Assisted living and independent living occupancy rates continue to increase.
It’s always nice to start the New Year with a little good news, and the good news I am talking about is the sequential and year-over-year increases in occupancy rates across seniors housing. The NIC MAP data has shown the largest increases to be in independent living, which makes sense since there are fewer new units coming on stream. The odd thing from the data is that occupancy levels in the primary 31 markets averages about 40 to 50 basis points lower than the other 68 markets covered by NIC MAP. A similar phenomenon exists with construction starts as a percentage of supply. In the top 31 markets, trailing 12-month assisted living construction starts represented 3.1% of existing supply, but this jumped to about 3.7% for all markets. This means that in the smaller markets, new assisted living starts were more than 4.0% of supply. This difference did not exist in the fourth quarter of 2013, when starts were at an even higher percentage of supply, for both primary and secondary markets. As we said a few months ago, it is not all about increasing occupancy, but what you do with that occupancy.
