Ask a Montgomery County homeowner over 70 where their friends went, and Shannondell comes up fast: a 140-acre campus in Audubon beside Valley Forge park, with more than a thousand apartments, its own performing arts theater, and a care continuum on site. This is the seller’s guide to that move, independent research (Samantha is not affiliated with Shannondell), built from the community’s materials and the University of Pennsylvania emeriti association’s CCRC guide, focused on the part the tour skips: the longtime house whose sale funds the entrance fee, and the calendar that makes the two transactions land together.
What Shannondell is, in verified numbers
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Type | Not-for-profit, fee-for-service (Type C) CCRC; minimum age 55 |
| Opened | 2003, in Audubon, Lower Providence Township, Montgomery County |
| Campus | 140 acres: 11 apartment buildings and two clubhouses connected by climate-controlled walkways, plus The Meadows care building |
| Scale | 1,106 independent living apartments in 40 floor plans (roughly 450 to 2,130 sq ft); about 1,400 residents |
| Care continuum | Personal care, memory care, rehab, and 60 skilled nursing beds at The Meadows; on-site medical practices |
| Contracts | Two plans: 90% refundable or 80% refundable entrance fee; identical monthly fees; $2,500 fully refundable waitlist |
The scale is the point: a 500-seat theater with a hundred shows a year, two clubhouses of dining venues, fifty-plus interest groups, and enough neighbors that the widowed and the newly retired both find their table. The independent PASEF guide details it unromantically, and the PA Insurance Department explains the disclosure statement to request before any deposit.
The two contracts and the waitlist
- Plan one: 90% refundable. 2024 entrance fees started around $199,000 (studio), $295,000 to $350,000 (one-bedroom), and $385,000 to $575,000 (two-bedroom), with the refund of the residential component returning to the resident or estate.
- Plan two: 80% refundable. The same apartments at roughly 10% lower entrance fees, identical monthlies, and a smaller refund: cash now versus estate later, priced explicitly.
- Monthlies ran from about $2,100 to $4,200 for one person (plus $1,160 for a second), covering 20 meals, utilities, maintenance, and the amenity campus. As with every community on this site: compare against the full carrying cost of the house being left, and read the fee-escalation history in the disclosure statement.
- The $2,500 waitlist is refundable optionality. Joining early costs essentially nothing and starts the clock toward the apartments people actually want. The contract-type background, and the medical deduction that can apply to CCRC fees, live in our CCRC funding guide.
From waitlist to move-in: the house-sale sequence
- 01On the waitlist: do the homework that has no deadline. The valuation, the net proceeds number for your township, the estate document review, and the slow-motion declutter. Families who use the waitlist years this way accept apartment offers without panic.
- 02At the offer: fix the calendar in writing. Acceptance window, move-in date, and what flexibility exists, then work backward: in most Montgomery County townships a well-prepared house goes contract-to-close in sixty to ninety days including municipal paperwork (the fee index has your town’s requirements), so listing shortly after acceptance usually lands the closing at move-in.
- 03Choose the bridge deliberately. Sell-first, move-once is cleanest; move-first with a short bridge avoids living through showings. Both are routine here; the sequencing guide prices the tradeoffs honestly.
The house this move usually sells
The Shannondell-bound sale is typically a Lower Providence, Collegeville, Upper Merion, Main Line, or Northwest Philadelphia single, owned for decades, with the classic longtime-home profile: excellent bones, strong equity, dated kitchens, full closets, and at least one system (the 1968 panel, the buried oil tank, the untested radon basement) worth resolving before a buyer’s inspector finds it. That is precisely the territory of our oil tank, radon, and old wiring guides, and of the prepare-in-passes philosophy that runs through the room-by-room checklist: clear, clean, brighten, fix what is broken, and let the young families who want these townships compete for the rest.
Comparing Shannondell against the alternatives
Most Shannondell shortlists include an Erickson campus (see our Ann’s Choice profile), a Type A life care community, and at least one ownership-model 55+ neighborhood like Hershey’s Mill. The honest comparison is structural, not decorative: refundable-fee residency versus deeded ownership, fee-for-service care versus prepaid life care, and one campus’s social scale versus another’s. Tour with the disclosure statements in hand, price the house once, and let the same net-proceeds number test every option; that is the entire method, and it fits on an index card.
Samantha, SRES®, sells the Montgomery and Chester county houses on the front end of this move and coordinates routinely with community move-in calendars. If Shannondell is on your list, or already circled, start with the free valuation, or ask her to map your township’s timeline against the community’s; it is a fifteen-minute conversation that replaces a year of vague worry.