Merrill Gardens at Greenville

Laura

I toured Merrill Gardens at Greenville. What I liked most first of all is the affordability of it. I didn't think I could find anything downtown Greenville that was affordable. That was the only place as far as the senior living community that was affordable and very nice. It was just a great location. This is pretty new. They have a restaurant there so I went and had lunch with the marketing guy and I was really surprised at how great the food was. It's really healthy and fresh food. They have a lot of nice amenities there. They even had a rooftop area where you could go and cook out and look out over downtown Greenville, which was fantastic. They had a nice pool area, I think it was heated. It was fairly small. I think there were like 140-160 units, something like that. So I didn't consider it that big. The only thing that I did not particularly care for was it was like a high-rise kind of setup like a hotel. The one thing that bothered me and I even mentioned it to the marketing guy, I liked him a lot, but as we were walking down the hallway, he pointed out a resident and said this, so-and-so told me her name and said, she's our oldest resident here and told me her age, and I'm like he's kind of divulging information. That bothered me a little bit that he knew personal information about residents and then was telling me about it. I'm a little concerned about people knowing my privacy, so that was one issue I had that I did bring up with them. They had a move-in special that was very reasonable. I think it was first rent-free. I think everything was included, all the utilities and the three meals a day, plus the snack and internet stuff. They had a good promotion going on. I think they reduced it by $400 a month for the next year and this was a big deal to me. There's no lease, so you could do it month to month. You do sign a contract, but if you want to leave next month, I think you'd have to get a 30-day notice. Then you could go ahead and leave, but the contract essentially said we're not going to raise the rate on you for a year. So I liked that about it. He said, if you live here a year, a month or so and don't like it, you can leave. So that was different, I thought. It's very modern as far as the style of everything, the colors were just really great. I didn't feel like I was in some old folks home.