14:27
a higher quality smoke detecting system. There may be things like that that you need to have, so you need to make sure that you figure out a lot of that information before you just jump into this. And then I also want you to spend time figuring out what type of resident you want to serve. This is a big one because a lot of people will skip this step because they just think, "Oh, I don't care. I just want to bring residents in." But if you figure out your why for getting into assisted living,
00:14:57
and then you figure out what type of resident you want to serve, it's going to help you out so much more on the back end when it comes to marketing and trying to get in front of that person that you want to serve and have them come into your facility and, you know, be happy there. So, you need to figure that out. And when you have those things in place, then you can start moving forward and determine, "Do I want to do licensed? Do I want to do unlicensed? How many residents can I actually have
00:15:21
in here? What route do I want to go? What do I want for myself when it comes to like my job? Do I want to be the one that's a living caregiver or doing this? Do I want to have somebody else do it? Um you know, all of these questions that are going to come to you and there's a ton of them. And if you need help with that, by the way, just type in foundation down below and I'll help you kind of cut through the noise and then figure out what to do as you're trying to get started as you
00:15:42
go through this. Now, you once you figure those things out, you're going to be in a much better spot. So, make sure you take some time, pause, go back to that, and do the groundwork, the legwork here as you're trying to get started. That's what's going to help you be successful. You always have to go back to the beginning, go back to the foundation, go back to the things that matter the most. And that's going to help you create leverage for yourself so you can be a lot more successful. If you found
00:16:12
this video helpful, make sure you like it, you know, subscribe, ring the bell, do all those things that YouTube tells you to do because it helps other people like you find the channel and helps them get unstuck as well. And helps them move forward. I have a free training for you, by the way. Just go down below or type in top mistake and we'll make sure we get it over to you. But if you just go down below, you're going to see the link for it. It's a 10-minute training, free training. Get in there and figure out
00:16:34
the top mistake that people like you are making as they're trying to get started. And I think it's going to give you a lot of clarity on the things that you should be focused on right now as you're trying to move forward and make some actual progress to starting your assisted living business. Are you curious about assisted living but you're not sure how to get started? At Assisted Living Investing, I help healthcare workers start their own assisted living business so they're not
00:16:57
stuck trying to figure it out and know exactly what they should do next. You need to be working on that foundation. You need to be focusing on the first things first and that's what's going to leverage you into moving on to the next step. And I want to promise you that if you are consistent and persistent in starting to make progress on this and moving towards your goal, that's what's going to allow you to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day. >> [music]
Download Your FREE Calculator
Stay connected with news and updates!
Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
Don't worry, your information will not be shared.
We hate SPAM. We will never sell your information, for any reason.